I toyed with them in a somewhat comparitive manner to see which one tanked better and such..
my standard was based on how often I had to heal the pet.. since that directly indicative of it's ability to deal out and withstand damage, in addition to the possibility of you taking hate from your pet through over-curing.. which is not good. For my testing I was fighting yellow cons, which are strong enough to give the pet a workout, but not really any threat if something goes wrong and you take hate too early.
what I noticed is that it appears that the tellurian recruit adept 1 is slightly more powerful than the tellurian hero with respect to taking damage. I had to heal the spider a little less than the obsidian golem...
with respect to damage output, they appear to be roughly equal.. mobs didn't die any sooner with the spider or the golem.
with respect to special abilities, the spider has "obsidian webbing" honestly I don't know what this does.. it *APPEARS* to be a dot, but it's hard to tell without a parser... the tellurian hero however does have a knockdown attack, which causes the mob to loose an action.. mind you this only applies to mobs that are two-legged, (knockdowns never work on 4-legged mobs). If obsidian webbing IS a dot, then it works on everything.. so that's another 1up to the spider.
now I will not say my observations are etched in stone.. but after about 10 or so fights with both, that's the conclusions I came to.
edit: oh the fire pet is NOT a solo-XP pet, it deals decent enough damage but will be dead in seconds against anything even remotely powerful, even white con can seriously hurt it.. a yellow or orange will rapidly rip it in half and come after you. I'd save that pet for grouping situations where you have a solid tank and don't need the extra DPS or tanking ability (like stopping adds) the spider or golem brings to a group.
Edited, Mon Feb 14 10:47:34 2005 by Iaini