Wondering if you bother to augment your follower gear. I did and then I read we’re not worried how much damage the follower does - they are there mostly to help keep the mobs away from us?
If followers were dealing at least 75% of your chars damage, than I would augment the gear. Otherwise what’s the point?
Followers would still need to attack much faster with their attacks, skills and actually deal a significant amount of damage to pull away mobs from us…
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Since followers do not benefit from any set bonuses and the like, they do less 0.01% of your total damage in general. Next, with the “follower cannot die” token, toughness is irrelevant. So augmenting a follower’s gear is essentially a waste of resources.
The only stats that matter on a follower are the legendary powers (e.g. Unity, Oculus Ring, etc.), attack speed (more weapon procs from say Thunderfury), cooldown reduction (more abilities being used), and adventure stats.
For adventure stats, 20% of the follower’s gold find, magic find, and exp on kill is added to yours.
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I do not remember everything but in one season I did augment them just for fun. The Crusader was at about 1.2 M sheet damage. 
I would hope that in D4 the followers could be more effective on higher levels. I run mostly solo, so I like followers.
I wish the followers had a few more options, like they did before launch.
A few follower gems and legendary items would also make me very happy.
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which hits like a feather when the white mob dude has 47bil HP!
I’m with Iria on this - attack speed / cooldown so the follower does stuff faster and more frequently…but damage, irrelevant.
I’ll even roll CDR onto weapon if it has a socket instead of putting a ruby or emerald in it.
On the flip side, it would be sweet if they actually could do significant damage and were treated like another player in solo…or if you could hire all three in solo to have a 4p group (even if the XP bump was less than real 4p)…although Kormac has a tendency to just “stand around” in battle even though he whines about it incessantly in town when I’m sharding or salvaging…
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One thing to add to Iria and PMG’s comments: after attack speed and CDR, CC reduction is the preferred secondary.
There’s nothing wrong with augmenting follower gear, but does nothing but add to a perceived Cool Factor.
Follower damage has not been a thing since Monster Power/Torment 6 era. That was back when the Scoundrel did quite a bit of damage to mobs while the other two were just utility.
I wouldn’t mind one of the season buffs having all three followers, or an item that allows all three to be with you, as the CC madness would be funny, and would make a few legendary items possibly worth using along with them. Such as that one ring that sends zaps between wearers of the item.
CDR stats have no affect on merc unless its with legendary token.
Boost IAS on all items.
Go ahead and imbue items with mainstat. It wont do much but every bit helps.
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While this would be amazing - never gonna happen since it would be solo only and god knows the META folks would never shut up about a “solo” season buff.
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Yes because heaven forbid solo play gets a wee bit of an advantage over the rat-race that is multiplayer, or even just get a wee bit more efficient.
Just give meta players a magical cookie or something.
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You got that right to them it is all about the 4 “man” meta, they do not care about others. If you are not in the meta you are viewed as a second class citizen and they do not want you around. It is sad to see that this is what the game has become (power leveling, meta, bots and speed racer).
I wish they had a dedicated server for solo players so they could make the followers more effective. They could create some legendary gems and items just for followers. We would have to complete several special quests to located these items (it would not be easy), as we continued with the follower back story and lore.
If they offered this as a dlc for solo players I would jump on it, I have money Blizzard. 
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I remember trying to get into the meta style of play. Reminded me of some of the old side-scrolling arcade games that had you bouncing all over the place like your character drank a couple pots of black coffee and ate a tub of nutella before zooming off into the distance.
No exploration, not much looting; run, run, run off to the horizon. It was quite boring and annoying really. So much as stop to blink and all at once I was a quarter of a mile behind everyone else zapping the snot out of everything in sight.
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I’ve often wondered about this. I use CDR on my followers gear, just in case, but they don’t actually have a CDR stat to check.
I’ll usually suggest it too, but I have no proof it works. Just using logic as my reasoning, which… can mean nothing in a video game.
Have you (or anyone, really) tested this?
If not, might just test it myself later on.
A while back I had a maxed out (50) boon of the hoarder in my chest. I used it to do caldesann on my enchantress just for the heck of it. Went down to torment 13, outside of tristram and let her pound on bad guys. Their health bar didn’t change. Oh what the heck? I used a level 90 gem on another piece of her gear. She still can’t move a monster health bar at torment 13.
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I tested it. CDR on items (apart from the follower token) doesn’t work. It was a couple of patches ago, so I don’t know if they changed it.
Edit:
OK, just tested again. CDR still doesn’t work. I have 28.4% CDR on my enchantress (10% weapon, 7% amulet, 7% & 8% rings). Cooldown on her skills should be: charm & mass control: 18s to 12.9s, and erosion: 15s to 10.7s. You can time it yourself or just watch the video time code. The cooldown isn’t reduced:
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Excellent, thankyou.
I had a feeling this was the case. I had just logged on about to test it.
I guess IAS is the only stat worth anything for them in that case.
Thanks again TimberWolf.
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Legendary gems unfortunately do not work on followers, along with some pieces of legendary gear. I believe there was a very brief window on a ptr just after Reaper of Souls was released where gems worked on them, but have not since then.
For a while, the follower’s 2.5 stat multiplicative bonus made them useful, but not being able to wear extra equipment beyond rings, necklace, weapons, and their specific item has really hurt them in the damage department. A multiplicative bonus simply does not compare to the absurd damage numbers that the player has had for a very long time.
The difficulty would have to be dropped down to about Torment 6 difficulty before they would do any meaningful damage, at least as far as I can remember anyways.
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Used to work but they nerfed it when they introduced the follower CD token…so the token actually had some minimal value.
But people still use the “never die” token…and we lost cooldown…
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Yeah, but no 100,000% damage multipliers…So they can do no damage after about level 50.
The Followers are useless for damage, but used instead for their character buff, defense, and crowd control abilities.
The best you can do is give them as much CDR and AIS as you can. Forget about Damage, or Toughness (Immortality Relic/Focus/Token required). You can forget about all other stats and damage; they are useless.
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Unfortunately, you are forced to use the immortal token on anything TX and above. No matter how much toughness you stack on a follower, they are insta-dead on anything that matters.
They really need to buff followers damage, maybe have it scale with your character, so they aren’t OP at any point. This could help close the gap a bit between solo and group players. It doesn’t need to put solo over the top, but make it at least a little bit interesting in gearing your follower. It is incredibly lame watching the Templar flail away uselessly at monster, only to have the monster walk right by as if nothing is there to chase you down.
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