Current Beorning Problems

[MrCuddleBear]

I wanted to start off by saying I'm a veteran beorning player on live. I wanted to at least help the developers be aware of some of the challenges the class is working with at the moment. I think it would be at their discretion to address some of them in a way that would resolve the underlying issues.

Tank line problems (blue)
1.) Beornings have low evade block and parry ratings both partially and potentially that many other classes with tank roles do not suffer from.
2.) Beornings don't have an ability to block, only evade and parry ratings, if the developers find a way to balance evade/parry out instead of adding block thats fine too but the avoidance issue I think is one of the flaws of the blue line.
3.) Beorning defensive skills rely on slight debuffs that are in-effective in their nature
4.) Their taunts are of short range in general, you have an AoE roar which is fine, sacrificing your single target roar taunt. Relentless maul taunting works fine, it should have a boosted range as it's very difficult to grab aggro when you're unmovable swiping the air as enemies run around to all your party members. The short range melee that targets enemies in front is also sort of bad. The AoE roar is the bread and butter, which has a 20 second cool down, which would be fine of the other taunts could pick up adds any where near effectively as the AoE roar does. In it's current state you pray your AoE roar is up when your group encounters a wave of enemies. Many bosses in the game have multiple waves in shorter than 20 second duration, which cause issues when beorning tanking.
5.) Beornings get 20% morale boost in bear form which is great, the problem is it's difficult in its current form to stay in bear form. I recommend changing bear form to a toggle of some sort and providing skill changes or stat changes based on the bear form toggle, similar to how wardens have stances. This allows the swap time problems to go away but again it's up to the developers.
6.) Single target taunt in blue line is non existant when you trait for AoE roar ( which is better but still a single target force taunt would be essential to tanking ).
7.) The hide line allows 65% mitigations to physical but only 55% to tactical through the use of skills.
8.) Beornings are lacking passively or potentially through skills and traits the ability to boost their avoidance ratings except through sprint based evade and bear form tactical mitigation rating which you lose when exiting bear form.


Damage Line (red)
1.) Beorning attacks feel sluggish in comparison to refined physical damage classes like the champion, burglar and similar, they generally have longer animation times such as bash for example.
2.) Beorning attack base damage is just too low in comparison to other dps classes, this should be increased or other boosts in bleeds or other wise should be encouraged
3.) Switching between forms is one of the biggest issues bears face, the time it takes to switch and the issues with wrath consumption being way too high per skill use makes using man form too often a problem. Switching is lowering the damage out put due to how often it we must do this in melee combat, again I recommend a simple toggle skill that gets particular buffs and allows us to stay in bear form while having other buffs in man form that are removed when moving to bear could be a possible solution or similar, up to the devs.
4.) Relentless maul if used when you have 20 wrath, will cancel the skill this should be addressed or re-designed to prevent consuming 20 wrath and falling out of the skill
5.) Red bears have boosted crit chance, which is good, however there are few or none innate offensive stat builders in the trait tree such as finesse, evade block or parry bypasses. We do currently have mitigation bypasses which is a perk of dpsing as a beorning.

Healing Line (yellow)
1.) Our healing requires switching, which creates down times or spikes in our healing that are very bad during certain parts of groups when healing is needed, when you switch to man form to gain wrath your healing output is abysmal, by the time you jump into bear form your team mates could be dead. This is often a difficult area to balance for novice beornings.
2.) Our healing is high single target and mediocre AoE, I would like a more consistent output of healing even if lowering the magnitude were required because a lot of instances requiring a good AoE healing output not single target. Currently on live I heal 20 - 25k heals per second to a 6 man group, and of that heals per second 10k is going to the main target which leaves low overall healing for the rest of the group making fights which involve high AoE damage nearly impossible to do on a beorning but easy to do on a minstrel.
3.) Switching between man and beorning during healing creates lag time that can be important to healing in a group setting
4.) Beornings lack a good rez, the one we currently have can bug out and hasn't been fixed. It's also difficult to cast it with a long induction in a group setting, it's also only 1 character that can be rezed with 50% morale and 40% power.
5.) The beorning doesn't get a large boost in healing output from the healing runes, this is a bug I believe from back in update 22


Non build specific recommendations or comments I'd like to make about the class
1.) We need more legendary legacy choices, what we have is very limited and now allowing us to think about what we want, we can build 1 legendary item for 2 or 3 builds and be fine because our legendary selection options are limited or poorly designed. I think this is a large area that could be improved upon for beornings
2.) Make bear form fun, some options could be more bear form cosmetics, emotes, colors, patterns, shapes, sizes, options
3.) No one currently uses 1 handers in bear form as it decreases the damage output, nor do bears have shields to tank with.
4.) Beornings could use more items that boost their stats such as foods, new grisly potions and others that effect wrath generation. I would love to see food that boosts wrath generation for example, could be part of the build in honey cakes who knows.
5.) Beorning primary problem is that it lacks a defined group role and many find it under whelming and not very fun end game.
6.) Beornings scaling at low levels appears over powered, giving the wrong impression end game ( under powered ) and many people don't make it to cap to really enjoy the experience


These are my on the surface concerns I've noticed while playing a beorning. Feel free to comment on your own below, more input never hurts.

[MsCuddleBear]

As a fellow veteran Beorning on live, I, too, have some inputs.

First and foremost, ./signed on the blue line aspect. Nothing triggers me more than seeing the bats in CoS able to block. I originally rolled my beorning because I wanted to tank and guardian wasnt appealing to me. But this line is lackluster and never used unless I'm locked on my guardian and need to tank a 3 man or something.

I'll skip dps because I hate dps, I didnt roll my bear expecting to dps well.

But as far as healing goes, I understand theres a lot of problems with healing, ie tactical relic not working on our carving, but theres just a few quality of life changes that ought to be made, nothing too crazy because our healing is actually in a pretty decent place. I did some parses with some kinnies who play minstrel, as far as ST goes, the difference was minimal, granted the mini always performed better ST, but theoretically a beorning could replace a minstrel as a main healer. Even on my guard, I have been in Abyss runs where the beorning and mini were close in numbers as far as the heals I received on my guard goes. Our Aoe heals however are far from mediocre, I'm constantly being asked to join groups in both PvP and PvE for aoe healing purposes. I think the only real changes that ought to be made to our heals is just a reduction to the animations/ introduce (or rework) a skill that clips animations similar to how SoS works well to clip animations on minstrel.

A fix to our rez is long overdue. SSG fixed relentless maul heals going through walls a few updates ago but they could fix our rez? Thats ridiculous.

Finally as a long time Casual and harcore RPer, can we please get a polar bear skin? Let me dye my hair white and become a polar bear please! You guys already have polar bears in the form of an LM pet and mobs in middle earth, why do we not have a polar bear skin for Beornings? If nothing else, SSG please add this and I will be a very happy beorning.

[gaara908776]

As a fellow veteran Beorning on live, I, too, have some inputs.

First and foremost, ./signed on the blue line aspect. Nothing triggers me more than seeing the bats in CoS able to block. I originally rolled my beorning because I wanted to tank and guardian wasnt appealing to me. But this line is lackluster and never used unless I'm locked on my guardian and need to tank a 3 man or something.

I'll skip dps because I hate dps, I didnt roll my bear expecting to dps well.

But as far as healing goes, I understand theres a lot of problems with healing, ie tactical relic not working on our carving, but theres just a few quality of life changes that ought to be made, nothing too crazy because our healing is actually in a pretty decent place. I did some parses with some kinnies who play minstrel, as far as ST goes, the difference was minimal, granted the mini always performed better ST, but theoretically a beorning could replace a minstrel as a main healer. Even on my guard, I have been in Abyss runs where the beorning and mini were close in numbers as far as the heals I received on my guard goes. Our Aoe heals however are far from mediocre, I'm constantly being asked to join groups in both PvP and PvE for aoe healing purposes. I think the only real changes that ought to be made to our heals is just a reduction to the animations/ introduce (or rework) a skill that clips animations similar to how SoS works well to clip animations on minstrel.

A fix to our rez is long overdue. SSG fixed relentless maul heals going through walls a few updates ago but they could fix our rez? Thats ridiculous.

Finally as a long time Casual and harcore RPer, can we please get a polar bear skin? Let me dye my hair white and become a polar bear please! You guys already have polar bears in the form of an LM pet and mobs in middle earth, why do we not have a polar bear skin for Beornings? If nothing else, SSG please add this and I will be a very happy beorning.

Lol did you just +1 your own post? Kinda detracts from the validity of your previous post.

[valkrye]

Lol did you just +1 your own post? Kinda detracts from the validity of your previous post.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure they waited 8 years to +1 a post that was specifically about Beornings, and then say the exact opposite of what their first post said.

OP said "Our healing is high single target and mediocre AoE"
2nd post said "Our Aoe heals however are far from mediocre"

But you didn't read the posts, you were just like "hurr the names are similar, must be same person!"

[MsCuddleBear]

Lol did you just +1 your own post? Kinda detracts from the validity of your previous post.

We are different people : )

[Fraushgrish2]

I also released a series of changes that would be nice to implement right here --> https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthr...alance-(maybe)

[Seschat]

Finally as a long time Casual and harcore RPer, can we please get a polar bear skin? Let me dye my hair white and become a polar bear please! You guys already have polar bears in the form of an LM pet and mobs in middle earth, why do we not have a polar bear skin for Beornings? If nothing else, SSG please add this and I will be a very happy beorning.

+1 on the white bear form, but I need dark hair for human to better fit in with my adopted Lossoth brethren. (And someone has already made the "polar opposites" pun about my preferences. )