Pets are going to remain fairly useless until breeding / pet armor / mountable combat pets are introduced.
Main issue is game world is so big not having a horse is liability. Even with herding seems you cannot have a great pet and a mount. Once you can ride bears and whatnot getting around and dismounting to fight will be realistic. Lykiators were decent at this in the first game if I recall.
Pets are too squishy. Whether combat or mounts they die in a few long bow shots generally and only high end 125 Pets have enough hp pool to not worry about dieing super fast. Once pet armor is introduced they need to revisit hp pools of all pets in a balance pass.
Pets take too long to tame, level up and replace. I'm hoping breeding will let you make some more pets out of a pair. Right now if your pet dies you have to spend a good half hour running to a spawn taming it bringing it back to stable and then level it up which takes forever. Pets are also location bound. If you live in meduli are you gonna run to jungle and tame one terror bird? No your gonna tame the closest spawn like a taur dog because no way to transport or breed pets elsewhere.
At any time a ma can just LuL 3 shot it and waste hours of your time.
Really tbh the whole taming profession is unfinished and there's too many missing skills and features to really make an accurate judgment on how strong it will eventually be but right now it's pretty weak looking at the big picture.
This why I say taming is useless your better off specing the points from taming into the current meta mounted archery or it less OP relative mounted magery. Like ya having a white bear is cool for show, but you know bring it out of town is useless, you won't have anything to use it on, an your basically painting a target on your back for some MA to ride up an kill it because they can an you can't do anything to stop them.
Extremely unrewarding, unenjoyable, poorly balanced profession the only purpose to be a max lvl tamer is to mass tame 4 horses at one time so you can sell them to other players nothing else. But hey that the benefit to having the game not punish people who only murder horse, tamers can easily make 100g an hour just taming and selling horse to people zero risk maximum reward doing it.
