I agree that for lower levels and worse equipment , or pets will be better well trained
My personal experience with AoW so far is the Lianelle & Zerk combo I’ve mentioned a few times already where max HP loss so far has been around 20% due to poison when rushing sand reaper queen and with the child of jhill boss due to that AoE attack

I leveled up two low level berserkers in UC over the weekend, both of them only had not much armor around 1k and berserkers battle axes
I gave them steaks for HP and at lvl 5-6 they were able to kill the red mother and few more other bosses with minimal HP loss
Imho if you have access to epic armor and weapons you can easily go with 2 thralls for more fun and variation almost anywhere besides a few dungeons