lol, this may sound stupid, but whats the best melee familiar? (I'm doing SoU with a wizard, henchman-less) I just want to use it to tie up my enemies, so I can blast them to the Abyss with my spells.

I think the panther is still the best, though I haven't really used a melee familiar since the OC (before SoU and HotU), so there might be better ones around now. Do you have HotU too? That gives some more familiar options.

I switched to using a faerie as my familiar in SoU and took Xanos and only levelled him up as a barbarian... and it worked out reasonably well.