Diablo 3 getting a pet fixing patch in the near future

A lot of Diablo 3 players have been complaining about pet survivability and the fact that pets are almost useless against many challenging creatures. Blizzard said a while ago that its looking into the situation, but still hasn’t announced a fix for the problem as of yet. However, Game Designer John Yang recently went on the Diablo 3 forums and said that the company hasn’t forgotten about this issue and is working on it as we speak. Blizzard is apparently in the process of doing a review of Rift Guardians and other high damage creatures in order to assess how much of a beating can pets actually take.

Yang says that pets are “roughly as survivable as the player”, but somehow they’re still extremely squishy so clearly there’s a problem here. Unlike Diablo 3 players, pets have no way of avoiding high damaging abilities like fireballs or AoE spells. While you can just move out of the way of certain spells, the pet can not so Blizzard is planning to do something about this.  “To work towards the first goal, Pets should take reduced damage based on how avoidable the monster attack normally is for a player,” Yang explains. “This is done instead of giving pets AI to run away from damaging attacks, which would cause them to lose out on DPS time.”

“We’re not at our goal yet but are actively working towards it” Yang adds. “Though the vast majority of monsters abilities in the game already follow these guidelines, we’ve identified a number of monsters abilities (e.g. Mallet Lord’s arm attack and some others mentioned in this thread and elsewhere) which don’t, and we will be addressing them in a future patch.” The Game Designer also reveals that if the problem persists even after the upcoming Diablo 3 patch is released, then the next step is to increase player Toughness, which will also increase pet survivability in the process.