[Balimon]

From my experience I prefer Fire or Earth pet as well. 29-51 Fire pet is hard to beat with a torch, you can reclaim level with almost no downtime. 51-56 the only pet you can really use solo is the 49 earth.

I personally feel like the water pet is over hyped. Every pet has it's role: Earth has huge HP and root, great for nuke leveling, reclaiming, or just powering down stuff. Fire has that huge damage shield and a fire proc, pre-50 it literally melts mobs down. Air has a stun, which is great for holding aggro, and it can invis allowing you do some tricky things.

Water has a proc.....and some hit points? It just doesn't fill any niche role we need. Earth fulfills the HP much better, fire has the same proc + the damage shield. On some of my mage toons I would use it 1-24 or so, but I find myself leaning towards air and earth for those levels now. At 49 it is almost useless in my opinion, the proc is so tiny, there just aren't many situations where that proc justifies pulling it out.

Water becomes really nice at 54 with the first rogue pet and finally comes into it's own as a real pet. Sadly the fire pet turns useless until Dyzil's at 56, but that's another story.