The challenges and counter-challenges of followers are one of the most fascinating stacks of interlinked dependencies to me!
Obviously it’s a problem that followers are tougher, more damaging, and way dumber than players. You feel like a squire for your bodyguard.
Followers don’t know how to dodge, so they need huge hit points in order to survive. We also can’t give useful orders or tactics due to both controls and AI, so they need even more HP to survive when they are standing in the fire.
Followers also make more of the game accessible to offline, solo, or casual players. If taking down a boss, player + followers has to have a shot at matching a team of a few players vs the boss. With the limit of 1 follower, that follower’s damage has to be huge until the AI can handle cooperation and coordination of multiple followers.
There’s more linkages, but it’s a really interesting nest of problems.