The guy making the decision to rebalance pets, without being prepared in any way should smoke less lotus as well.
2022 as @Kikigirl just reminded us…
It’s about time to finally deliver.
We have a lot of pets with a lot of different move sets, statuses and other abilities.
I get that this might be a bit of effort.
But nobody can tell me they didn’t have the time for that, but they had the time to revamp dye bench, purge and inventory UI….
And all that other nonsense nobody asked for.
As for the OP, it depends what you’re fighting if the pet you’re taking with you is still useful.
All pets are much more squishy, means they should be at level 10 to 15 before you start fighting world bosses or doing harder dungeons with them.
You also have to make sure pets have status effects which are appropriate for your opponents.
The sand reaper was the strongest pet for a while (not anymore though). She has an insanely powerful poison attack and against living creatures that’s still very strong.
But she isn’t as strong against undead enemies anymore.
Back in the day she was even powerful enough to shred undead creatures, she didn’t even need her poison.
Anyways, it comes down to preference, enemies and the unique abilities of your followers.
I personally still like sand reapers, once they reached a certain level they still can handle most enemies on their own. Their poison attacks deal a lot of damage and can hit multiple enemies at the same time.
I also still like frost giants, they aren’t as squishy as elephants or mammoths but can also knock down enemies. And they are surprisingly strong by comparison as well.
2 sand reapers, or 2 frost giants can easily kill the scorpion queen.
But 2 scorpion kings or scorpion queens can’t kill the actual scorpion queen?!
Weird! 
(Tested all of them with lvl 20 of course)
Once i fought the arena champion with a dancer and a frost giant, and i was really scared the arena champion is gonna wreck them.
But she didn’t, the frost giant was consistently knocking her down while my dancer was smashing her to death.
I didn’t even do anything myself, i was just perplexed how well that combo worked against her.
So… yeah… for people returning to the game after a longer break, pets might appear to be a huge disappointment.
But some are still useful if you know what to go for in specific scenarios.
I hope so, the time and effort is still about the same.
We don’t have to equip them, but therefore we have to play the slot machine even harder.
We not only have to be lucky finding the chubs (which aren’t always guaranteed as well) AND play the slot machine at the animal pen too.
Nevermind the fact that an Animal pen is insanely huge, building such an obvious structure on a PvP server should be rewarded with something at least useful.
Yeah thralls are customizable and will be therefore always be superior, but pets need to be closer to them.
But this DBNO (down but not out mechanic) FC wants to implement gives me the creep.
And i know maybe i should be a little bit more optimistic, as someone suggested me to not judge it before it’s even out just recently.
… But i can’t help it, i think they don’t want to rebalance followers. They give us the ability to revive them… and that’s it. 