Mage Pet Agro vs. Mele groupFollow

Hello,
The subject pretty much says it all. I started boxing a mage/bard duo hoping to have the mage pet tank. I currently box a bard/shaman with a tank merc and healer merc. I wanted to shoot for more dps with my new set-up, introducing a dps merc and a healer merc with mage pet tanking. Problem is, I can't get in mele range with my bard without getting snap agro. Even when the agro meter shows the mage pet with higher agro my only options are to dot. Is there any way the mage pet can sustain agro even when a player steps in mele range or is the mage pet's agro designed specifically for a ranged fight?

My mage's pet routinely gets up to 160% agro in melee range and my warrior has no problem keeping the mob's attention. That gives you some idea of how bad pets are holding agro when players are within melee range of the mob.

Some pets are great for this from a tank perspective because they can essentially be used as an agro pump for the tank. Since the pet can get higher agro without the mob turning on it, the tank can taunt and gain <pet agro +1>. Obviously, not so useful if you don't have an actual tank.

Also, pay attention to which type of pet you're using. Some mage pets (earth?) proc roots on the mobs they're fighting. This can be problematic for melee characters since root makes the mob always attack the closest character, not necessarily the one with the most agro. This is even worse with a merc tank, since NPCs seem to have greater melee ranges than PCs (cause they're not so great at distance management). I've noticed that if a mob is rooted, it will *always* attack any PC in melee range in preference to the merc tank. I'm assuming this is because the merc gets as close as he needs to be in melee, but that's farther away than the PCs have to be in order to actually hit the mob.

So don't use pets that root mobs if you want to have anyone else in melee.