Ellyl Sages (53-57) - Ellyl Sages are the best nuker pet in my opinion, they throw firballs for pretty nice damage and their cast range is very high.
They also self-heal themselves at around 50% HPs. Set on passive, they will heal your groupmates. They are nice to have... park them on the fringe set to passive... let them back up your cleric's spreadheals.
Also, the level 57 sages are almost as good as the centaur lookouts, without the defense but with healing. They're harder to get and you sometimes have to kill a few oj cons first, but well worth the effort.
FYI - You have to keep your pet at 100% hps. If they go below 100% or close to it, they want to start meleeing. They will also always melee if something starts beating on them from up close.
Nuker pets take stutter steps forward and eventually get in melee range & start trying to melee (not good). Make sure to try to attack from maximum range to increase the dd to melee ratio.
Also, Ellyl Sages may be what we need to balance out losing so much in NF. If you leave your pet on stay and passive you can fight someone several units from it (1k range for example) and it will heal you the entire time. Or an alternate strategy is to allow it to bolt your opponent until you need healing.