By viable I mean for a casual player to level up the character to 100 have a fun time but perhaps even fail eventually.
So I recall in TQ you could play a nature character and you would use the wolves to buff your damage with their howl. There are some pets in Occult that will buff your damage (storm spirit for familiar and hellfire from hell hound). I have a Witchblade that I was hoping to make him fairly tanky with DOT effects from Sigil of Consumption and Bloody Pox. But use those pets to grant him buffs and kind of just have ‘pets’ like you could in TQ with wolves.
The question I don’t know is how much you have to invest in pets to prevent them from being cleared from the board too often.