Monks' has been obsoleted by a regular attacking combat ability, that's good. Warriors' still does its thing w/r/t agro, so it's fine. Could be upgraded, but it's fine. Rogues' has always been bad for ****ing with agro unduly, so never good to use except when rogue soloing, which isn't ideal but also isn't new. Berserker Phantom deals under 50k damage. Since the attacks are proc-based, the damage isn't even usefully boosted by shm/brd/mag auras. But damage is still damage so it's kinda wrong to not use it? I view this as a Problem. Berserker class is due some streamlining and this ability is one of a couple that stick out to me as problematic for not carrying the weight they should for a hot button (Blood Pact is similarly very bad. procs & pets both carry overhead vis-à-vis lag, besides their UI footprint. Their effects need to earn that.) A couple options I brainstormed for going forward, depending on one's perspective & goals this is I think the smarter choice: move Phantom Assailant to timer8, shared with Sapping Strikes. So it gets to be used as intended for a couple years on progression servers before politely going away forever. New Sapping Strikes in SKU27 should proc four Frenzy hits with appropriate base damage, instead of four non-melee hits this is more exciting: create a new Phantom for SKU27 that, instead of proccing Phantom Assailant Strike IV+, procs New Mangler's Bladestrike (the covenant proc) such that ber ally can be actual thing too. Are there other clever solutions I might like? Is the real answer to just stop clicking it and be sad?
If they want to keep pets for classes like Berserker maybe they need to be more damaging but on shorter duration & longer cool-down giving them more of a burn-use than a fairly frequent flavour purpose, personally I wouldn't miss them at all. Your idea of moving them to share sapping strikes timer makes sense if they are okay with them being phased out for other abilities later down the line. I do like your second idea a lot, sounds fun. However I've seen a bunch of posts regarding zone lag during raids that make me think there is a strong case for removing the pets of non-pet classes or doing something like you suggest in order to phase them out a few expansions after they appear & transferring that damage over boosting another regular ability, removing any AA for them in the process & refunding those or having those moved & applied to something else that gets a raise. Long term, streamlining of all of the classes may well be necessary to solve the lag issues if hardware solutions and processor scaling cannot bridge the divide between game flavour & demands on the equipment on the back end that creates those underlying problems, it's almost as if the pace of processor demand created by the increases of player power and how that has been done has been too fast for the hardware to keep up creating a pinch point in performance overall.
