TL:DR-Companion druid build seems to be aligned to the philosophy of that of D2. You can play completely passive in WT4 without pet deaths with proper itemization but with harder content you need to add some support skills. The pet damage tool tip is not clear, maybe it is bugged, maybe it is not, but without clarification from the developers we will not know. Please give us a pet board. Finally, the build is FUN to play and if you don’t want take time finding gear, druid has many other solid options for you.
On to the detailed analysis:
Seems to me like the design intent behind the Druid companion builds is comparable to D2. I was just running a game of D2 with a Druid in godly gear (using offline mode) for a zookeeper and at players 8 setting a passive play style led to all minions death with only 33% of Andariel’s life missing and I cannot run ubers at player 1. Ran at players 1 and about half of the minions died but they were able to kill Andariel. I have actually played the build all the way through and with some support damage input, the build cannot handle much more than player level 1. So even in the beloved D2, druid companions were never meant to play in a completely passive manner, but rather complement the druid skills like shapeshifting or casting. In contrast I can play a completely passive style with the necromancer, but the curses encourage a passive play style. I cannot speak for the D4 necrosummoner, but the D3 necro summoner deviated from the D2 playstyle.
Now back to D4 companion build, they are actually quite good if built properly. My wolves do not dye in WT4 in the open world or dungeons when played in a completely passive manner, which would equate to me as players 1 in D2. In addition the kill time seems to be similar to that in D2. Now built properly hear means having top notch gear that take time to get vs a BL sorcerer where you get gravitational aspect and you are good to go. When playing the companion build in a compliment play style, meaning most of the damage comes from pets or pet proc’s vs shephard aspect driving a core skill that does most of the damage, I can get up to NM80 so far, and wolves still stay alive 70-80% of the time. In NM50 they do not die at all. I play completely in human form, only half my glyphs are leveled to 15, I am missing 60% of Lithith alters and the clear times for 80 are about 8-10 min (no cherry picking dungeons either).
However, there are still some issues as other posts have pointed out. The damage output does not appear to match the tool tip and seems most odd especially with the wolves. There needs to be some clarification there, but the damage seems to be split among all possible pets. For instance if the passive damage for ravens is 60k and I have 6, then each does about 10k. Even then though there is still some inconsistency, especially with wolves. Storm wolves from the pants definately hit harder than werewolves from alpha aspect alone. I would also like to see a pet focused board vs 1 more glyph and I think that would be enough to balance things out.
Happy killing to all the companion theory crafters!