Everyone who is being fatalistic about this should just consider themselves 100% correct and just assume pets will be deleted in the next patch.
Go ahead and break bonds with them now and start replacing them with thralls. Why wait for a fix you are convinced is never going to happen?
Hasn’t everyone already broken bonds with any thrall they had before the 3.0 patch came?
You know, when some stat lines were deleted and new ones were added but locked at 0?
If the pet is a decorative placeable that eats up a follower slot and a player is happy with that, leave it as is. But if it is expected to contribute to home defense, why wasn’t it already released?
They are ornaments and decorations and there is no pragmatic reason to clutter up inventory, server load, and follower list with them betting against the devs changing their mind about wanting them weak.
Hahaha!! 
Oh @LostBrythunian that was absolute gold, I love it. And in fact darn near spat my coffee while I was reading it.
Very well said indeed.
Apologies for the peril to your beverage.
No need to apologise, it was well worth it! Coffee is almost easier to procure than desert berries.
The level system is misleading, but it’s the only real numerical system to measure our progress through the game.
I think “endgame” doesn’t begin when you hit level 60. Getting there is so fast that you’re likely still living in a sandstone hut, and you don’t have Epic level gear either. That’s the point where you begin to make permanent choices in the game - building a stronghold, equipping followers with high-tier armor, etc. At this point, a mediocre pet follower could still be viable.
Endgame, in my opinion, is when you have all top-tier crafting stations in your base, which is also made Purge-resistant, and you have multiple high-tier thralls at your beck and call.
But despite this re-definition of concepts, I mostly agree with you; any feature that is intended to be used before you reach level 60 - that is, in the first week or so of a playthrough - is going to become redundant very quickly. Scalability of followers (such as training them to become stronger over time, making even thralls such as Exile fighters useful in the long run) is something I’ve been hoping for a long time.
Now that we can recycle 100 % of our building materials, maybe some day we could have a similar economy with followers.
That’s been going on…since like 2019. I mean seriously even Den said they were midgame content. What? do you still use your steel pickaxe after you get your star metal?
Pets COULD have been more but with development views of them as midtier fillers, they will never gain the traction because they aren’t designed to. They are tools to get you to end game mats and that means discard them when you get your 'serker.
Why even do that?
You can get RHTS at level 10. They’re not exactly out of reach for low levels.
Exactly. The issue with planning on mid level companions at all…the ease of getting top tier stuff mixed with faster leveling means these lower tier companions are pointless.
I’m reminded of old threads where the discussion was the point of bagging an exile I vs top tier thralls. The only real reason to do it is for rp purposes or cuz you know… that exile I looks good in a thong and hey, she’s a dancer. Pets kind of fall in this category for me (rp purposes, not wearing thongs). Yeah, it doesnt make a lot of min/max sense to use them, probably after a bit of unnerfing it still won’t make min/max sense to use them. But pets are hardly the first aspect of the game that has limited utility (or nonexistent) if you are purely concerned with dealing/resisting maximum damage.
We will have to wait and see what their final adjustments are but it was clear from dennis that they just aren’t going to be as good as thralls (he said that pretty directly).
You brought up something to consider.
Pets are heads and tails better than even the strongest Tier 1 Thrall. For some reason we’ve accepted that T1 Fighers and Archers are just to be killed, not even worth a wheel slot. But the moment something with fur or scales seems to fall behind T4s… its a major issue.
I wonder if I should put some of my ideas into their own thread about how thrall/pet balance, obtaining, and raising should be. Ughh… that’s a 30-45 minute writeup though. We’ll see.
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