Yes, Vlod is super tough, but I've beaten him several times with a couple of birds and mages....no bears. Ranged attacks and kiting is really the only way to beat him without dying 20 times and hoping that one of the mages survived his attacks.

My point was that bears couldn't do much against Aunt Emma (she was stationary so beckon never worked), and Duke didn't need bears because if you just stood by the statue, Thralls never spawned, so no need for crowd control there either. Perhaps they were valuable for Grobble, but he was easy enough and didn't hit hard enough to warrant a full-on tank.

In the end, melee attacks on Fang bosses were just inferior to ranged attacks like bows/talons/wands/staffs. The biggest benefit to having a bear in the group is crowd control and tanking, but when crowd control has little value for the bosses and with Vlod insta-killing half the group, it didn't matter too much if the bear withstood the first attack when all the mages were dead.

But, as I said, bears were wonderful for mob control and clean up, just as it was in Nuri's (for most maps) and the Sewers.

I was actually defending bears (kiitz said that they weren't necessary). But, I while I pointed out that they provided value in Fang for the mobs, they just didn't fare so well with the bosses because of their attack range and low hit percent.