Before switching over to Birbs completely, I did try to make physical pets work . Infact that was what Fluffy Squishy was supposed to be at first. With FG release, I wanted to make a pet build work with the Azrakaa devotion proc and thought it would be great at first. Or atleast, it looked pretty neat on paper.
This was my build: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/4NOkGodN
The results are in the Fluffy Squishy thread: The Fluffy Squishy - Pet Conjurer
I eventually ended up giving up on it and moving on to Double Birb Elemental due to how little damage the physical setup actually did, by comparison. It was too slow to kill stuff. If I had to guess, I would say that enemy Armor was the culprit. But I am not sure. Maybe there wasn’t enough AoE, maybe the problem was that I couldn’t convert all my pet dmg into physical and since lost like nearly half of it due to them being of a different dmg type, maybe something else.
But when I saw its 40 min cally kill time, I just gave up on it. That said, it was a few patches before and things have changed since then. I don’t know how it will perform atm. But if I were to bet, I would bet that it still won’t be able to touch Elemental builds, or even come close.
Maybe pet need Armor Shred, or their own version of Beronath Sword. Maybe I just suck at trying to make physical pets work. But if someone can come up with a version that shows performance similar to elemental counterpart, consider me extremely interested and impressed.