Pardners

[swa]

Best one for each class?

[paugus]

The doc.

[BeastofBones]

Comments based on hard mode.

Doc Alice is the most universal of the helpers, as being able to outright oneshot skeletons is an extremely powerful ability, welcome in pretty much any class. Scattergun also does fixed damage which means her damage while not great, never falls to zero like the other partners. Her healing is also extremely relevant early game for all classes early game.

As far as class specific helpers go, Susie has great synergy with Snake Oilers, due to Bad Moxie allowing you to double dip on the -Moxie debuff, which lets her actually do damage and DPS. Ghetto Fan hammer with shoot, Susie lasso, shoot, Susie shot. Susie's raw damage is actually quite good. For the other two classes, she's pretty much just a 1 round stun + one time cover, which generally doesn't cut it mid-late game, without a way to buff her damage, expect her normal shot to do zero damage.

Pete is great with Cowpunchers, since max rank Menacing Moo is a repeatable AOE stun, Pete can safely buff your stats to the point where you no longer take damage, and each round that goes by is a net 20 muscle swing for the player character. Cowpuncher already owns against single or pairs or enemies, Pete + Bill combo gives you a good answer to large groups of 5-9 enemies. For the other two classes, Pete tends to be kinda meh, as since he's positioned up front, he almost always dies after one turn. If he was one square back and could hide behind Beanslinger walls, there would be some synergy there.

[Neosuduno]

Gary is good all around, but not for his attack skill. His debuff skill hits all enemies and is repeatable, makingbattles against real bruisers easier to handle. He does not do so well against hoards, even with his clone technique.

[BeastofBones]

Gary's debuff skill is terrible. The debuff never scales up from the initial 3, unlike pretty much any of the other partner skills. It's very likely this is a bug that needs to be fixed. The goblin grunt Gary makes isn't particularly useful either, as the stat debuff often means it deals zero damage. If you're not swinging with Gary every turn, you're doing it wrong. (as of patch v 1.02) Best use for Gary is since he levels by finding Shroom-gro, you can easily overlevel him compared to enemies in the early areas, in which case he destroys.