Diablo 3 characters’ summoned pets have a tough time of it against Nephalem Rift Guardians and other super-powerful boss creatures, often dying before they get a chance to really do anything.
Following complaints about the rising cost of Diablo pet insurance, Blizzard has posted on the game’s forum to confirm that they’re working on the issue.
The basic idea is to make pets ”roughly as survivable” as players, according to designer John Yang. Pet survivability is tied to your own character’s Toughness stat, in a bid to avoid invulnerable super-minions. ”In the live environment pets are too squishy,” admits Yang, ”but even after our review is done in a future patch, if your pets are still dying a lot, we want you to be looking to increase your Toughness, which will consequently increase your pets’ survivability.”
Part of the current problem is that pets have no way to avoid telegraphed high damage abilities that the player is intended to simply skip out of the way of. Yang expains that the team is working on a method of reducing or increasing pet damage ”based on how avoidable the monster attack normally is for a player.”
“We’re not at our goal yet but are actively working towards it,” Yang continues. ”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.”
Diablo 3’s latest patch 2.10 launched at the end of last month, bringing a bunch of Season Ladders, Rift challenges and other ways to hack at stuff with an axe.
