That's a great writeup, except that unless they changed things recently,
the bit about weapon damage seems to be incorrect.

If you watch a pet for a while, you'll find his maximum damage, the
hardest he ever hits.   If you hand him a weapon, and then watch him for
a while, you'll find it may or may not change his hardest hit.  If the
damage listed  on the weapon is high enough that double that damage
number is higher than that maximum damage you saw him do before, that
will be his new hardest hit, and in general the overall damage of the
pet will also be raised correspondingly.

This is easiest to see at very low levels.

To prove my point (or test to see if I'm wrong) I just made up a brand
new mage and went into the tutorial.   Opening a few barrels got me a
bow, which sufficed to buy the level 2 water pet and some malachite,
lets see how it does.

OK, his high end hit is 12, although he also hits for 6 4 8 3... but he
hits for 12 a lot, and never for more.

Now, off to Huoo in Gukta who sells rusty weapons, I buy a selection.

First the rusty axe, with a damage of 6.  Testing, does nothing to
change his high end hit.

Summoning a fresh pet, I give this one a rusty scythe (8/51).  As
expected by my theory, he's now doing 16 damage on high end hits, along
with some 14s, a couple 15s, and a 9... I'm not running a parser but it
looks like his average damage is up too.   Oops, dinged 3 while testing.
Lowest hit I can get out of him seems to be 3

Summon pet number three, and test him to make sure my being level 3
hasn't changed his damage output.  Same as before, although I got a new
low end hit of 1.

Now for the big gun, rusty two handed sword, (9/50)  New high end hit
is, as I expected, 18; the lowest I can coax out seems to be 5, as rare
as the 1 is when weilding nothing.   This seems to indicate a +4 damage
per hit across the board, although without much longer parses its hard
to say for certain.

Goign from a max hit of 12 to a max hit of 18 is a nice jump, but the
article you quote seems to say it can't possibly happen, you'd need to
give that pet at least a 24 damage weapon as I read it, (which would
then do a whopping 48 damage), or even if thats not quite right, at
least a 12 damage weapon (which would give 24 damage hits).

What I think they are forgetting is that high end hit with a weapon is
twice the damage listed on the weapon, so what you really need is
something more than HALF the highest hit of your pet, much easier to
arrange.