I haven't really read this thread in any depth and this isn't particularly on topic as far as arguments for/against whatever are concerned, but I'm in an idea-thinky mood (though I'm sure people have brought this up before):
When a character dies, they don't lose their gear. It doesn't seem to me that there's any huge reason why it couldn't be the same way for pets.
So my thought is basically just to make the pet inventory static and let players gear up their pets in much the same way they gear up their characters. Add some pet-only armor and weapons to raid encounters across the tiers--preferably as wholly extra drops rather than taking up space that could have held player-usable pieces of gear--and take out most if not all of the trash-drop pet weapons from citadel and emberflow and whatnot.
Could be used to address survivability and scaling issues as well as just adding an extra level of pet management and give pet classes more to achieve. At the same time stats like INT and WIS can be made to do something for pets, and maybe we could even make them use their ATK values in their damage calculations. Also, I'd make it so pets return whatever they were wearing when you give them a new piece of gear, allowing you to swap in their gear for them and suchlike.
If this idea was agreed to I'd almost want to say that Companion Strength and Health focuses should be axed in favor of focusing on a more robust pet inventory, and maybe axe the replacement for Pet Discipline and have pets consider Focus Effects on the items they are wearing themselves too. Maybe even have pets consider weapon damage and delay somehow, although that would be tough to balance with their old "new pet, bigger dmg numbers" values. But those are details that could be ironed out later.
Anyway it's kind of a theme with me recently I guess but I think pets could be much more interesting than the simple bags of HP, damage and maybe 1 ability that they tend to be.
Would need to replace the Mage murk spell though.
