Minions/Companions need a bit of love and there are alot of ways to do it and im sure the devs have a way in mind, but i jut wanted to throw out a new concept that might be difficult but would definitely diversify everyones pet builds, here it is
Step 1. Player unlocks minion/companion skill, for this example lets look at wolves and skeletons. In the inventory interface there would be muiltiple tabs, 1 like there is now for the palyer gear and a 2nd tabs for pets/minions/companions. Everytime a minion skill is unlocked its woulb be activated in this interface so you could put pet exclusive gear on them making them look different/be stronger and such. The gear you put on them would only be allowed to have minion affixes. Totems would not be included in this category and would still gets its boost from player equipment using new Totem affixes (seperate from minions). The gear in this slot would automatically affect the minion type it represents once its summoned. Gear should be made to be worn only by that minion type (obviously if you can have 60 wraiths wearing top gear they would never die) so a wolves armor would be better than a skeletons armor just due to the sheer number of minions you would have, obviously balancing would be needed.
Pets now level up, thats right you gotta go out there and train them and level them up by using them! Yea this is unlikely to happen to complex/difficult/time consuming, but would be cool As your pet levels its stats scale with its level, not yours and it has to be higher level to wear top gear (still has to meet the level requirements)
and lastly, to make all minions more balanced, they all start at 1 base damage and now you equip pet weapons on them just like you would your main character. Since you can have 3?4? wolves its weapon would be 1/4 the power of say the bear that you can only have 1 of. can have 10 skeletons? its weapon of same tier has 1/10th base of a bears weapon and so fourth for balance.
Like i said unlikely this will happen, but for minion builds definitely would get the player to interact more with them, raise them, equip them, love them, use them, and each build from player to player would be dramatically different.
as i read this after i type it, i realized it sounded dumb but going to post anyways.