Started playing warlock again recently. I’ve always been a fan of precise pet control, but it seems my Imp likes following my target despite specific targeting commands I give it
Are there any ways to have pets auto-assist me without changing targets from specific commands I give? I would hate to turn to help burst a ranged add, only to see my felhound crawling 80 yards away from the main target, only to attack one time, then crawl 80 yards back.
Or, failing that, is there a full listing of things that cause demons to change targets?
Your summoned demons will follow your orders such as your Tyrants, Doggoes, Vilefiend, Felguard (or any other personal demons) and maybe Greater Demons from NP or ID.
Your lesser demons such as imps however will attack whatever you hit with Hand of Gul’Dan or whatever you hit something the most recently and will chuck fireballs to that target until it is dead, implode or runs out of fel energy.
AFAIK, greater demons used to not listen to your commands now you can. But Imps will still not follow your commands and will continue to chuck fireballs much to your own dismay of someday hoarding them.
If you have your pet on Assist “stance/mode”, even though you tell it to attack a target, if you attack a different target - your pet will switch to your target within moments.
As Locutus said, the dogs/vilefiend/grimoire-felguard/tyrant now follow your main pet’s commands AND STANCE.
To avoid this, you would need to have your pet(“s”) on Passive (or possibly Defensive?).
—However, if you have your pet on Passive: when you summon your dogs they will not leap at your target, and I think it even causes the initial leap/damage to be forfeit/lost?!; when you summon your tyrant it will not attack your target.
The dogs/tyrant will not attack until told manually to do so.
-Furthermore, not only is it tedious to have your pets set to passive and have to tell them to attack each new target, but leaves much room for dps loss due to unintended idle time.
Pets will stop attacking targets you Fear, and CCing a target (fear/stun/interrupt) will not cause pets to switch to that target; I believe they’ll only switch upon using a -damaging- attack.
I’d generally advise playing with pet(s) on Assist, and trying not to switch targets too much, especially while the dogs/fiend are summoned.
Though, the felguard has charge, the tyrant casts, and even the dogs move pretty quickly, which helps mitigate the dps loss from switching to adds.
IMO, you won’t be doing too much damage to the adds without the use of your pets any way 
Let other classes/specs get the “really ranged” adds if you’re not needed there, or try to optimize the timing of summons for the specific encounters/adds.
TK
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Thank you for the in depth response! However, I only am interested in micromanaging during destro or affliction specs, so I am open to the idea of playing with Passive pet (or a semi-passive pet, changing based on certain regularly used spells?)
Even playing passive, there is some delay and lost commands when I instruct pets to attack specific targets. For example, using an imp to walk off my path to pull a quest mob, while I start dps on something close by… the imp will simply not attack when told, or require multiple presses to actually GO. Or similarly, when playing with a melee pet and opening on a target with soul fire or chaos bolt, I command pet to attack, but the first command is often lost.
Perhaps its hopeless to get this working the way I imagine, but I figured I’d ask. Thanks again!
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Ahh, I had a suspicion you might not even be talking about Demo 
In that case, I think your pet will be around 15% of your total damage, give or take (at least that’s about what it is when I attack PvP target dummies in destro/affl), and bursting adds sounds practical lol.
But yes, I have a similar issue in arena if I want my felguard to stay on the healer so they can’t drink, but I want to turn and damage someone else, …but Passive is too much of a bother and becomes inefficient.
Best of luck!!
TK
Believe or not for some reason I’m having better luck with the defensive stance.
Not sure why it may be fake perception of mine but it seems like my demons are getting out of combat earlier now. Where as before I had assist on and sometimes I was stuck in combat for some amount of time.
Like I said though this could just be me though. Especially since I’m gauging on it on feels, not actually testing it.
Which is probably like someone what had 8 beers trying to aim for the center of the toilet.
Your experience is better than nothing, I’ll give defensive an extensive try and see how it goes!
Sometime this week I’ll try to sit down and test out as many options as I can think of.
I was hoping this would get hotfixxed out since we all noticed the day of the ai update but that’s modern blizzard.
Mostly these days I just assist and manually control, but as expressed that also had problems.
Macroing /petattack into spells and leaving everything on passive was tried and wasn’t amazing.
May try a defensive stance.
All in all it mostly just means demo and bm should be in manual control all the time which fits spec fantasy but it needs some QoL love.
I guess the Ideal behavior i want is current “Assist” mode, but when a specific /petattack is given, that command is obeyed until the target is dead or otherwise no longer is attackable, even if it means some negatives like attacking immune targets, breaking cc, or despawning the pet due to range.
For me, pets are like an extra limb of my character to move around and interact with the world, not some “other mob” that kinda follows me around and acts on its own, and I want enough control to reflect that.
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