As a necro in the endgame, I don't find that my pet is dying to alot of mobs.
For instance, 3 out of 5 IP dragons dont kill your pet, 4 if you proactivly use the recall minion hotkey, Taeshlin doesn't kill your pet until he does his big nuke, mirror golems dont kill your pet, among many others.
That's not to say that pets are useless on alot of raid fights, but because of high damage AE's and the lack of pet healing available it is often the case (especially in cod/thaz) that pets will either die or not be used on alot of raid fights.
A few things can fix this problem, one of them is pet resists, but that would only work for AE's and unless the resists gain was very large, wouldn't have an extremely significant impact (IE: pets would still die due to the extreme negative resist modifiers of the aoes and debuffs the mobs cast).
Other mobs that pets are useless on are mobs that rampage (if you range fight it, which is now par for the course) and mobs that whirlwind.
What I suggest is a twofold solution to both AoE's killing pets way too fast and rampage/whirlwind mobs making pets absolutely useless. Give pets a 65% damage reduction on rampage/whirlwind damage and a 50% damage reduction on AoE damage spells. This, combined with the current pet healing, would allow pet users to use their pets on mobs that would normally kill them, while still requiring them to actually use their pet heals (something that is rarely done anymore since its usually impossible to heal your pet through aoe's or rampage on a raid so it ends up either being a pet attacks and doesn't get hit or a pet doesn't go in at all situation).
To put it to some numbers:
My relic necro pet has on average 4300-4500 hitpoints based off of what percentage my heals do when they land. Let's say a mob normally rampages every 6 seconds and hits for, on average 1000. Normally, I can heal my pet for 458 every 6 seconds, using Spirit of Kaezul. In this case, my pet would take 5000 damage (enough to kill it) in 30 seconds, while my heal would heal it 2290, leaving it with 1700. Then, the next 2 rampage rounds, my pet would take another 2000 damage, and get healed 916 leaving it at 1044 life. In the next 2 rampage rounds, my pet would take another 2000 damage, and heal 916 and would die. So from the start of the fight, my pet was alive and attacking the mob for 54 seconds. At the average dps he parses (70) he would do 3780 damage. Compared to one cast of my Relic: Marlows Cremation, which does an average of 3900 ish damage in 36 seconds, the pet seems rather lackluster.
If the rampage melee damage reduction was implemented, I could use my relic heal (which is very mana intensive) to keep my pet alive during the entire fight (giving him some purpose instead of 70 dps for 54 seconds).
The same applies to AoE damage, but in some cases the pet will still die with only a 50% reduction, but the length of time that it does damage to the mob will be increased to the point where it plays a significant factor to the overall damage that a pet class can do on a fight.
