Pets so happen to be the mostly the speciality of the Witch Doctor class, although other classes too, are able to spawn them depending on one’s skills. Right now, pets get damaged whenever a monstrosity that you go toe-to-toe against unleashes certain attacks that you can easily avoid, but not so for your pet since it would be the computer AI that controls them.
Game designer John Yang decided to do something about the situation, having posted an update on the Diablo 3 forums that pinpointed several upcoming changes that Blizzard is working on so that this issue might be addressed. Do take note that the changes are not laid down in concrete.
Yang wrote, “Pets should scale with your survivability stats. They currently scale with most of your stats but not all of them. This is being worked on. Pets should derive their Toughness from yours, and if you skip out on it, your pets’ survivability should be noticeably lower as a result. On the flip side, they should be noticeably tougher if you’ve increased your own Toughness. You shouldn’t skimp on Toughness just because you have pets.”
Sounds like good news for pet owners, right?