Diablo 3 players who have relied heavily on their summoned pets to either alleviate some of the damage their character receives or to do serious damage may have been experiencing trouble lately fighting against Nephalem Rift Guardians or any other extremely powerful boss creatures. Summoned pets haven’t been faring so well against these enemies, which is why Blizzard has announced they will be tweaking Diablo 3 a bit so summoned pets can be “roughly as survivable” as players.

Diablo 3 designer John Yang took to Blizzard’s official forums to announce these upcoming changes as a summoned pets’ survivability will be tied to a character’s Toughness stat so indestructible minions aren’t accidentally created. So if you feel your pet isn’t surviving an onslaught of attacks, then you’ll just need to bump up your Toughness stat.

In addition to linking with the character’s Toughness stat, pets will also take reduced damage based on how avoidable a particular monster attack would be for the player. These attacks will fall into one of three categories:

• Full damage to pets - Basic melee/weak projectile attacks, not expected to be always avoided by a player.
• Reduced damage to pets - Special attacks such as fireballs, which typically deal more damage than a basic attack, are pretty bright and visible, and can sometimes be avoided by the player. Good example are Perdition’s volley attack or Agnidox’s fireballs.
• Drastically reduced damage to pets - Persistent AoEs for which the player is intended to move out of quickly or highly-telegraphed attacks for which the player is intended to avoid altogether. Examples are Thunderstorm monster affix, Mallet Lord’s arm attack, or Morlu meteors.

These changes are expected to be made available in patch 2.10, which should be rolling out at the end of September. So don't you fret, summoned pet users. Your day of balancing will soon be at hand!