U23.2 Beorning Class Update Feedback

[Legondil96]

Am i the only one actualy happy with the update (except the hearten cool down)

[Arabani]

I am very happy with the update: I love heavy armored classes, and I usually play a heavy armored healer (cleric in D&D, cleric in EQ1, Inquisitor in EQ2, Paladin in WoW, Commando in SWTOR and so on). I am sort of forced to play Mistrel now, because Captain Healer is broken since HD, - the class I do not really like; so I defenitelly look for the opportunity to see the new Beorning. I just wish there were more heals in Human form and the class were able to use swords (and the other beornings actually use swords in the Prologue).

Speaking frankly, I believe that Yellow line should be "Human Form" healing line, Blue -Bear Form tanking line, and Red is something in betwwen: most time you spend in human form and use Bear form as a damage burst cool down (let's say 30 seconds duration buff which transforms you and your skills in to bear-themed abilities with increased damage and/or additional effects on 3 minute cooldown). Constantly switching between Bear and Man form is not fun. Moreover the transition is clunky, animation is long, there are lags and other factors. All them together make Beorning very dangerous to play: not once I was a second late to heal someone or use a defensive ability because of form switching issue. So, please, leave Bear form to RP, and just make it like a permanent stance mechanic wise.

[Oelle]

On closer inspection it appears that there are a few typos on these patch notes. Here, I'll correct them to what they should have said:

• General Changes:
  
  • Normalized All Beorning skills to standardized progressions.
  • Legendary weapon legacies given greater magnitude to ensure Beorning scales at the same pace as other classes.
  • Now learn 'Wanderlust' - the ability to use their bear form for out of combat travel (that functions in instances) - at level 20. Essentially providing a Bear form variant of forced march.
  • Ferocious Roar, Hearten and Bash animations have been halved in duration.
  • You can now select pure white and copper hair options for your Beorning with matching Bear form fur colours.
  
  
• The Hide Changes:
  
  • When traiting blue the Beornings physical and tactical mitigations are increased by 8%.
  • Guarded attack has been removed and the "Guarded" buff reworked. Now the Beorning receives a 3% increase to physical and tactical mitigations for every 20 wrath.
  • The physical and tactical mitigation traits have been replaced. The tactical Mitigation trait has been changed to be a critical defence bonus of up to 10%. The physical mitigation trait is now an incoming healing % boost of up to 10%.
  • Counter-attack now hits AoE, is always available and has a 3 second cooldown. Wrath generation is reduced to 5.
  • Counter has been removed. Now each time a Beorning is hit they gain a stack of rage. Each stack of rage increases the damage of counter-attack by 5%. Rage can stack up to 15 times. At 15 stacks the damage bonus is set to 100% rather than 75%.
  • Claw Swipe has received a significant increase to damage.
  • Worthy Adversary now applies the armour and morale bonus to both forms. Armour bonus has been reduced to 20%.
  • The 5th level of the trait 'Opposing presence' no longer adds a forced taunt or increases the cooldown. The trait now caps out at a 20% increase to Biting Edge damage.
  • Relentless Maul no longer acts as a forced taunt with the Menacing Assault set bonus, instead the skill gains a threat increase similar to that of a Guardians Warchant (this threat bonus is distributed over the duration of the skill rather than once per pulse).
  • The trait 'Quick Recovery' now increases the initial heal by 150% at rank 1 and by 300% at rank 2. It retains the reduction to the HoT.
  • 'Defensively Minded' has been reworked. It no longer gives guarded stacks on parries/evades, instead it gives a -10% incoming damage bonus to Bear form.
  • 'Assertive Roar' now applies a morale bubble rather than increasing health.
  • 'Thunderous Roar' is now it's own skill rather than replacing 'Vigilant Roar'.
  • New Legacy: '+ Incoming Healing Rating' has been added to the Beornings mainhand weapon.
  • New Legacy: 'Counter-attack Critical Magnitude' has been added to the Beornings mainhand weapon.
  
  
• The Roar Changes:
  
  • Yellow line 'In the Face Of' trait replaced with 'Overbearing'. This trait now grants a separate combat rez skill with a shorter induction, that does not replace the peaceful version of Bear Up.
  • Rez should now work consistently in combat.
  • Shake Free bubble now provides 10% morale bubble (15% at rank 2).
  • The ferocious roar bug has been fixed and the trait 'Desperate Shouts' once again reduces the wrath cost of the next heal to 0.
  • 'Nature's Bond' has been reworked. The Beorning can now place a honeycomb on the field which grants a +40% incoming healing buff to all allies within a 10m radius. Cooldown increased to 3 minutes.
  • Set Bonus: 'Encouraging Roar's HoT applies to your entire fellowship' has been removed.
  • New skill: 'Honeyed Words'. Only available to yellow in man form, this skill places a reasonable HoT on a target for 16s. 1s induction, 4s cooldown, generates 10 wrath and is castable on the move.
  • 'Natures Mend' has been reworked. The heal magnitude has been increased by 50% and the cooldown increased to 15s.
  • New Legacy: 'Natures Mend Heal Strength' has been added to the Beornings mainhand weapon.
  • New Legacy: 'Honeyed Words Heal Strength' has been added to the Beornings mainhand weapon.
  
  
• The Claw Changes:
  
  • Composure cooldown increased (14->28).
  • Execute is now granted baseline to red Beornings. The talents to improve execute remain.
  • Moment of Opportunity has been increased to offer a 25% chance of a free execute.
  • Expose no longer gives the Beorning a mitigations bypass. Instead it now grants a 80% increase to critical magnitude and a 30% increase to devastate magnitude when used in man form. This becomes 40% and 15% in Bear form. Duration increased to 20 seconds.
  • 'Any Advantage' now gives a +10% incoming physical damage debuff to the target alongside the heal at rank 3.
  • 'Sharpened Claws' redline set bonus has been revamped. Now Ferocious Roar applies the 'Berserk' buff to the Beorning for 10 seconds. Whilst under the effects of the 'Berserk' buff any critical/devastating hits a Beorning scores on an enemy will put a non-stacking moderate bleed on that target.
  • New skill: 'Go for the Throat!'. Available to bear form only, 4s cooldown, generates 5 wrath and makes the next skill critically hit as well as doing a moderate amount of damage.

I'd like some changes that make manform viable in all three lines.
Your new blueline would have manform without any forcetaunt at all and kinda forces beorning tanks to always stay at maximum wrath.
Once there is enough wrath to switch to bear, any tanking bear would have to be bear to forcetaunt and likely stay in bear as manform doesnt have any viable skills to use for tanking. Counterattack being always available doesnt make sense. It should be behind getting hit or anything, but the "Counter" buff should just be passive. With everything from Counter being passive, a part of the lack of avoidance is gone, too. Your change in defensely minded can easily make the beornings only panicskill quite ultimately strong aka no damage taken anymore. Not that I'd have a big issue with being immune to damage with my only panic skill with such a big cooldown that cant anymore be brought down via legacies (need a fix here for ILI).

I think, it would be funny to get a morale bubble everytime you go over-wrath. So if you are at 100 wrath and use a skill for 5 wrath, you get a 3-5% maxmorale bubble. If you use a skill for 10% wrath, you get a 6-10% morale bubble. 15 wrath -> 10-15%. These bubbles overwrite each other and decay within 2-3 seconds. That would give manform a decent advantage to be viable, too. Manform needs anything. Its just unfair if all viable skills are in bearform. Otherwise, bearform could just as well be the permanent form as soon as you choose blueline.

You ask for 4 more mainhand legacies, yet mainhand AND class item have much less legacies than all the other classes. I think they should give beornings the same number of legacies like any other class and shared across the ILI (same number for both). And while we are at legacies, the reduced CD for the blue panic skill must be part of the ILI legacy, too.

[Joedangod]

I'd like some changes that make manform viable in all three lines.
Your new blueline would have manform without any forcetaunt at all and kinda forces beorning tanks to always stay at maximum wrath.
Once there is enough wrath to switch to bear, any tanking bear would have to be bear to forcetaunt and likely stay in bear as manform doesnt have any viable skills to use for tanking. Counterattack being always available doesnt make sense. It should be behind getting hit or anything, but the "Counter" buff should just be passive. With everything from Counter being passive, a part of the lack of avoidance is gone, too. Your change in defensely minded can easily make the beornings only panicskill quite ultimately strong aka no damage taken anymore. Not that I'd have a big issue with being immune to damage with my only panic skill with such a big cooldown that cant anymore be brought down via legacies (need a fix here for ILI).

I think, it would be funny to get a morale bubble everytime you go over-wrath. So if you are at 100 wrath and use a skill for 5 wrath, you get a 3-5% maxmorale bubble. If you use a skill for 10% wrath, you get a 6-10% morale bubble. 15 wrath -> 10-15%. These bubbles overwrite each other and decay within 2-3 seconds. That would give manform a decent advantage to be viable, too. Manform needs anything. Its just unfair if all viable skills are in bearform. Otherwise, bearform could just as well be the permanent form as soon as you choose blueline.

Making bear form the primary form for blue was the plan. Due to the way I suggested passive mitigations work man form would be too strong defensively, with a forced taunt you'd be able to happily sit in man form all day long and wouldn't be required to touch bear form at all. This way man form is primarily a way of regaining your wrath pool in the more quiet moments of the fight so you can return to peak defensiveness in bear form. I also kinda wanted to massively reduce forced taunt reliance anyway, I realise now that I forgot to extend the cooldown on thunderous roar in those notes. Regardless, the aim for those blue line changes were to promote Bear form as being the primary form with man form attempting to complement it rather than be equal with it. I'm also trying to promote the traitline differences, i.e. Blue is mostly a bear, red is a fairly even mix and yellow is mostly human. I'd love to expand on those mechanics more but honestly that's well beyond the scope of anything SSG will do. The changes I wrote are kinda the minimum that could be done to make Beornings competitive and fair from my perspective.

It's worth noting that a big part of what I tried to do with those changes was to ensure that Beornings maintained some weaknesses. That's why I didn't add block or heavy armour to it and that's why I wanted to keep man form weak in places since wrath management in man form is trivial.

You ask for 4 more mainhand legacies, yet mainhand AND class item have much less legacies than all the other classes. I think they should give beornings the same number of legacies like any other class and shared across the ILI (same number for both). And while we are at legacies, the reduced CD for the blue panic skill must be part of the ILI legacy, too.

They can't. Beornings have fewer skills than most other classes and even if they did have more skills there isn't much point adding more legacies. Many classes in this game have just enough useful legacies to fill out the LI's they use and the rest are useless. This isn't really a class problem, it's more of an "LI's are a terrible system that should never have been extended by imbument" problem.



*Updated the 'patch notes' with the forced taunt cd increase and clarified the defensively minded bonus. Also set Beornings to be agility. It's not an ideal fix but it's still better than being heavy armour.

[Aelbryht]

Instead of just asking for feedback on what you've changed could a blue name perhaps pop in to properly outline what you're still planning to do with the class? Otherwise we're just racking up page after page of great ideas again that are never actually going to be implemented. I mean, are shortened animations for skills like Ferocious Roar, Hearten/Composure and Skin Change actually a realistic request for example? Will the rework carry on until all the bugs mentioned in Joedangod's post are dealt with?

[Casmond]

I think i speak for most people here when i say:



3. Buff DPS in red SIGNIFICANTLY and nerf composure

As someone who plays Red Tree almost exclusively (I purchased the class for the novelty and the fun), I would agree with this, BUT ONLY IF damage is increased significantly. Also, somewhere lost in the shuffle is the RECUPERATE (bear heal) skill. A little over 1000 morale with 6 pulses of a similar output is rather weak based on the morale totals bears are carrying around these days.

So, if dps is buffed significantly, I can live with a longer cooldown on Composure, especially if there is a viable/useful self-heal in bear form.

I've noticed a lot of comments that start with "I only play Yellow Tree, so don't nerf Hearten, but I don't play Red Tree, so nerf those guys over there."

[Timberfox]

So, you nerf Hearten with a 30 sec cooldown. I do not see any new or updated methods of generating Wrath so we can stay in Bear form. Okay. I won't complain I will watch and wait. And if I STILL can not play the character/class I thought I paid for, I will unsubscribe because I am tired of waiting. It has been 4 years....FOUR YEARS!!! LOTRO is not the only game out there, and if you can't fix one class to make it playabe, viable and competitive with the other classes, in FOUR YEARS, then maybe I am wasting my money here.

And if you think a new player is going to put up with this madness for 75 levels to get to run around in bear form, you are smoking Wakky Tobakky.

[Arabani]

Yes, I actually wonder why level 75 for a pure cosmetic thing?

[Casmond]

BTW, has anyone considered that a majority of the Heavy Armor items are saturated with power and regen power stats (even a lot of the signature pieces)?

[Joedangod]

BTW, has anyone considered that a majority of the Heavy Armor items are saturated with power and regen power stats (even a lot of the signature pieces)?

Yeah, switching to Heavy armour is a bad change. Hopefully they undo it and stick to swapping Beornings to agility. The stat derivations are already mostly in place (need to disable Might) so it should just be a matter of switching the class specific gear over.

[Legondil96]

Yes, I actually wonder why level 75 for a pure cosmetic thing?

its a speed boost big difference

[Joedangod]

its a speed boost big difference

[Rebel230]

What was done to help the class fill a dps role in a group? I like the shape change of the class and I don't want to heal. In the movie the Beorning dropped off an eagle, changed shape while falling into a HUGE bear and was attacking groups of mobs ripping them to pieces. Where is that? The class is not a great or even really good dps class and has 1 cone aoe skill. So much potential so poorly executed.

[Rahvanox]

All things considered, I really don't have any problems with the changes you have made for this update. Definitely an improvement. 1 request I will make is to lower the required level for the new run speed skill. I believe 50 is a great level for it. Don't make it too low though. Just enough for the people who play Beornings, like myself, to take time to grow with the content. A character rocketing around lower level areas is not exactly fair to the other classes. Level 50 is the end of the main introduction of the game; a good graduation present if you ask me. Do NOT increase the speed past 40% either. No class should have a reason to quit using mounts. Period. Some people have suggested on this thread to increase it to match a mount speed. Bad idea in my opinion.

My 1 impossible (unfortunately lore-breaking) wish: Give us bear emotes or let us do some preexisting emotes in bear form. Emotes can't be performed visually in combat anyway so it wouldn't be too disruptive and seriously, just imagine how much fun that would be. /groundroll /firebreath /snowwizard /faint /liedown and OMG dance emotes! You could literally recycle the PVMP warg animations for dance emotes exactly for bears. Or if you wanna go crazy with it, something like this: (I did not make this video but I'm definitely a fan) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq9gy6MFrl4

My Beorning experience: I have a cap level raid-ready bear on Landroval and a level 38 bear on Ithil.

[ENDrain]

Update 23.2 Bullroarer Release Notes
Classes:

• Beorning - Now earn the ability to wear Heavy armor as of level 15.
• Beorning - Old Beorning armor sets have been converted to heavy armor statistically. (all appearances unchanged).
• Beorning - Level 116-120 Beorning armor has been converted to heavy, most lower level Beorning specific armor is otherwise unchanged.

It's good to see that LotRO team stays true to themselves. Amongst all possible options, they always choose the most wrong one.

NEVER listen to community. ALWAYS apply quickest solution.

* * *

Or why don't you just give them heavy Armour instead? Since you did all that work during U23 to make might a potent main stat for them.

That is also a definite possibility. Probably a better one frankly as it would require fewer changes overall and existing Beornings could just transition over to the new armor sets gradually.

This is disgusting. They aren't even pretending. They just don't want to work and are rather straightforward about it.

I've got a question: if you don't want to work on your game so much, why won't you just shut it down and find a new job you are passionate about?

And PLS do not change us to an agi class. Give us heavy armor. That would be the best choice.

Personally, I wouldn't be a big fan of heavy armour for Beornings since I don't really think it fits their fantasy.

1. I am very much on board with changing Beorning's armor type to Heavy. The very same problem happened with Wardens, right?

And Beornings should not get heavy armour. The have to be agile and movable in the woods and forests of middle erath. They would never wear chain armour I think.

I know it's a convenience thing, but I don't want to have heavy armour or agility medium armour. <...> Might and medium armour makes sense. Just make more of it.

Sound like a good idea to let it might but in heavy armour, but make that new beorning sets look less metalic than the other class, after all they have ticker skin so will not need huge armour plates. I think that beorning deserve unique looking armour sets inspired on their class personality & needs as all other classes do.

Can we make this guy a developer?

In general I’d consider it to be a shame if you went down the path of giving Beornings block and heavy armour.

I have to say that swapping to heavy armour somehow doesn't seem right for the class...yes we're in a bad spot with the combo of medium armour and no blocking but surely there are other ways to make up for that?

5 of these 9 (excluding Vastin's) comments are contra-heavy armour. The people have spoken. The SSG haven't listened. Shocker.

[Happychappy]

Also, why does every other Heavy armour class get Heavy armour at level 1, yet the Beorning gets it at 15?. What are pre 15 Beornings to use, medium agility based armour?

I would just scrap preview 1 and go straight to preview 2 and work on speeding animation times up first. It would make a far bigger impact for the Beornings.

[Casmond]

Yeah, switching to Heavy armour is a bad change. Hopefully they undo it and stick to swapping Beornings to agility. The stat derivations are already mostly in place (need to disable Might) so it should just be a matter of switching the class specific gear over.

Heavy armor could work. But, you have to get something from the power stats. Perhaps increased Wrath regeneration, or critical rating, or a defensive stat. They nerfed fate just a little while ago, and you don't get as much critical rating out of it if I recall correctly. That, kind of made the race trait Feral Presence a bit of a joke since we already don't require power regeneration (which is one of the primary benefits of Fate).

[Joedangod]

Heavy armor could work.

I mostly meant it was a bad idea since suddenly it gives the most durable healer in the game 10% more mitigations. It's a flat buff to the class that we shouldn't be getting. Mitigations are definitely a problem in blue but they are perfectly capable of slapping a decent bonus to mitigations for speccing that line in the first place.

[Happychappy]

Why not just make medium armour give both Agility and might? remove the physical mastery in might from Wardens and Physical mastery in agility from Beornings? Might and agility would only give a small amount of either block and parry or critical and evade extra then, not much to worry about tbh.

[Joedangod]

Why not just make medium armour give both Agility and might? remove the physical mastery in might from Wardens and Physical mastery in agility from Beornings? Might and agility would only give a small amount of either block and parry or critical and evade extra then, not much to worry about tbh.

Honestly might as well just make Beornings agility mainstat. Stat derivations are mostly there already. Just ends up being a small change that solves the itemisation issue without screwing with overall balance.

[Happychappy]

Honestly might as well just make Beornings agility mainstat. Stat derivations are mostly there already. Just ends up being a small change that solves the itemisation issue without screwing with overall balance.

Ok. Was just trying to keep might for some that feel might to be more fitting. But agility is fine.

[Joedangod]

Ok. Was just trying to keep might for some that feel might to be more fitting. But agility is fine.

I mean we also feel that medium armour is more fitting than heavy. Either way we lose a bit of flavour here, might as well pick the option that's closest to what we have now.

[Zvim666]

A guardian could probably do the same but with more dps.

Not at level 50. Guards benefit from insanely good imbued legacies. It is one of the major flaws of the Beorning class.

[Zvim666]

I think the changes made to Guardian red line were good changes, it significantly increased Guardian damage output and made it far more enjoyable to do landscaping or solo instances without the Guardian clogging main DPS roles for larger groups/raids, I think that is a good blueprint for looking at the Beorning.

The biggest gameplay problem for Beorning imo is shapeshifting, the animation is way too long and there is no need for the cooldown on it because it is resource based, it makes the gameplay feel clunky. Another big problem with shapeshifting is you basically lose access to half your character depending on which form you are in, I think only Runekeeper has this type of lockout but Runekeeper can switch between dps and healing where Beorning get locked out of half of the one role. This is a big issue for Beorning for Blue Beorning who lose a significant amount of survivability when having to switch to human form mid fight.

Legendary Legacies are also really bad and need addressing. There is a lack of cumulative bonuses, most are pretty low uninspiring static bonuses to a specific ability. For the guardian you have more impactful synergistic cumulative bonuses, say for example you use a response skill like Whirling Retaliation you get the damage bonus from Reactive Parry legacy plus from the weapon you get Area Effect Skill Damage and Whirling Retaliation Damage. Non-area effect abilities like Brutal Assault are impacted by Brutal Assault Damage, Guardian Bleed Damage and Bleed Critical Damage. You can even do decent damage with Shield Smash given it is impacted by Area Effect Damage, Shield Smash Damage and Shield Damage.

These are not only impactful, but provide the player with a large number of options for building legendary items to suit a particular play style or skill rotation. I have 8 imbued LIs on my guardian because there are an abundance of good choices. i have 3 on my Beorning, 1x 2h weapon, 1x 1h weapon and 1 carving and the options are pretty much terrible across the board. Poor legacies severely impact what you can tweak to make the class enjoyable to play. You can just overtune the base damage values to compensate and leave the legacies bland but it leaves no room for any meaningful character optimisation.

I think SSG is shooting themselves in the foot trying to squeeze in class updates in the same updates as major content patches. I honestly would rather you leave Beorning alone for sometime later than ham-fist the type of changes that are being shown, at least there would be the delusion that you might do it properly sometime later. You should consider doing minor class updates between major content updates so you can just focus on doing the character updates properly, because I think the vast majority of class updates have been rushed and botched, the Guardian is probably the only one where I think a good job was done and you basically ignored blue and yellow due to time/resource constraints. The classes aren't getting the quality of attention they need or deserve imo. I think my LM for solo is worse than before the "improvements" because I can't reliably upgrade the dots because you put it behind a slow casting long cooldown ability that nobody wants to cast. I just stopped playing my LM, i can easily do content thanks to the pets but it plays horribly. I am getting the feeling the Beorning is going to join the scrapheap after this update.

Do it properly or do not do it at all.

[Casmond]

Why not just make medium armour give both Agility and might? remove the physical mastery in might from Wardens and Physical mastery in agility from Beornings? Might and agility would only give a small amount of either block and parry or critical and evade extra then, not much to worry about tbh.

Unfortunately, you can't make changes like that because people are already geared throughout the game. Some have spent "real money" on stat tomes to gain the benefit of mastery from 18 tiers of agility. Taking away stats is a very tricky business. I had a warden based fully on might and then they nerfed the ever living #### out of the might stat a few years ago. It was capped at the time so I lost, basically, all my gear, and the nice bracelet you got from Osgiliath quests.

It seems the Heavy Armor approach for Bears is the most fluid and viable. It does give an unfair advantage to the Yellow Tree Bear concerning toughness, which will be compensated in some way (which is likely a concern of those that play Yellow Tree exclusively).