Why Play In Human Form Now?

[Beyorn]

If this has been asked I'm sorry but I dont see a point anymore. Seems like one heal is in human form only but that is it. Am I missing something?

[Beyorn]

As soon as I posted I found a thread about it ;P. Sorry for posting!

[Pavlin]

Am I missing something?

Yes you do. You miss to say in which tree.

[camenecium]

As soon as I posted I found a thread about it ;P. Sorry for posting!

No need to be sorry; it's a question that will be on many people's minds, and the answer may change again after Vastin's second pass. Since people may find this thread via searching, you might want to cross-link to the post(s) in question, and it might be worth elaborating a little regardless. I'm not a Beorning expert, but here are some of the reasons I've seen so far:

• You can still build wrath faster in man-form.
• There are some combat effects like Expose that are only available in man-form.
• You cannot interact with some objects in bear-form.
• In early Red Line, you have to assume man-form for heals.
• Man-form might have higher DPS in Yellow Line. (I haven't confirmed this.)
• At least so far, you can't ride a war-horse in bear-form.

Regarding upcoming changes, keep this comment from Vastin in mind:

[...] I do want wrath to remain a real consideration when you're trying to decide how to run your rotations, and when/how often you break out into man-form for faster generation, or whether you're willing to suck it up and stick with thrash and other bear form generation mechanisms like CotW - but right now you mostly just don't care very much, and that's not quite where I want it.

[Casmond]

If this has been asked I'm sorry but I dont see a point anymore. Seems like one heal is in human form only but that is it. Am I missing something?

Red tree, I've been experimenting on this very issue. It turns out your dps will be better if you work man form into your rotation. Yes, there is a self-heal in man form, but Recuperate (which you can grab from Blue tree) is a little better than it used to be prior to the update (accidentaly, or on purpose? Who knows?). That being said, you are going to run out of skills in Bear Form pretty quickly due to the decreased animations and increased cooldowns (and the fact that while wrath will build from selective Bear Form skills, it isn't fast enough to give you the optimum dps).

So, I've come to the conclusion that timing the Execute skill to coincide with a very quick trip to Man Form seems like the way to go. That's going to take whatever Wrath you have left and empty it, so time the skin change to occur after it's use. Man form Icon (hotkey), Expose...Biting Edge (for another bleed), Armor Crush/ Slam (for the offensive/defensive buffs if you grabbed those from Blue Tree)...self-heal if you need it...and then Thrash on a second hotkey (which has no real animation, no induction, and no real cooldown). You can do all of that in a matter of seconds, and your wrath will be built up again and ready to go.

Some of you might say using Execute as you are running out of wrath is wasting the skill since it will be more potent with full wrath. Bah...it really isn't hitting that hard with full wrath. Relentless Maul is hitting like a truck (40k to 50k hits one after another), Vicious Claws is awesome (70k hits now and then), Bash (averaging about 20k pulses), Even your auto attacks are going to be about the second or third most damage in any prolonged fight. A one minute fight is going to get you over 250k damage just from auto attack (which I believe shows up as Melee on CombatAnalysis).

I don't have a whole lot of Mastery on this bear. I think about 150k buffed. What I do have is capped critical rating (which IMO, is a must if you like to do damage as a Red Tree bear). Your wrath is high more often now. So, it makes sense to take advantage of the critical/devastating hits. It makes a HUGE difference. I'm averaging about 36% critical hits on level in prolonged fights.

[camenecium]

Some of you might say using Execute as you are running out of wrath is wasting the skill since it will be more potent with full wrath. Bah...it really isn't hitting that hard with full wrath. Relentless Maul is hitting like a truck (40k to 50k hits one after another), Vicious Claws is awesome (70k hits now and then), Bash (averaging about 20k pulses), Even your auto attacks are going to be about the second or third most damage in any prolonged fight. A one minute fight is going to get you over 250k damage just from auto attack (which I believe shows up as Melee on CombatAnalysis).

Do those numbers assume Expose on the target(s)? So far I've treated Vicious Claws as an Interrupt and hold it until needed, but that damage is pretty significant even with the longer cooldown.

[Casmond]

Do those numbers assume Expose on the target(s)? So far I've treated Vicious Claws as an Interrupt and hold it until needed, but that damage is pretty significant even with the longer cooldown.

Expose is only -15% on mitigations, so it's not really as material to the high Vicious claws output as it used to be at -40%. I do put Expose up, though, whenever dropping into man form (mostly out of habit). As far as using the Vicious Claws skill as an interrupt only....I think that wastes it a bit. If you obtained armor crush from blue tree, you have a second interrupt in bear form (which is where you're going to be most of the time now).

So, to answer your question...I use Expose when I can, but I don't rely on it for high dps. I'm, more, relying on critical rating which gets bumped up 15% with full wrath. Essentially, a lot of the time you are going to be sitting on 40% critical rating. 4 out of 10 hits critting with the higher dps across the board is going to do some damage.

I'm pretty moderately geared right now (waiting on some decent essences like everyone else) and I'm parsing out low to mid 20k's dps on bosses.

[Estelrandir]

If this has been asked I'm sorry but I dont see a point anymore. Seems like one heal is in human form only but that is it. Am I missing something?

Well, there are two heals in human form.

I will answer your question separately for each line:

Yellow: in bear form you can burn your wrath quite quickly (10/20/20 wrath costs on heals + 10/10 on support skills), so you go back to the human form to regain the wrath. And slash makes +15% outgoing heal. It might seems useless currently with broken Abyss set, where you can keep the highest tier of encouraging roar on the whole group. The situation will be different once fixed.


Blue: most likely no reason. But let´s be honest, who wants to tank in human form?


Red: for higher dps. Still searching for the best rotation, but I´m of the opinion that keeping 60-100 wrath and dance between human and bear form is the way to go. Thus I am not friend of execute burning all wrath. Although it deals (with my equipment+full wrath) ca 100k damage while other skills can crit around 40-60k, but the most damage comes from dots, where crit chance is more important to me than one harder hitting skill.

[ColMcStacky]

I honestly am fine with bearly using man-form on my bear (ok, I will see myself out...). I mean that is the whole gimmick of the class, using bear-form, so I'd rather spend more time as a bear than as a man while playing my Beorning.

Basically what Estelrandir said is mostly right.

Well, there are two heals in human form.

I will answer your question separately for each line:

Yellow: in bear form you can burn your wrath quite quickly (10/20/20 wrath costs on heals + 10/10 on support skills), so you go back to the human form to regain the wrath. And slash makes +15% outgoing heal. It might seems useless currently with broken Abyss set, where you can keep the highest tier of encouraging roar on the whole group. The situation will be different once fixed.


Blue: most likely no reason. But let´s be honest, who wants to tank in human form?


Red: for higher dps. Still searching for the best rotation, but I´m of the opinion that keeping 60-100 wrath and dance between human and bear form is the way to go. Thus I am not friend of execute burning all wrath. Although it deals (with my equipment+full wrath) ca 100k damage while other skills can crit around 40-60k, but the most damage comes from dots, where crit chance is more important to me than one harder hitting skill.

I just want to point out that I find in blue-line, if you stance dance back and forth, using Hearten and Recuperate off cooldown, you can get upwards of 7k HPS on yourself while tanking. Of course this means your max morale and armour are constantly fluctuating, but if a healer has gone down for example, as long as you aren't dealing with 1shot mechanics, sacrificing ~6% phys mit/~1% tact mit and +20% max morale for 2-3s every 15s is more than a fair tradeoff when trying to self-sustain.

Other than that, the only time I drop into man-form while tanking is when I get unlucky procs on the Guarded Attack phys mit buff.