Diablo® III

I always laugh when I start a new character and get Kormac and see his measily 2 damage which is less than the player dishes out when they are fresh out of the gate. I continue to laugh as he does less than 10% of my characters damage most of the time. This is the same for the others. Now running in later difficulties they serve only to amuse me as they charge into battle soaking up damage and accomplishing nothing in terms of kills. I know they didn't want people to use followers as a crutch like many did in D2 (I always had a barb merc tanking for a necro or sorc). Those followers were actually really good and while maybe the followers shouldn't have that great a combat ability dealing ineffective amounts of damage and dying constantly makes them worthless other than the occasional entertaining dialogue.

Would buffing them to do maybe half the player's damage or something along those lines be good or would they still be pathetically weak and almost worthy of being eternally left in town (the passive buffs are their only saving grace).

Am I the only one who thinks followers need a buff in their offensive and defensive abilities. We can gear them all we want but the underlying reductions to their stats really keep them from being useful, especially on inferno. Just got there and my enchantress does virtually nothing against inferno difficulty enemies.

I wish for a method, that you can use the same gear for all your followers(if you have 3 characters, 1 templar, 1 scoundrel, and 1 enchantress gear is should be needed only, not 3 different for every character separatly, which is makes 9 follower gears).

I would love the option to use 2 or 3 of the followers at the same time :)

A slightly buff would be to grant the followers +3% critical hit chance. They have +50% critical hit chance from the start, but no chance, making it useless, and anyway is very difficult to increase the critical hit chance on the followers, because they can use only a few things.