Pet Pal is default if you pick Conjurer (summoner) preset for one of your companions. You can change it when you finish act 1.
No I don't mean with a specific pet pal preset, I picked Enchanter and Wizard for them and had pet pal on both, on top of their own talents(far out man for both iirc). You just get it for free on companions for some reason, but not all of them since I didn't have it on Red Prince so it's weird. In fact if you pick a pet pal preset on them(conjurer/wayfarer) you just lose that free talent point.
That is very very interesting. It seems Warfare needs a little tweak. Will go play around with it after work.
It isn't really a tweak, but the way the % damage are calculated. All the weapon based damage % are additive with main stat bonus it seems. Because you get like 200% from your main stat, adding 5% is a small overall increase. Meanwhile all the skill bonuses like warfare and scoundrel seem to be multiplicative, so they scale a lot better.
On the rogue versus archer thing, I can see if you want to min max why you'd take archer but it's not always better. Archers with maxed huntsman do about the same damage as rogues in backstab position, on non crits. You do get crits added so their damage is superior, and from range.
Also a bunch of their skills actually increase their damage output by a fair amount, like piercing if you line up target, ricochet, ballistic in most situations, barrage if you target all 3 on the same target and assassinate is a huge burst if you start the fight sneaking. The only concern is if for some reason you don't have the elevation bonus, they're A LOT worse.
So their higher damage output is a bit conditional, although a lot of the time it isn't really hard to use a movement skill to get high ground on everything but other mages/archers unless you move them all down(which you can with teleport/netherswap, although range is sometimes an issue).
Rogues on the other hand have an easier to deal with conditional(assuming you have the pawn) due to their very high movement speed from scoundrel bonus, so getting back attack is easy, although sometimes you simply can't when enemies have their backs to a wall. They also can jump on high ground and kill targets there, instead of having to drag everything down with teleports.
Their skills however are sadly pretty low damage, they don't have skills that simply increase their damage a bunch, with the exception of Sawtooth which does a fairly weak bleed effect(and can only be used when the target has no armor for bleeding) and Rupture Tendons which works very well with Chicken but quite often feels wasted when you can just attack the target once more and kill them rather than have them run around. Everything else is mostly debuffs and utility.
I'd say that's the main issue with rogues, their skills are just too focused on status effects and don't do nearly enough damage for a class that's mostly an assassin. Mind you, they do enough in terms of killing stuff, I kill every normal mobs in 2 or 3 attacks each(so 1 turn with adrenaline or not, depending on how tough the mob is, casters/archers is 2 attacks) but compared to a high ground archer, they do less damage and the utility isn't really worth it. A lot of time I use my skills because they do more damage than normal attacks, but I get 0 return out of the effects because the target simply dies before anything can trigger. Only bosses and stuff get affected but a lot are immune to most stuff or have walk it off so it's pretty meh anyway and it's still not hard CC either.