A wyrm needs awe, yes. It's also not a bad idea to give it a splash of magic to make it useful a bit longer, but if you take one with no magic it's certainly not very painful to lose it.
Also just to be clear, when I said "SC pretenders are more useful..." I didn't mean period, I meant comparatively to other times you'd use an SC pretender
I have personally only once ever taken a (dormant bless) SC pretender in an MP game (and I lost because I was playing TNN and had no magic diversity when late game rolled around, heh. On the other hand, that SC pretender is basically the entire reason I survived the early game against Niefelheim). Most of my MP pretenders are... blessers and rainbows :P I honestly hate SC pretenders that do not have healing or immortality, because without one of those I feel they are marginalized too easily.