Beornings - The Good Stuff

[FastPablo]

It seems to me that the only thing I can find on the Beorning Forums is ranting about how terrible [insert class mechanic here] is. "Beorning DPS is terrible," or "Beorning tank?" are the main ones. But come on, admit it, you do love playing Beorning. If you didn't, you wouldn't bother with making the complaints. So feel free to post the good times you have had with your Beorning, and any tips you have on how to maximize gameplay.

[Oelle]

Its a bit challenging to do stuff as a beorning, at least in comparison to for example hunters or minstrels, who litterally are just one-button-classes...
thats a nice side.

[Pavlin]

It seems to me that the only thing I can find on the Beorning Forums is ranting about how terrible [insert class mechanic here] is. "Beorning DPS is terrible," or "Beorning tank?" are the main ones. But come on, admit it, you do love playing Beorning. If you didn't, you wouldn't bother with making the complaints. So feel free to post the good times you have had with your Beorning, and any tips you have on how to maximize gameplay.

Rant ? Beo is good only if you wana play solo/ and stil warden is better.
With few words - nothing good in beor. I do love to play it and i did for like 2-3y. Now i quit lotro till they fix it / may means forever/
cheers

[Calenyavie]

I've loved almost all my time as a beorning. I'm not ignorant of its flaws, but I love the class despite its flaws. The lore of the beornings is some of my favorite stuff in The Hobbit, and the LOTR appendices. I waited years in this game hoping that they would release the beorning as playable. It's just a great class for people that love its lore.

[Galdhron]

[Speaking as a Beorning below Level 50 and exclusively one trait tree at a time.]

My Beorning, Medloth Bearlady, has been in mostly group play throughout her career. As a roleplayer she first conducted herself as a stranger in a very strange land, for everything that humans did seemed not only counterproductive, counterfactual, but at times downright dangerous to themselves and others. Then as she worked through the paradoxes and issues of the human condition, she decided to become something of an ambassador. The model is something of a "noble savage".

From a game mechanics standpoint, she works with the group to bolster her strengths and minimize her weaknesses. The first part of her career, up to Level 45, was in Yellow line. In solo landscape she could self heal through almost any encounter and grind it down. In group play she had moderate damage, good utility, and the sporadic but powerful heal capabilities that took a huge load off the main healer. She relied on the group to take agro while building up her wrath, until she figured out how to maintain wrath out of combat.

Around Level 45/46 she branched out to the Red line. By that time she had her starter LI, which had a legacy to extend Call To Wild. Now she is able to maintain her wrath in combat about twice as long as in Yellow and do more than twice as much damage, making her a significant party damage dealer, comparable to a Champion.

Then at Level 48 in one of the Angmar instances she specced as a Blue Line tank and held the line well enough to replace a Blue line Warden. Not to say she was as good as the Warden, but good enough to substitute for one.

So I guess what makes Beorning so compelling to me is the versatility. In Yellow, it feels much like a Yellow LM but with far stronger healing and weaker CC. In Red it feels like a Red Champion, and in Blue it feels like a Blue Warden. Whenever our group ran into really challenging instances, I could pick a different line and let others also choose a different line and that made our group dynamic so much better. Her roaring not only improved the characters' morale, it improved the players' morale as well. They found a lot of encouragement in seeing her charge into battle with complete disregard for her own safety.

[Happychappy]

[Speaking as a Beorning below Level 50 and exclusively one trait tree at a time.]

My Beorning, Medloth Bearlady, has been in mostly group play throughout her career. As a roleplayer she first conducted herself as a stranger in a very strange land, for everything that humans did seemed not only counterproductive, counterfactual, but at times downright dangerous to themselves and others. Then as she worked through the paradoxes and issues of the human condition, she decided to become something of an ambassador. The model is something of a "noble savage".

From a game mechanics standpoint, she works with the group to bolster her strengths and minimize her weaknesses. The first part of her career, up to Level 45, was in Yellow line. In solo landscape she could self heal through almost any encounter and grind it down. In group play she had moderate damage, good utility, and the sporadic but powerful heal capabilities that took a huge load off the main healer. She relied on the group to take agro while building up her wrath, until she figured out how to maintain wrath out of combat.

Around Level 45/46 she branched out to the Red line. By that time she had her starter LI, which had a legacy to extend Call To Wild. Now she is able to maintain her wrath in combat about twice as long as in Yellow and do more than twice as much damage, making her a significant party damage dealer, comparable to a Champion.

Then at Level 48 in one of the Angmar instances she specced as a Blue Line tank and held the line well enough to replace a Blue line Warden. Not to say she was as good as the Warden, but good enough to substitute for one.

So I guess what makes Beorning so compelling to me is the versatility. In Yellow, it feels much like a Yellow LM but with far stronger healing and weaker CC. In Red it feels like a Red Champion, and in Blue it feels like a Blue Warden. Whenever our group ran into really challenging instances, I could pick a different line and let others also choose a different line and that made our group dynamic so much better. Her roaring not only improved the characters' morale, it improved the players' morale as well. They found a lot of encouragement in seeing her charge into battle with complete disregard for her own safety.

And then it all goes down hill sadly.

The bear is fun, but could be far better.

[Joedangod]

[Speaking as a Beorning below Level 50 and exclusively one trait tree at a time.]

Can't really judge any class on how well it does things at 50 or below, pretty much any setup for any class works in that range and some of the best classes at 50 are never even seen at cap in T2C (Yellow guardian for example).

[Rhunar]

• Beornings are immune against power drain effects
  
  • Rage build up however is sometimes tedious (Beorn would be dead if had to change within one fight 20 times his shape from men to bear and back) It should be possible to stay in one form for a normal fight lenght (healing could be mainly men form while tanking and damage could be mainly in bear form)
  
  
• Beorning have some unique healing capabilities paired with nice debuffs in the yellow trait line (e.g. 'Mark of Grimbeorn', 'Piercing Roar', 'Grisly Cry', 'Nature's bond')
  
  • but battle rezz is bugged, it should really work...
  
  
• Beorning COULD be intersting tanks (no block, but strong debuffs, damage reflect, self heals)
  
  • but a.t.m. they simply get too much damage as a tank in t2 content;
    actually I see only once chance for beornings as a tank right now: investing much in the red trait tree to (partially) unlock 'Hearten becomes Composure';
    'Recuperate' is a joke a.t.m.

For AvM t2 they are only useful in the role of an additional buff-debuff-based healer.

My personal opinion. My beorning was fun to play up to lvl 105. After that their capabilities simply weren't scaled right to take into account the high stat increase lvl 105->115 and the accompanying damage increase by opponents. And they share the general 'low DPS' problem with other might based melee classes (champion, captain, guardian).

Kind regards
Rhunar

[Oelle]

Beornings were always fun to play, but only before they got legendary items, they were strong.
They just didnt grow well with legendary items. much worse than any other class.
There are several reasons for this:

Tactical healing on their carvings doesnt increase healing output nearly as much as it does for all others. All other healers get ~1-2% increased healing per tactical healing rating, beornings get roughly 0,01% increase per rating (one should think thats a simple typo somewhere in the code and easy to fix). Thats mainly why they suck as healers (plus not having good manform-healskills and such being quite slow in reaction time to heal sometimes).

Then, every other class has 18 legacies for each of their legendary items. 36 legacies together. Usually, those are roughly 2x6 legacies per traitline, making it viable to have a set of legendary weapons per traitline.
Beornings have 2x10 legacies. The choices here are so bad, that still on lvl115 and even though mainstat legacies are trash, many beornings still use mainstat legacies.
Plus, beornings legacies are generally weaker than those of most other classes (besides wardens, who have weak legacies, too).

If beornings got viable healing from tactical healing rating, some more legacies, some bugfixes and one or two common skills, they'd be fine.

[Galdhron]

Back to the Original Posters point. I don't play t2c, because being that competitive is not fun for me. It really wouldn't matter if the Beorning were an underpowered class, overpowered class, or just an oddball class. They are fun to play and carry enough of their weight in encounters (at least SoA encounters) to be worth bringing along. In the last two weeks we had a group of Level 48s take on Thaurog, and my Beorning was definitely an asset with her high powered AoE heals in bear form.

[slicewalker]

Nothing beorning's don't have any perks maybe they are OP below level 50 but its entirely down hill from there almost to the point that lower level classes out dps you even geared at end game.
They have no agro skills out side of force taunt no block to tank with and extremely under powered healing in blue without going full on red line for composure.

They do make nice fireplace rugs tho.

[Finrowe]

I am roaming in "red line" since a couple of weeks (on Sirannon), and really, the single thing I have fun with this class is that I am crossing no other Beorning *at all*.

I feel like unique and I fear the time when they make beorning usefull to anything