So, the Plated Behemoth is a creature that’s been in the game since the start. It runs on the bear animation skeleton (the same way murellows and arctodi do), and thus we really wouldn’t need to adjust anything to add it to the roster of pets available to Rangers.
Bears are tank pets. Everybody who plays a ranger knows this, and it’s the reason why “bearbow” is a setup that garnered a lot of popularity early on and is still sometimes used. The big issue with this setup is that bears have a lot of trouble holding aggro, particularly against groups of mobs, and it’s especially egregious against other players, where you need to use “Protect Me!” to benefit from their large health and toughness pools at all. Even drakes get largely ignored by enemy players in any sort of pvp, and they have decent AoE capability.
The addition of a taunt would definitely help to alleviate this problem. It wouldn’t cost much in the way of additional resources to add in, would create another viable alternative in pvp (where, for ranger pets, Control is currently king), and people frankly get excited about new pet types if they play a ranger. Even better, in some of the demo videos we’ve seen for HoT, We’ve seen Plated Behemoths in the Verdant Brink, suggesting that there’s a bunch out there as well, making this an excellent opportunity for them to become tamable.
Thoughts? If this was a pet that was available, I’d most certainly run it.
