Okay ...
thx to railshot/Keith of Sonoma for clearing some things up for me.
Spend some hours on TC to work my way into this thing; forget some of the bs I posted before.
After doing some exercise, I think some features should be reconsidered.
They said: A good GD should stay a top-pet to go with. At the moment, we indeed have the sad situation that in most cases tamers only take GD's to complete their tasks, other pets are only taken for pvp and very special situations. Therefore, this approach to make a variety of pets "sexy" again for tamers is a good one. And the variety of builds it allows is remarkable and really looks like tons of fun - thanks for that!
However, I took my tamer-copy and grabbed my lesser Hiryu that remained untrained after I tamed him long ago. I thought that I wanted to build him in a way that he was perfect against swoop (ok, I did not want to lose much time dealing with baddies so I was looking for a remote area with a decent mob to play with). I went through that gate in New Haven and got my first level of upgrades, what raised pet lvl from 2 to 3 follower slots. With this, I managed to give the pet the following: 700 hp (raised from 210 I think); 80's in the core resists of physical and energy (and since I had still points left also fire); and 150 stamina. This build can be left with swoop some time without having trouble (go and get a coffee, nothing serious will happen). It is not a "swoop-killer" yet since his base-damage is low, but I just wait for the next upgrade and will try to get a monster-upgrade on base-damage and maybe strength. In fact, I want to build up this pet to resemble a GD (5 slots) and compare them in the end. Even at this stage, the lesser Hiryu seems to be much more resistant to swoop, even when wrestling is much lower (106 vs 119 on GD). The only advantage my GD has is that it kills swoop more faster, but wait for the next upgrades!
What are the main features that decide on the "power" of a pet? It is (i) how resistant it is to damage and how long it can therefore stay to be healed, and (ii) how much damage it can deal. For the first point, the following features are essential: (i) hp-pool; (ii) resistances; (iii) wrestling and with minor importance parry and magic resist. For the second (i) base-damage (ii) strength (iii) wrestling combined with tacs and anat, (iv) magery combined with eval int and mana-regen. So what will tamers do?
They will all do the following: (i) tame a creature, (ii) go through the heaven gate, (iii) push hp to say 700-800, (iv) push the resistances they need for next training to max (eg. phys & fire), (v) push stam to make them hit fast, (vi) go to next training round, if completed, (vii) push base damage. I dont think there will be much variation to this scheme.
Therefore, the "variety of builds" is only of theoretical nature. For a pet to become effective only a few key features are important, and these few will be pushed. Furthermore, after this the variety of pets is not existing anymore. If a lesser hiryu can be pushed almost 4x in its hp-pool, the outcome has nothing to do with a lesser hiryu anymore except for the animation.
Maybe some issues should be reconsiderd. Doubling hp-pool is max upgrade for pet possible? Pushing resistances is much more costly? I think this points should be adressed, otherwise we land in a mess of identical builds that only look different because of their animations and some features like type of damage dealt or specials.
Regards, Fizzle