They need some epic-ness. They're great through heroic levels, and reasonably useful in epic hard if you spend the feats and energy to build them up.

But in elite? Useless. They die so quickly, and eat up all your mana trying to keep them alive. They are used only as lever pullers in Maze so I can solo it, and PoP for solo or sometimes groups.

How to fix? The easiest way would be to have some new items for collars that are epic. They need to give the dogs all the defenses that characters can get, but they can only wear armor and collars. Collars are easy, because only the pets can use them. There's no game breaking unbalancing concerns because someone used them on a player character.

Right now, my summoner druid can get his dog to almost 2000 hp, but he still dies in 15 seconds, especially if he runs off and gets blocked from heals. And the heals have to be pretty much non stop, or he will die. And this is ridiculous for a toon that has every single possible boost for the pet, from feats to past lives, and even thunderforged gear.

Right now, collars are offense only (and not much of that, but I'll get to that later) but we could easily have a couple level 28 collars that contain resistance, fort, prot, hit points, prr, etc with a couple slots left for customization. This would allow us to get the dogs to a decent AC, reflex save, and prr for some ability to take a hit without folding up and checking out. Maybe even ghostly and/or a displacement proc. The dogs need an enormous amount to be able to survive, and this would allow it but still keep it out of the hands of players.

Now offense. With enemies having hundreds of thousands of hp, it's pretty silly that a well geared dog with a strength of 60 would do 40-50 pts of damage. The trip doesn't work. The bluff doesn't work. Does sneak attack even work? I've never noticed, but I haven't really looked. At any rate, the damage increase isn't exactly dramatic or I would have noticed. The mobs certainly don't seem to notice. What's the point? This isn't as easy to fix as defense, but redoing the pet enhancements to allow for some *epic* enhancements would be the way I would go. Next, as above, let's see some collars with deadly, and some decent base damage.

The skeletal warrior that wizards get it much hardier, but it also does only incidental damage. When playing a wizard, the pet is a bit more useful as you can send it out to get aggro while you stand back and cast. But this costs you a lot of AP, which seems unfair as the dogs get their own enhancement trees. And the skelly needs armor and a weapon that can be slotted.