The topic of shadowknights being underpowered has been discussed, dissected, and analyzed so many time that I'm not going to re-post or summarize
what others have already said more eloquently, but simply to counter the they-don't-need-to-be-changed argument in this thread I'd like to remind that Wiz stated in a B&D thread that they were already planning on changing shadowknight pets (quote below). Sadly, from what I've heard all of the good ideas turned out to be impossible to implement and the whole thing has kind of petered out. There isn't a lot of info on the new runic Ikisith shadowknight pet in the parser, and it certainly isn't finalized regardless, so I don't see any issue with shadowknight pet brainstorming.
Shadowknights
SK pets will receive a boost in power and probably some kind of utility (not decided what exactly), but we're hoping to make them actually useful at all levels.
I will go ahead and post my shadowknight pet-specific gripes with regards to the summoned cleric animation. The cleric hammer has many advantages over the shadowknight pets in that it has a faster cast time, lower mana cost, higher level, and innate smite proc. Its detriments are that it cannot be controlled or buffed and that it has very low health. While a shadowknight pet can be controlled and buffed it is still such a low level that its dps is paltry and mobs tend to focus on it (because it is a green con) until someone else has generated a decent amount of hate (turning pet taunt off solves the aggro issues that don't stem from its level). Cleric hammer pets die a lot and so do shadowknight pets, but getting a cleric hammer back up and running is much more mana efficient and (more importantly) time efficient than recasting/hasting/buffing the sk pet. I'd rather watch paint dry than wait for Augmentation of Death to pop.
That being said, I really like the idea of sacrificing the shadowknight pet for a lifetap, or even having a kind of autocast lifetap on pet death that you can't really control. I also wouldn't mind a swarm pet (balanced for emergency crowd control, not dps). I really liked Wesell's spin on this in the B&D shadowknight thread:
I think it would be cool if SK pets were replaced with a line of swarm pet spells. It would work like this; you kill a named undead and loot some NO DROP bones or a skull. Turn this in to an SK quest NPC who returns the scroll for a spell which allows you to summon this undead named as a swarm pet. You could give different swarm pets unique abilities (one might be a wizard - another a necromancer or cleric, etc). Put all of these spells on the same 30 or 45 minute warm up and recast timers so you don’t need to balance the pets around the possible summoning of multiple swarm pets.
I think that collecting named swarm pets would in itself be fun. This spell line would also be tied to the difficulty of the content from which it was received (rather than being tied to level) so you could continue to have collectable pets available in advanced areas, like keyed dungeons and raid zones.
Regardless, I don't think any long time shadowknights are going holding their breath for any pet changes, and whatever does happen needs to be pretty nice to warrant taking up a buff slot (if it's like a familiar) and a spell gem. A line quested pet clickies could be very cool if done right. Phago in nightmare might be a good guy to throw something like that on.
