Now I will preface this by saying I have no problems with the increased damage output generated by NPC’s. Except in relation to this one issue which I believe has been overlooked. Pets!
Now I am well aware that Pets are inferior to Human Thralls, that is not a question. The issue is simply this. A crocodile pet straight out of the pen has only (approximately) 128 HP (less than stated on the wiki) and Komodo’s started out with only (approximately) 230something, again less than stated on the wiki. So, have Pets been nerfed even more than previously? I raised two of each and they had the exact same HP out of the pen.
The issue now is, one hit from a Crocodile NPC will drop your Crocodile pet to half health. 1 hit and it’s half dead. From a starter mob on noob river. The only way you can conceivably level any pet up is to set them to attack nothing and set them to follow at 15m so they stay far enough back so that if you pull anything with your bow (a whole other issue not to be addressed here) you can swap to a melee weapon and burn it down as the NPC’s will ignore you (the person damaging them) and make a straight line for your pet.
Now, for a new player who sees a hyena pup, or a crocodile hatchling and says “heck yeah I want a cool animal friend to fight by my side” just think how they will react when it is torn to shreds within the first 3 second of their first fight and dies. With this increase to NPC damage pets need a big increase to either their HP pool, their armor rating or in all honesty both. They are no longer simply worse than Human Thralls, they are utterly worthless at this point.
Either the people making this design choice never met a bear or a lion IRL 
or haven’t ever used a pet in this game.