For the future, tone down white bear spawns.

[Kelzyr]

Why would some level of micromanaging be bad to balance the pet? The only other thing you're doing as a BM would be either casting spells (could easily hit another hotkey while the spell is charging) or pulling a bow (same thing, just hit a hotkey while pulling the bow) or I guess is some cases fighting with a melee weapon, which would be the most difficult way to play the tamer.

I think most people's complaints with pets is the send and forget aspect of pets.

In wow the pet is very underwhelming damage wise, what made them good was abilities the user had to strategically issue to get a desired result. Therefore, either all pets should be relatively useless damage wise with some abilities (beast mastery skill with a damage nerf) or you keep the high (relative) damage with the additional micro managing.

Tbh I feel if you don't find these changes reasonable you just want to be able to do good damage with little effort during combat (obviously there is effort before combat)

 

[bbihah]

Best way to balance it is to come to the conclusion almost every game did. Like SWG and WoW;

Pets can't add a disproportionate amount of damage than they take away from a player. Rather they should promote added utility to the player. Be it through being a distraction(in PVE this would be mostly things like tanking, in pvp it would be sheer taking hits that would otherwise have been done to a player by taking focus away through player decision, not mechanic) or being able to be a low priority target enough to be able to output a more constant amount of damage(example is a very tanky pet that doesnt do a lot of damage, not even enough to kill a player 1on1. It would be ignored as long as there are other more important targets as damage "wasted" on the pet is damage that could have been done to a nearby target that is "more" dangerous).