Beorning feedback

[juiceyhammo]

- Beorning U19 Beta feedback-

While it's been great to see an obvious attempt to improve hunters and burglars, I can't help feeling like beornings are being left behind as the forgotten class. I enjoy playing my bear a lot, despite it's bugs and general mediocrity, but there are some issues which I think have been ignored for too long, and I'd really like to see some effort in correcting them, perhaps in beta 3 or 4.

- 'Tactical Heal Rating' on a beorning carving does not have any effect on heals. This is instead dependent on main hand weapon damage, which makes no sense, and makes duel wielding second best by a mile.

- Interupt skill 'Vicious Claws' is NOT instant, and can take seconds to go off'

- The in-combat res is (still) bugged. 'Bear Up' will often give an error and will not res.

- Relentless Maul cuts short if you are fairly low on wrath, when it shouldn't.

-Beorning tanking needs a workover (Starting with being able to block, if a warg can block with it's teeth, then so can a bear!)

- Despite being listed as a 'dps class', beorning is very average in the dps ranks, and has no real specialization. This is no thanks beorn being made a 'might-medium armour' class, as essences are wasted on crit rating, where other agility classes gain crit from raw agility and beorning cannot therefore gain as much mastery as other 'dps' classes. The point is, beorning needsa general increase in dps capability, and an increase to max wrath too. Adding a minor bleed to bear form skills such as 'thrash' would not just be realistic, but would help a little to improve where beorns are lacking.

- I might be wrong, but the current 4 piece Pelennor set that reduces attack duration according to wrath has very little/no use to a beorning. It would be nice to see this changed to something more useful, perhaps +% bear form damage/bear form critical damage.

- Beorning generally feels clunky - from the animations of ferocious roar, hearten, etc. to switching from bear to man form. Animations need to be cut shorter, as well as a decrease in the time it takes to jump between man and bear form.

I could name a dozen more bugs/issues the beorning faces, and in honesty it still feels like an unfinished project, but seeing as the devs are listening to the hunters and burglars, it might just be worth mentioning that the beorn is still a class struggling LOTRO, and the fixing the issues listed above might just be a good start.

Fellow beorns feel free to add to this list, or correct me if I made a mistake anywhere. Most importantly speak up if you want beorning to change, it's the only way we'll get it.

[Joedangod]

I'll throw the good ol' Beorning bug list in here. Whilst I wish these were fixed the class probably needs a fairly large overhaul to solve it's plethora of problems. One of the base issues is that man form just isn't good enough, you spend half your time in this form yet it remains extremely weak. Whilst bear form seems relatively adequate in each role you are only in this form for a very limited time, whilst I like the whole "stance dancing" kind of thing it is just ridiculous if the only two stances are "adequate" and "sub-par". Neither bear form nor man form are even close to being capable of standing on their own, by mashing them together (with inconsistent transition times and attack durations) the problems are slightly obscured but they are still there. For Beornings to feel like a real, working class man form and bear form need to be looked at separately. There should be a reason for being in man form, a reason for being in bear form. Once both forms are decent on their own, they can be combined together to make a well-rounded, strong class. Currently it just feels like a really weak class got a magical button to turn itself into a mediocre class for a while.

And don't get me started on Beorning set bonuses...or most parts of the traitlines...or stat derivations...or available weapon proficiencies...or racial traits/bonuses...or legacies...

~ Beorning Bugs ~

The Hide:

• The trait "Hardened Heart" only applies the wrath generation after 2-2.5 seconds rather than the 1 second listed on the tooltip.
• "Slash" and "Claw Swipe" bleeds override one another.
• "Animalistic" only applies in combat.

The Claw:

• Using vicious claws on a target who has 2 "Bash" bleeds present will remove one of the bleeds and refresh the other instead of refreshing both. (Therefore reducing dps)

The Roar:

• "In the face of" does not reliably work, this seems to be related to the TARGET being in combat. If the rez bugs while channeling instead of "Invalid target" you'll see the message "Target must not be in combat". This also happens when the target is selecting themselves while attempting to rez a bugged target. Generally occurs to DoT classes more than anyone else.
• Mark of Grimbeorn does not seem to increase the healing of Hearten besides the initial heal.
• A beorning getting disarmed removes any Mark of Beorn and Mark of Grimbeorn they cast. This is particularly annoying since Mark of Grimbeorn is tied to Cleanse cooldown reduction.
• Imbued weapon legacy Bee Swarm Critical Defence does not apply if the 6th yellow traitline bonus, Greater Swarm, is granted. In other words, no heal specced bear at cap can use this legacy.

Skills:

• Relentless maul will cancel when wrath starts getting low. This happens when passing the 20 wrath threshold.
• "Slash" and "Claw Swipe" bleeds override one another.
• Nature's mend functions like a skill that consumes wrath despite it not consuming wrath. e.g. It consumes the "Desperate Shouts" free heal as well as possibly giving +3 wrath from the legacy, both of these effects should only apply to wrath consuming skills.
• Piercing Roar does not seem to correctly reduce outgoing damage by 40%, instead it appeared to only do around a 5.7% decrease (tested in Filikul on Mighty Melee Attack).
• Discrepancy with "Skin-Change" timing, bear form to man form is faster than man form to bear form.
• "Grisly Cry" fear is often immediately broken by ranged auto-attacks due to the 1 second grace period being too short.
• Sacrifice almost never lasts longer than 12 seconds despite having 20 seconds on tooltip.
• Vicious claws takes too long to go off to be fit for purpose.
• General Error 0x100001DE when trying to use Thunderous roar. Somehow it fixed itself by swapping to a different trait line and then swapping back. Link

Miscellaneous:

• Relentless maul cooldown does not always display properly.
• The Pelennor armour for Beorning gives a 4-set bonus that reduces attack duration; Beornings are not affected by attack duration buffs or debuffs.
• Occasionally wrath stops decaying when out of combat, typically triggered by quickly moving between loading screens.
• Beorning stops receiving stat-appropriate armour from level 75 onwards.
• A few armour sets specifically for Beorning contain ICPR (The Orthanc armour sets are one such example)
• Beornings don't appear to generate a proportionate amount of healing threat.
• Beornings healing does not appear to be enhanced by "Tactical Healing Rating" like other healers, instead it appears to scale off of main hand damage.
• Whilst not technically a bug Beorning warsteeds "Ride for ruin" needs wrath to stay active, since a Beorning will frequently hit 0 wrath in combat on warsteed this buff is almost unusable.
• Entering bear form only removes disarm if the disarming effect is the classic, pottable disarm. Any other effect, such as the unpottable disarm from Easterling sorcerors in Dome of Stars or the disarming wound from Tunkild in Black Serpent, is ignored. This means such effects still completely disable pretty much every skill, including bear form skills.
• Beorning stat derivations are weird and weaker than most other classes, Beornings has less BPE from stats compared to the other tanks and for some reason will gives evade.
• Man-form damage legacy applies its increase to both man-form and bear-form.
• Bees bonuses do not stack if multiple are traited.

[Alko]

Have no idea is it considered bug but traiting The roar to get Debilitating bees doesn't stack with with The hide trait line Sluggish stings in mean time: Sluggish stings and Debilitating bees can be traited with The claw line Crippling Stings. Feels like a bug but maybe it is way of balancing debuffs.

[Moon-Biter]

Thank you for compiling these bug lists. Beorning really feels like an abandoned project, which is shame considering that this class has great potential. As the things stand now, it's really hard to get into t2 content (let alone raids) on beorning, which is kind of where hunters were before this update. I really hope they decide to revamp beornings and make them viable class for t2 so that theycan perform as well in their roles (tanking, healing) as other classes and not be inferior in everything.

[Cordovan]

I'll throw the good ol' Beorning bug list in here. Whilst I wish these were fixed the class probably needs a fairly large overhaul to solve it's plethora of problems. One of the base issues is that man form just isn't good enough, you spend half your time in this form yet it remains extremely weak. Whilst bear form seems relatively adequate in each role you are only in this form for a very limited time, whilst I like the whole "stance dancing" kind of thing it is just ridiculous if the only two stances are "adequate" and "sub-par". Neither bear form nor man form are even close to being capable of standing on their own, by mashing them together (with inconsistent transition times and attack durations) the problems are slightly obscured but they are still there. For Beornings to feel like a real, working class man form and bear form need to be looked at separately. There should be a reason for being in man form, a reason for being in bear form. Once both forms are decent on their own, they can be combined together to make a well-rounded, strong class. Currently it just feels like a really weak class got a magical button to turn itself into a mediocre class for a while.

And don't get me started on Beorning set bonuses...or most parts of the traitlines...or stat derivations...or available weapon proficiencies...or racial traits/bonuses...or legacies...

~ Beorning Bugs ~

The Hide:

• The trait "Hardened Heart" only applies the wrath generation after 2-2.5 seconds rather than the 1 second listed on the tooltip.
• "Slash" and "Claw Swipe" bleeds override one another.
• "Animalistic" only applies in combat.

The Claw:

• Using vicious claws on a target who has 2 "Bash" bleeds present will remove one of the bleeds and refresh the other instead of refreshing both. (Therefore reducing dps)

The Roar:

• "In the face of" does not reliably work, this seems to be related to the TARGET being in combat. If the rez bugs while channeling instead of "Invalid target" you'll see the message "Target must not be in combat". This also happens when the target is selecting themselves while attempting to rez a bugged target. Generally occurs to DoT classes more than anyone else.
• Mark of Grimbeorn does not seem to increase the healing of Hearten besides the initial heal.

Skills:

• Relentless maul will cancel when wrath starts getting low. This happens when passing the 20 wrath threshold.
• "Slash" and "Claw Swipe" bleeds override one another.
• Nature's mend functions like a skill that consumes wrath despite it not consuming wrath. e.g. It consumes the "Desperate Shouts" free heal as well as possibly giving +3 wrath from the legacy, both of these effects should only apply to wrath consuming skills.
• Piercing Roar does not seem to correctly reduce outgoing damage by 40%, instead it appeared to only do around a 5.7% decrease (tested in Filikul on Mighty Melee Attack).
• Discrepancy with "Skin-Change" timing, bear form to man form is faster than man form to bear form.
• "Grisly Cry" fear is often immediately broken by ranged auto-attacks due to the 1 second grace period being too short.
• Sacrifice almost never lasts longer than 12 seconds despite having 20 seconds on tooltip.
• Vicious claws takes too long to go off to be fit for purpose.
• General Error 0x100001DE when trying to use Thunderous roar. Somehow it fixed itself by swapping to a different trait line and then swapping back. Link

Miscellaneous:

• Relentless maul cooldown does not always display properly.
• The Pelennor armour for Beorning gives a 4-set bonus that reduces attack duration; Beornings are not affected by attack duration buffs or debuffs.
• Occasionally wrath stops decaying when out of combat, typically triggered by quickly moving between loading screens.
• Beorning stops receiving stat-appropriate armour from level 75 onwards.
• A few armour sets specifically for Beorning contain ICPR (The Orthanc armour sets are one such example)
• Beornings don't appear to generate a proportionate amount of healing threat.
• Beornings healing does not appear to be enhanced by "Tactical Healing Rating" like other healers, instead it appears to scale off of main hand damage.
• Whilst not technically a bug Beorning warsteeds "Ride for ruin" needs wrath to stay active, since a Beorning will frequently hit 0 wrath in combat on warsteed this buff is almost unusable.
• Entering bear form only removes disarm if the disarming effect is the classic, pottable disarm. Any other effect, such as the unpottable disarm from Easterling sorcerors in Dome of Stars or the disarming wound from Tunkild in Black Serpent, is ignored. This means such effects still completely disable pretty much every skill, including bear form skills.

When time permits, I'll raise this list with the team.

[Joedangod]

Welp, my outlook on the future of the Beorning is a little bit brighter now. Thank you for that.

[Oelle]

and thats just the buglist, not the issue-list... like being the worst tank, a clunky healer and a mediocre dps... and all that comes with those.

[Bondamar]

I'll throw the good ol' Beorning bug list in here. Whilst I wish these were fixed the class probably needs a fairly large overhaul to solve it's plethora of problems. One of the base issues is that man form just isn't good enough, you spend half your time in this form yet it remains extremely weak. Whilst bear form seems relatively adequate in each role you are only in this form for a very limited time, whilst I like the whole "stance dancing" kind of thing it is just ridiculous if the only two stances are "adequate" and "sub-par". Neither bear form nor man form are even close to being capable of standing on their own, by mashing them together (with inconsistent transition times and attack durations) the problems are slightly obscured but they are still there. For Beornings to feel like a real, working class man form and bear form need to be looked at separately. There should be a reason for being in man form, a reason for being in bear form. Once both forms are decent on their own, they can be combined together to make a well-rounded, strong class. Currently it just feels like a really weak class got a magical button to turn itself into a mediocre class for a while.

And don't get me started on Beorning set bonuses...or most parts of the traitlines...or stat derivations...or available weapon proficiencies...or racial traits/bonuses...or legacies...

~ Beorning Bugs ~

The Hide:

• The trait "Hardened Heart" only applies the wrath generation after 2-2.5 seconds rather than the 1 second listed on the tooltip.
• "Slash" and "Claw Swipe" bleeds override one another.
• "Animalistic" only applies in combat.

The Claw:

• Using vicious claws on a target who has 2 "Bash" bleeds present will remove one of the bleeds and refresh the other instead of refreshing both. (Therefore reducing dps)

The Roar:

• "In the face of" does not reliably work, this seems to be related to the TARGET being in combat. If the rez bugs while channeling instead of "Invalid target" you'll see the message "Target must not be in combat". This also happens when the target is selecting themselves while attempting to rez a bugged target. Generally occurs to DoT classes more than anyone else.
• Mark of Grimbeorn does not seem to increase the healing of Hearten besides the initial heal.

Skills:

• Relentless maul will cancel when wrath starts getting low. This happens when passing the 20 wrath threshold.
• "Slash" and "Claw Swipe" bleeds override one another.
• Nature's mend functions like a skill that consumes wrath despite it not consuming wrath. e.g. It consumes the "Desperate Shouts" free heal as well as possibly giving +3 wrath from the legacy, both of these effects should only apply to wrath consuming skills.
• Piercing Roar does not seem to correctly reduce outgoing damage by 40%, instead it appeared to only do around a 5.7% decrease (tested in Filikul on Mighty Melee Attack).
• Discrepancy with "Skin-Change" timing, bear form to man form is faster than man form to bear form.
• "Grisly Cry" fear is often immediately broken by ranged auto-attacks due to the 1 second grace period being too short.
• Sacrifice almost never lasts longer than 12 seconds despite having 20 seconds on tooltip.
• Vicious claws takes too long to go off to be fit for purpose.
• General Error 0x100001DE when trying to use Thunderous roar. Somehow it fixed itself by swapping to a different trait line and then swapping back. Link

Miscellaneous:

• Relentless maul cooldown does not always display properly.
• The Pelennor armour for Beorning gives a 4-set bonus that reduces attack duration; Beornings are not affected by attack duration buffs or debuffs.
• Occasionally wrath stops decaying when out of combat, typically triggered by quickly moving between loading screens.
• Beorning stops receiving stat-appropriate armour from level 75 onwards.
• A few armour sets specifically for Beorning contain ICPR (The Orthanc armour sets are one such example)
• Beornings don't appear to generate a proportionate amount of healing threat.
• Beornings healing does not appear to be enhanced by "Tactical Healing Rating" like other healers, instead it appears to scale off of main hand damage.
• Whilst not technically a bug Beorning warsteeds "Ride for ruin" needs wrath to stay active, since a Beorning will frequently hit 0 wrath in combat on warsteed this buff is almost unusable.
• Entering bear form only removes disarm if the disarming effect is the classic, pottable disarm. Any other effect, such as the unpottable disarm from Easterling sorcerors in Dome of Stars or the disarming wound from Tunkild in Black Serpent, is ignored. This means such effects still completely disable pretty much every skill, including bear form skills.

You didnt mention the bees debuffs not applying correctly. The crit defense legacy doesnt apply in yellow or blue line, only in red line. you also cant trait more than one debuff at a time, although you have enough trait pts to get both the yellow and blue bees. Some more interactions but basically bees debuffs arent working very well.

[moebius2778]

• The Pelennor armour for Beorning gives a 4-set bonus that reduces attack duration; Beornings are not affected by attack duration buffs or debuffs.

As a fairly minor point, this is only mostly true. Last I checked, like all other classes, Beorning skill activation times still use the (1 + AD / (4 - AD)) multiplier (where AD is in the range [-0.40, 0.40]).

[aelso]

Friend of mine and I both bought the beorning class, Got it to 105 and decently geared. Tried to heal, tank, and dps with it. In the end, neither of us was really impressed with it. Just use it as an alt to help do daily etc. Some of aspects of it are good. He ofcource went back to his RK, I went back to my burg/hunter. Yea I notice, like the de-buffs weren't working. That class has a lot of bugs, My rage was going very quickly also, constantly had to build rage up. Felt like 75% of time I am trying to get rage up.

[Joedangod]

As a fairly minor point, this is only mostly true. Last I checked, like all other classes, Beorning skill activation times still use the (1 + AD / (4 - AD)) multiplier (where AD is in the range [-0.40, 0.40]).

Grabbed this from my small proposal thread in the Beornings forums:

Had to dive deep into the past but found where the whole "fast" attacks thing not being affected by attack duration comes from: http://web.archive.org/web/201208090...hanges?start=1

We also updated the existing “fast” skill timing which we have used since the game launched. The “fast” skills will not accelerate the execution of any prior skill, but they will execute “as soon as possible” whenever a previous skill animation completes. These skills also ignore the remaining “action duration” of the previously executed skill. We have added the “Fast” keyword to these skills’ tooltips.

Every single Beorning skill is a "fast" skill thus making attack duration meaningless.



I would like to reiterate my first point; Beornings suffer with the dual forms. When tanking man form is simply there for hearten and biting edge taunts, you try to be in man form as little as possible. When dpsing man form is just used to build wrath back up so you can get back to bear form and hope that moment of opportunity might finally proc. Healing is probably the worst for this, bear form drains wrath exceptionally fast here so you actually spend very little time in bear form, instead you perpetually spam wrath builders until bellow/skinchange is off cooldown. If there are going to be two forms there should be a decent reason to use both forms, at the moment all the good skills are in bear form, man form exists purely to build wrath.

[Gremus]

When time permits, I'll raise this list with the team.

Please be aware, sir, that the list you quoted is not complete.

re: Vicious Claws being slow, in fact neither Vicious Claws nor Rending Blows / Armour Crush from blue traits are immediate.

re: Relentless Maul cooldown indicator being off, this happens in redline due to the 4th red traitline bonus, Brutal Energy.

Three issues which were not mentioned at all in that list:

1) A beorning getting disarmed removes any Mark of Beorn and Mark of Grimbeorn they cast. This is particularly annoying since Mark of Grimbeorn is tied to Cleanse cooldown reduction.

2) Imbued weapon legacy Bee Swarm Critical Defence does not apply if the 6th yellow traitline bonus, Greater Swarm, is granted. In other words, no heal specced bear at cap can use this legacy. Another poster mentioned it also not working in blue line, but it works in my blue line build (which includes Sluggish Stings trait).

3) BPE from stats are a big issue! The standard for other classes (yes, even the light armor classes) is 5 BPE per might or agility. Champs are even better, 6 BPE per might (3 block, 3 parry). But Beornings are missing out: 3 BPE per might (3 parry), 2 BPE per agility (2 evade). Agility is only a minor loss, but the loss of BPE from might is a big problem as our main stat.

4) Man-form damage legacy applies its increase to both man-form and bear-form. (Bear-form damage legacy only applies to bear-form as would be expected.) This is a bug which helps beornings, but it is still a bug.



I don't doubt there are more bugs as well, that have hopefully been mentioned in bug reports. The major ones should have been fairly well covered, though. For me as a healbear primarily, 1) is big when soloing for annoyance factor, 2) when running instances as I am being denied a major damage increasing debuff.

Grinand Bearit


EDIT: Added 4), nearly forgot about it.

[gripply]

- Beorning U19 Beta feedback-

While it's been great to see an obvious attempt to improve hunters and burglars, I can't help feeling like beornings are being left behind as the forgotten class. I enjoy playing my bear a lot, despite it's bugs and general mediocrity, but there are some issues which I think have been ignored for too long, and I'd really like to see some effort in correcting them, perhaps in beta 3 or 4.

- 'Tactical Heal Rating' on a beorning carving does not have any effect on heals. This is instead dependent on main hand weapon damage, which makes no sense, and makes duel wielding second best by a mile.

- Interupt skill 'Vicious Claws' is NOT instant, and can take seconds to go off'

- The in-combat res is (still) bugged. 'Bear Up' will often give an error and will not res.

- Relentless Maul cuts short if you are fairly low on wrath, when it shouldn't.

-Beorning tanking needs a workover (Starting with being able to block, if a warg can block with it's teeth, then so can a bear!)

- Despite being listed as a 'dps class', beorning is very average in the dps ranks, and has no real specialization. This is no thanks beorn being made a 'might-medium armour' class, as essences are wasted on crit rating, where other agility classes gain crit from raw agility and beorning cannot therefore gain as much mastery as other 'dps' classes. The point is, beorning needsa general increase in dps capability, and an increase to max wrath too. Adding a minor bleed to bear form skills such as 'thrash' would not just be realistic, but would help a little to improve where beorns are lacking.

- I might be wrong, but the current 4 piece Pelennor set that reduces attack duration according to wrath has very little/no use to a beorning. It would be nice to see this changed to something more useful, perhaps +% bear form damage/bear form critical damage.

- Beorning generally feels clunky - from the animations of ferocious roar, hearten, etc. to switching from bear to man form. Animations need to be cut shorter, as well as a decrease in the time it takes to jump between man and bear form.

I could name a dozen more bugs/issues the beorning faces, and in honesty it still feels like an unfinished project, but seeing as the devs are listening to the hunters and burglars, it might just be worth mentioning that the beorn is still a class struggling LOTRO, and the fixing the issues listed above might just be a good start.

Fellow beorns feel free to add to this list, or correct me if I made a mistake anywhere. Most importantly speak up if you want beorning to change, it's the only way we'll get it.

Very good points. The Vicious Claws are wasted in my rotation because they do a lot of damage so I just have them in my quick list, interrupt or not.

After about level 60, I started to notice these clunky issues a lot more. The beorning I play is 67 and in Enedwaith, and every time I use any skill... it's a click (pause) click... freeze... (pause), click type of battle. Often it's when other mobs are putting a dot on me and I'm simultaneously interrupting or removing buffs. Both of these skills do nice damage and have nice timers, so I like them as part of my general rotation. The pause before becoming a bear thing is crazy.

And what's the point of cancelling my casting of debuff removal just because the mob died? I might still have a dot on me. I constantly have to click... wait and see if it worked, click again... with the Beorning.

Fun to play solo, but nothing I'm taking to a real battle. Too much work left to be done on it. (Like adding wrath potions for all the other levels, not just anorien), but that's a different thread (see: Crafting thread).

PS: Should I mention that I miss playing the Swashbuckler (some of you know what game I mean) because of the stance that repeatedly interrupted attackers on a timer? I guess making Vicious Claws part of my main rotation was predictable for me.

[Joedangod]

I updated the original bug post with the things that were mentioned here, I'll also throw the updated bug list back on the Small Proposal thread I created in the Beorning section of the forums.

3) BPE from stats are a big issue! The standard for other classes (yes, even the light armor classes) is 5 BPE per might or agility. Champs are even better, 6 BPE per might (3 block, 3 parry). But Beornings are missing out: 3 BPE per might (3 parry), 2 BPE per agility (2 evade). Agility is only a minor loss, but the loss of BPE from might is a big problem as our main stat.

You forgot to include the evade Beornings get from will! :P

[gripply]

Not to make this entirely negative... I LOVE IT that the Beorning is old school and gets significant buffs from ALL the stats. Yellow = tactical makes my heart sing when Red = Physical, and suggests a totally different build. I agree that the Blue line needs block to be a relevant tank, or even off tank. Since I don't tank while soloing, I haven't paid enough attention to it (level 69 now), but the red/yellow dichotomy has me interested, very interested. One possible fun build I will probably try is a Blue / Yellow tactical tank. Since threats/force attacks often are tactical anyway.

Many moons ago, my first captain was looking for advice and the advice was to include will and tactical in my build. Fond memory that.. now that the cappy is so very different.

[Joedangod]

Beorning is old school and gets significant buffs from ALL the stats.

Tactical mastery is useless for a Beorning, there are very few attacks that actually scale with it and none of them are particularly useful in DPS situations. Tactical mastery won't noticeably improve your healing either.

The evade gained from will is still too insignificant to merit stacking will which makes it being there pretty pointless. Beorning stat derivations are all over the place, this actually weakens the class since you cannot stack all 5 stats in equal measure, this leads to the Beorning being lesser than the other classes since their stats are neatly packaged together.

[gripply]

Tactical mastery is useless for a Beorning, there are very few attacks that actually scale with it and none of them are particularly useful in DPS situations. Tactical mastery won't noticeably improve your healing either.

The evade gained from will is still too insignificant to merit stacking will which makes it being there pretty pointless. Beorning stat derivations are all over the place, this actually weakens the class since you cannot stack all 5 stats in equal measure, this leads to the Beorning being lesser than the other classes since their stats are neatly packaged together.

When I see replies like this I wonder if people are reading all their skills, in every trait tree, or only the trait tree they use (I assume in this case you run Red?). Because if you read the yellow line skills you will see how that's not really true what you're saying. It's only true if you are DPS focused. In the case of the Beorning, Turbine did a good thing by showing that the Trait trees can truly give us playstyle options. It disappoints those who want a simple "What's the best rotation? What the best gear? What's the best x?" for their class, but I'm glad those questions can't be easily answered for a Beorning. One can only say that a certain rotation works decently, that there are many details that can make any playstyle better... etc. It's a very well thought out class, despite the bugs.

[Joedangod]

Because if you read the yellow line skills you will see how that's not really true what you're saying. It's only true if you are DPS focused.

There have been many, many posts on the relevance of tactical mastery on healing, most generally point out that it is not worth stacking. If you spend 10 essence slots on tactical mastery you will generally see something in the region of a 100 morale boost to the tooltip value of a skill that already heals 6000 morale. Do you heal more if you stack tactical mastery? Yes. Is this difference enough to be noticeable? No. This is why the majority of raid healers will have 50k morale unbuffed on their minstrel and the like, it just isn't worth stacking the tactical mastery, morale gives much better returns.

It disappoints those who want a simple "What's the best rotation? What the best gear? What's the best x?" for their class, but I'm glad those questions can't be easily answered for a Beorning.

With Beorning the difficulty to answer any of these questions stems from the fact that there just aren't any really good options. Pre-raid the best option was to use Pelennor armour for all 3 roles, not because the set bonus was good (it doesn't even apply) but because it just gave the most stats and there were no other good set bonuses to go with. Heck, Pelennor is barely behind the raid armour at the moment, the only good bonus was the thickened hide cooldown. Wanna know what you get if you fight through the raid on t2 and win 4 armour pieces for yellow line? 1% parry buff on your marked ally.

It's a very well thought out class, despite the bugs.

Conceptually a dual form class seems like an excellent idea but this class was poorly implemented. Man form exists purely to build wrath for bear form, that is its only purpose. There are no bonuses to being in man form, it simply serves as a distraction whilst you attempt to restore your wrath to full. If you want a class that utilises 2 forms then the 2 forms should be balanced, they should both have specific buffs and debuffs and thus reward you for changing form to adapt to the situations you find yourself in. At the moment your "reward" for playing in man form is that you get to stop playing in man form for 10 seconds or so whilst you do some stomping around as a grizzly bear.


Whilst I'm delighted that we might just get some bug fixes it does not change the fact that the Beorning lacks real depth and remains the weakest and least played class, there just isn't a reward for those of us who have persevered to end-game with it.

[Gremus]

There have been many, many posts on the relevance of tactical mastery on healing, most generally point out that it is not worth stacking. If you spend 10 essence slots on tactical mastery you will generally see something in the region of a 100 morale boost to the tooltip value of a skill that already heals 6000 morale. Do you heal more if you stack tactical mastery? Yes. Is this difference enough to be noticeable? No. This is why the majority of raid healers will have 50k morale unbuffed on their minstrel and the like, it just isn't worth stacking the tactical mastery, morale gives much better returns.

For heals yes, stacking tactical mastery is not worth it. I have some swap jewelry with tactical mastery for soloing, it raises my tactical mastery from 43.4k to 54.8k. Outgoing healing goes from 63.7% to 71.5%. End result on heals is about 4% overall gain, in exchange for nearly 10k morale.

However, I do use those tactical mastery jewelries for soloing, because I solo in yellow line. Greater Bees is a rather nice AOE, and its damage scales with tactical offence. Certainly not champ or warden (or guardian or LM) level AOE, but still great for wearing down groups, since Greater Bees hits ~8 targets. Noncrit, it does around 2k per pulse, crit double that. If you target a signature or higher mob with the bees, the pulses following a crit cast is enough to kill the normal mobs nearby.

[gripply]

There have been many, many posts on the relevance of tactical mastery on healing, most generally point out that it is not worth stacking. If you spend 10 essence slots on tactical mastery you will generally see something in the region of a 100 morale boost to the tooltip value of a skill that already heals 6000 morale. Do you heal more if you stack tactical mastery? Yes. Is this difference enough to be noticeable? No. This is why the majority of raid healers will have 50k morale unbuffed on their minstrel and the like, it just isn't worth stacking the tactical mastery, morale gives much better returns.



With Beorning the difficulty to answer any of these questions stems from the fact that there just aren't any really good options. Pre-raid the best option was to use Pelennor armour for all 3 roles, not because the set bonus was good (it doesn't even apply) but because it just gave the most stats and there were no other good set bonuses to go with. Heck, Pelennor is barely behind the raid armour at the moment, the only good bonus was the thickened hide cooldown. Wanna know what you get if you fight through the raid on t2 and win 4 armour pieces for yellow line? 1% parry buff on your marked ally.




Conceptually a dual form class seems like an excellent idea but this class was poorly implemented. Man form exists purely to build wrath for bear form, that is its only purpose. There are no bonuses to being in man form, it simply serves as a distraction whilst you attempt to restore your wrath to full. If you want a class that utilises 2 forms then the 2 forms should be balanced, they should both have specific buffs and debuffs and thus reward you for changing form to adapt to the situations you find yourself in. At the moment your "reward" for playing in man form is that you get to stop playing in man form for 10 seconds or so whilst you do some stomping around as a grizzly bear.


Whilst I'm delighted that we might just get some bug fixes it does not change the fact that the Beorning lacks real depth and remains the weakest and least played class, there just isn't a reward for those of us who have persevered to end-game with it.

Well I guess I'll have to agree to disagree. Sorry to bring up another game again, but it's relevant. In EQ2, the numbers became illogical, with 400% debuffs to crit chance in some areas of the end game (could be worse now, I stopped playing it when Daybreak struck). It was always eventually clear what your crit chance should be if you're a scout, mage, or whatever, but most of it was done experimentally by fighting epic training dummies and running ACT (which is a more detailed kind of Combat Tracker). Every time there was a n update, the dummy room of the guild/kin hall was busy. The numbers just didn't make sense anymore in any logical way. You had to have at least 800% crit chance? Huh?

So the 1% parry isn't so bad when you consider that you must double up on relics to get 4% anymore. The benefit of the buff is to get splash heals, not to buff parry. The guardian's buff doesn't heal but gives better parry. The effect is largely the same.

The roles in EQ2 were rigidly divided. The Swashbuckler I mentioned before had a historical nerf to its dps (which I hear has been removed now) because it was able to play either a tank/off-tank or a dps scout role. As a result, people avoided it, I was one of only two raiding Swashbucklers I knew, but everyone had one maxed and waiting, just in case. The "pet class" (favored) of each update could change on a whim and then you were either stuck with boring powerleveling, or you had to have one in stock. What happens with roles being stiff and non-multi or dual class toons is, updates cause you to regret your choices sooner or later, especially if it's hard to powerlevel or there are daunting finishing tasks (both true in LOTRO, not true in EQ2).

I'd have to look for the old developer diaries, but I"m pretty sure that they said several times that this game is designed to be dual class / multi-class. The Tales of Arda player mentioned she was leaving partly because she didn't think she could customize her class as well as before (trait trees). I wonder if you're coming to LOTRO with assumptions from another game, and not appreciating it for what it is, a dual class / multi-class, multi-role, game. The changes they make are still more often to BPE, for example, than to classes directly. I've noticed the change lately to more direct class changes. I'd rather they wouldn't. And I'd rather keep those classes that still work as multiple-role classes. Like I said we don't agree because it's a basic design decision. multiple roles or single roles for classes? I choose multiple because I enjoy it more. I'd rather never be able to answer the "what's best" questions in a simple way. It forces everyone to try things and discover how they like to play. I miss the days when a really good champ could tank as well as a guard. It was rare and therefore it was impressive.

I like the idea of heal-through tanking and it could work. I just haven't played with the blue line on the Beorning yet. Chances are the best way to set up Beornings will be similar to the way Captains are set up now, in multiple trait trees (even while cappy tanking, put points into red to get Time of Need, for example... but not so much because you want dps, but because you want more ways of entering battle ready state). I'd rather have a chance to discover such things about my Beorning before it's changed out of existence. I don't think we've had enough time to think abou tit yet. It was just before the server merges when I noticed nearly everyone was leveling their Beornings. That was this year. I hope we get at least a couple years without major changes to really live with our options and try new things. I definitely don't want it shoehorned into a dps role, that's just flat. We have enough of those.

----------
Side issue, tactical mastery -- the many many posts about tactical mastery miss something. Usually, if you're a physical mastery type, then your "main stat" be it might or agility will not give you as much physical mastery as you could get from a mastery essence. But the same is not true for tactical mastery. Usually a LM or RK (the two classes I know well), benefit more from Will conversion to tactical mastery than they do from tactical mastery essences. In the case of the Beorning, if someone wanted decent tactical mastery, they'd have to essence-up carefully doing the math on conversions from might or will or even might+will, considering the collateral buffs from those compared to the tactical they gain from a direct tactical essence. (This would only make sense in Yellow trait, btw, even if you cross-trait, the main trait will likely benefit most from Yellow and picking up the yellow trait-ed tactical skills. ) I happen to like these kinds of balancing problems, I like solving them and testing them.

Much of the yelling about class balance, is in my opinion, done by people who overstack some attributes and ignore others, unbalancing their own class instead of playing it in a well rounded way. then they complain that it's not balanced. Well they unbalanced it themselves while minmaxing. That's not the fault of the designers. It's player error.

[daedalusAI]

When time permits, I'll raise this list with the team.

Damn. Never seen a bigger middle finger from turbine so far.
"When time permits" which literally means you have no clue and really don't care one bit about the current state of the classes.

That beorning bug list is already months old and readable in the beorning forum: but I guess you as CM knew that already right?
Oh you didn't because all we got in the original thread was nothing but silence from you. Guess "time didn't permit" the CM to read the forum.

I'm mildly agitated right now that you and turbine are even more incompetent than what you've shown so far.

[Joedangod]

Sorry to bring up another game again, but it's relevant.

None of that was related or relevant. The Beorning has tank/heal/dps lines it's true, is it any good at any of those roles? No. The argument is mildly pointless at the moment, you are still in the low level stage for your Beorning in which the class is almost invincible (pretty much every class is invincible up to 50 anyway). You do not know how the class handles at end game. The Beorning is the third choice as healer behind minstrel and RK, it's rarely a struggle to find either of those two classes to perform the role of healer so beorning is essentially nudged out of this category. Next we have tanking, in this case Guardians/Captains/Wardens all easily outperform the Beorning in the raid (although 6 man and lesser content is easy and low TPS enough for Beornings to survive) so that's 3 classes that nudge out the Beorning in this category, 4 if you count a good champ tank. Finally we're down to the final role of DPS! RK/Warden/Champ/Hunter/Burglar will happily run circles around you here so don't expect to find groups for this role.

At no point have I asked for the devs to consider refining a single one of the Beornings traitlines to the exclusion of the others, I have mostly suggested improvements to all of the traitlines. Admittedly I tend to focus mostly on blue line but that is because it has one of the most visible fixes: access to BPE levels matching captain or guard at the very least. It's all well and good insisting on a "dual role/multi role" experience but at the moment the Beorning doesn't realistically qualify for any role.

As for your initial point about will being good for tactical mastery: Might gives more tactical mastery and is a significantly more relevant stat, stack robust might essences and ignore tactical mastery essences. It's that simple.

[gripply]

The argument is mildly pointless at the moment, you are still in the low level stage for your Beorning in which the class is almost invincible (pretty much every class is invincible up to 50 anyway). You do not know how the class handles at end game.

On this, I admitted it previously, and agree. Let others decide the rest. I'm surprised not to hear from other beornings, I know they're out there. These two views are surely not the only ones.

When time permits, I'll raise this list with the team.

Since the thread is thankfully being watched by a blue name (thanks by the way), I'd be glad to read what others have to say.

[daedalusAI]

Since the thread is thankfully being watched by a blue name (thanks by the way), I'd be glad to read what others have to say.

You are thankful that the CM only reads a re-post of a post from the beorning forum while he distinguished himself with his constant absence there?
I don't fault people like you grabbing after straws which could be interpreted as turbine would care - but I won't do that.

[gripply]

You are thankful that the CM only reads a re-post of a post from the beorning forum while he distinguished himself with his constant absence there?
I don't fault people like you grabbing after straws which could be interpreted as turbine would care - but I won't do that.

Good for you, I'm sure your negative attitude will bring lots of attention to this issue. And if it doesn't, well I'm sure you have even more colorful ways of trying to get attention. I marvel at your ingenuity. Surely sarcasm must be a skill only clever people have.