I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and assume that it's an oversight, rather than a deliberate design decision, since it would go against the philosophy that companions are supposed to allow you to run group-oriented builds (for example support builds) during solo play.
Especially since it was probably never considered that players might want to guard NPCs, since it didn't really come up often if at all, since all NPC fighters were usually immortal (or they were pets), and pets have massive damage reduction, but this isn't the case with companions.
It would help a lot with their perceived survivability issues as well, since we can't control them as well as we'd like and their AI isn't very good.
Please fix this before you let companions go live.
Edited by Kuratius on June 4, 2021 1:40PM