Greetings,
I would suggest fixing the following code-side bugs(present in 1.13d, unsure about later iterations), if possible:
1. If a minion is too far(approx. 2 screens away)the minion AI would fail to set a minion position to the owner's current position, if the minion is busy(fighting, recovering, paralyzed). Instead, a summonable minion would be deleted, and a hireling would "vanish" server-wise(can still be seen, but cannot interacted with).
2. If a character(tested with a barbarian) is being hit, or knocked back during some skill moves(Whirlwind, Frenzy), the blocking, or the hit-recovery animation routine botch his movement pattern, the skill move either fails(uncontrollable whirling on the spot), or the character becomes frozen in place(control can only be regained through game reloading).
3. Aura states from items cancel each other, especially on hirelings. From my research, it seems to be a side-effect of a badly implemented anti-cheating measure, present since patch 1.11.
It would also be nice, if the hireling animation and inventory management was soft-coded.