I really don’t like companions. I have one, and I find that while it grows on you and starts looking cute after staring at it being a puke-green version of Raticate for an hour or two, it is very… dumb.
They tend to attract too much aggro for their level, and then they can’t effectively act on anything. There’s no commands to give it and the server is handling everything. Now that everyone and their dog has a pet rat on Zemyna, there’s just a lot of minor annoyances.
On top of that, it seems to cause unnecessarily large skill delays. By having mine out, I’d get small, but noticable skill input lag. Cross-cut wasn’t coming out immediately, and Cartar Stroke wouldn’t activate at all because Sprite, while cute, was sitting there being a bandwidth sucking jerk.
I’d personally prefer if people could have client managed AI systems, as difficult as that is, similar to how Homunculi on RO worked (You’d have your own AI file, and could modify it to teach it to do new things, like harass enemies or bait monsters for you.)