Beorning Update Incoming

[Vastin]

I'm definitely looking over the suggestions here for a polish pass, so thanks for the feedback!

I'll look at whether it makes sense to fold the speed buff into basic bear form and remove the specific wanderlust form. The speed buff cancels in combat regardless, so that might work technically, but there are a few other factors I need to consider behind the scenes before I do that.

As for wrath, the change I made to base wrath burn vs. generation in bear form actually shouldn't have made as big a difference as we're seeing - it's mostly just a convenience benefit and a minor wrath bonus in combat. More significant in blue line obviously, but still really only amounts to a total difference of 2 wrath/sec.

Thrash generating wrath obviously makes a pretty big difference and perhaps the two together are sufficient to explain the much higher wrath generation - but I'm still dubious. I think there's another source or bonus that I overlooked that got buffed by one of my changes that I need to re-examine, because yeah, the wrath REALLY floods in during combat. I fixed a bunch of bugs with other skills not benefiting correctly from things like legacy wrath bonuses, so maybe all together it is just adding up too much.

I don't want to choke it off mind you, but 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.

-Vastin

[Hildilas]

-Vastin

Sounds good. Every form should have a benefit. Best case would be that they are equally good but needed to different things. remember that other classes do not need to do this and focus or whatever and esp power is not an issue at all anymore so the wrath problem is unfair compared to other classes.

What about the armor issue? Is it intended that the armor we bought for ash is not heavy armor and that the values are all messed up? Will there be a hot fix?

[Happychappy]

Other classes have no power management issues either. Most are very efficient and barely need to take a potion here or there. Does anyone actually need a lore master for power transfer nowadays? probably no. Not at higher levels anyway. Share the power doesn't seem to do much when i use it on my new LM.

Beornings should not have it harder than them really. Or change the others also.

[Siddharta]

I'm definitely looking over the suggestions here for a polish pass, so thanks for the feedback!

Abyss set is bugged, it works ok for the first 3 uses, but on 4th i applies a full HoT, so it is not fixed.
Beorning currently is the most overpowered healing class ever i guess

[Pavlin]

Bear feels much better now. Wrath is arguably broken since you rarely run out of it why is it there, but I'm not so sure wrath wasn't broken at design time. It took so long to build wrath in man form that often by the time you switched, it was too late. Mob was dead, player was dead because you didn't heal them, etc..

Having bad dps in man and good dps in bear is I think a broken design. That just doesn't feel good. Man having a different set of skills that are different yet you have a reason to use them, is a better design IMO. Man for healing, buffing/debuffing, etc..

Blue beor must tank in bear form permanently/ first is more easy for devs to adjust/fix or call it whatever, second is more natural. Same to red bear. If you wana do dmg you go damn beast. We dont need clunky shape changes. About yellow i dont know. Healer rolle dont fit beor at all.
I dont know why you all complain about perma bear form ? If we go human we need bonuses from blue / 30% armor +20% hp/ to aply to both forms.
Or we face caping mits problem AGAIN. I dont like the choise to over cap my bear form to not take dmg when i`m in human. Neither i want to just bring to cap bear but to take #### ton of dmg in human form. Both blue and red bears are fine now. We are not op. Stil in the bottom of the dps chain, but atleast we are here. About blue, we are stil behind guardians and captains. Duno why you call for nerf for just fixed class.
Lets do it like this. You say beo is OP, then post video to prove it. I say beo strugle and i`l post video prove. Or even better, post a screenshot of your beor lvl...
Call for a nerf, show us the reason.

[Pavlin]

but right now you mostly just don't care very much, and that's not quite where I want it.

-Vastin

Vastin dont balance the class around sugestion of ppl who run landscape and low lvl instances.
On rly long and hard fights/ at one you need to kite/ when you cant stay on target all the time and generate resources, wrath just vanish because of recuperate and claw swipe spam. You hardly use other skills as beor when you kite, and we all know most of lotro fights are based on kiting.
Wrath is ok/ in blue atleast. Dont make us go in human form again. With the dmg scale in last expansion this mean one thing > dead bear.
Tried to stack both bear and human HoTs. Didnt work. It barely outheal the dmg we took at the moment we stay in human form to cast hearten.
Solution is to ad some time / like 5 seconds / to swipe dmg debuf. This will give us some aoe dmg reduce. Because of constant thrash and heal spam in our rotation, and with the current duration of the debuf we can barely stack/keep it 3 times.

And one question. Why you give us option to generate wrath in bear form, while in the same time try to bring back the old way of wrath generation /human form/ ?

[Vastin]

Abyss set is bugged, it works ok for the first 3 uses, but on 4th i applies a full HoT, so it is not fixed.
Beorning currently is the most overpowered healing class ever i guess

Yes... yes they are.

Luckily this was an easy one to find and fix. Still going to have to go through the release cycle so it'll be a little while before the fix makes its way through to live, but this one is already on its way.

-Vastin

[snacktime]

Sounds good. Every form should have a benefit. Best case would be that they are equally good but needed to different things. remember that other classes do not need to do this and focus or whatever and esp power is not an issue at all anymore so the wrath problem is unfair compared to other classes.

What about the armor issue? Is it intended that the armor we bought for ash is not heavy armor and that the values are all messed up? Will there be a hot fix?

I think it's too late for that design, but I'm with you on this. I think wrath was broken at design. Or rather how they tied it all together is broken.

Doing good dps in bear form and mediocre dps in man form, if dps is mostly what you are doing in man form, that's not the most fun experience. You can retain the wrath building by adding more synergy between man and bear vs making them compete directly with each other.

How you do that at this point I don't know. But I do know I'm strongly in favor of fairly heavy wrath generation in bear form. Not where it is now, as wrath is here to stay so it should have some meaning. But I don't want to be spending 2/3 of my time doing mediocre dps compared to bear form. I'd still play the class but most likely avoid dps roles if at all possible.

Healing/tanking don't suffer as much from the direct man/bear competition thing. And at least in yellow which I've played more, wrath generation makes it a bit OP.

This is all landscape/T1 stuff, I don't play end game.

[Drengeir]

I'm definitely looking over the suggestions here for a polish pass, so thanks for the feedback!


-Vastin

Hi Vastin!

I will admit I was skeptical about a lot of these changes at first, but having played many hours of my bear over the last two days, I will say that the class finally feels like what it was meant to be. I know some people have found the multiple stances inconvenient, but it hasn't bothered me personally. Getting rid of Wonderlust and adding the bonus to bear-form stance might help with that though. Here are just a few things and suggestions on how the class feels right now, and possible fixes to help. This is for Red Line only

Getting rid of out-of-combat wrath degeneration is the best thing for a casual player. It allows us to run into combat as a bear (if we so choose) and helps the class feel like its roots (I do understand that the expose buff is still necessary, but I'm talking landscape specifically). If you do decided to nerf the passive wrath generation in Bear Form, it may help, but it is very minimal anyway.

Next, please allow Bash bleeds to stack again. Right now the fact that Vicious Claws refreshes the bleeds is virtually useless because when Bash resets its CD you just use the skill again. It just takes a little strategy out of playing the class.

In terms of wrath building and skills that consume wrath, I think there is just a few small adjustments that need to be made (and some larger suggestions). Having thrash build wrath is awesome, as it allows us to fight a little longer as a bear than before. However, rn there aren't enough useful bear-form attacks that consume wrath that fit in to a regular rotation. Vicious Claws can deal good damage with the legacy, but the CD is now longer. Same goes for skills like Armour Crush (if slotted) and relentless maul. The CD's are so long that if you wanna stay as a bear then you just keep using thrash for a while anyway. Switching to man form doesn't help much either as the DPS does drop and the most useful skill is the expose weakness buff.

SO - my thoughts on how to combat all this. I think rotations could become more fluid and have more options if some of the other wrath consuming skills had there CD's reduced. For a skill like Relentless Maul, I think it could be made more useful if either A) the damage was drastically increased (the legacy adjusted from about 30+% to maybe closer to 60+%) or B) the CD was dropped. If either of these things happened, you could increase the wrath cost of the skill to help balance out the building and usage of wrath. Obviously I would like Bash bleeds to stack again. And finally Execute. I understand why the free usage was removed when the skill procs, but the attack still doesn't do enough damage to justify losing all wrath. I would say either allow the skill to crit again/always crit or increase the base damage of the attack drastically. Otherwise the moment of opportunity proc needs to be altered. Maybe have it consume a large chunk of wrath when it procs, but not all wrath? Something like up to 40 or 50 wrath? That way the skill does not drain all wrath and can be once again thrown into rotations (again the CD could be dropped, though if some of these other fixes go through it would be less necessary to do so).


WHEW. Sorry, I know that was a lot. Hope any of that feedback helped or the suggestions helped, or something. I am very happy with where the class is after a lot of these changes and would like to see Red line begin to get closer to its fullest potential.

Thanks!

[Aelbryht]

I think there's another source or bonus that I overlooked that got buffed by one of my changes that I need to re-examine, because yeah, the wrath REALLY floods in during combat. I fixed a bunch of bugs with other skills not benefiting correctly from things like legacy wrath bonuses, so maybe all together it is just adding up too much.

-Vastin

I've been trying out red line while questing around Eregion at level 50 on Anor (without an LI) and I notice most of my attacks can just randomly add an extra 3 wrath, even normal auto-attacks. Whether in man or bear form. So if I use Bash at 100 wrath for example, it will drop to 80 then suddenly spike up to 83 instead of just climbing 1 at a time like normal.

Has something gone wrong behind the scenes with:

Wrath Return Legacy: Only attacks that spend wrath can benefit from this refund legacy. Non-attack skills no longer incorrectly benefit from this legacy.

?

*EDIT* - It's the same in blue line except my passive gain is 3 at a time in bear form, and these random extra chunks of wrath are +5 instead.

[Drengeir]

Oh, sorry, and one other thing - Call to the Wild.

Right now skills that consume wrath have such long CD's that the skill feels next to useless (beyond the fact that it's currently bugged). If all skills that consume wrath had wrath costs increased and CD's decreased, then Red Line would probably feel more balanced and a skill like Call to the Wild more useful. Though I ideally still think the legacy should be altered to give phys. mastery as well increase duration (like the non-imbued version)

[CaerArianrhod]

I don't want to choke it off mind you, but 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.

-Vastin

Don't change it to early.
I did some t2 6man instances with the Beorning as healer, i still had to change forth and back from bear to man form to get wrath quickly back to heal up the group. The wrath generation is nice, but considering T3 i would wait a bit and see. If you mean with "CotW" Call To Wild, it is only a red skill, in yellow we have only one short-CD skills with sure wrath generation: Thrash. All other skills are depending on chance.

[JERH]

Having spent some more time on my beorning today I wanted to reinforce a few points made in just previous posts. Blue has enough bear form wrath using skills on short Cooldowns like claw swipe that you can use up wrath and go down somewhat quickly. Offsetting this is if counterattack procs you zoom right back up nicely. If not you can drop below 50 easily. In blue there is no loss of crit like in red so no side effects.

As pointed out red has no real users of wrath on short enough cooldown ( most skills 12s, 16s, ...) to use up the thrash increase. This seems good to allow the +15% crit bonus to stay on. Every 15 seconds I need to hit slash, then refresh expose, composure if healing needed, then thrash (and then bash) to go back into bear stance. This also keeps wrath at max in red. With only 1 short cooldown bear skill it makes for some awkward pauses.

So, very good work so far and I look forward to some tweaks that balance out the different blue, red, and yellow play styles.

[Henna95]

Would it be possible to make shape shifting to be an immediate skill, like the previous skill was.
Currently changing forms feels much less responsive than what it used to feel before the update.

[Arkinon]

I've got to agree that now it feels clunky changing forms whereas before it flowed smoothly. Adding the speed buff out of combat to regular bear form would help and just revert it to turn it on or off with the one button like it used to be if it is possible. If not I will get used to it I guess.


I love the other changes for my blue line Beorning though as now I really feel like I am experiencing the text that reads being mainly in bear form for the line. Even my buddy that I play with all the time noticed I was in bear form more now. Of course I am only mid-level so I'm not able to say what these changes do in the end game.

[JiiPee]

I'm definitely looking over the suggestions here for a polish pass, so thanks for the feedback!

Good to hear and lot of changes are quite good you have made, however healing is overtuned in my opinion.

And I know you are still working with maul, not sure if you know this very annoying bug on it. Skill cost 20 wrath but you need to have actually over 40 wrath to it work. If you do maul and you have only lets say 38 wrath, maul will cancel almost instantly what means that you jsut wasted 20 wrath for nothing. This goes to all traitlines.

[Hildilas]

I think it's too late for that design, but I'm with you on this. I think wrath was broken at design. Or rather how they tied it all together is broken.

.

Nah I didn't want to say that anyway because I read everything and knew that it won't be an overhaul. BUT it actually should be easy to have wrath/get wrath because of how easy other classes get "theirs". I don't think about power on my warden/lm/burg/ hunter, I don't think about focus on my hunter...and they don't even need to press an extra shapeshift button in between.

We have two skills that transform us to man/bear. It would be amazing to shapeshift automatically by pressing every "grey" button.

[Dinara]

I'm definitely looking over the suggestions here for a polish pass, so thanks for the feedback!

I'll look at whether it makes sense to fold the speed buff into basic bear form and remove the specific wanderlust form. The speed buff cancels in combat regardless, so that might work technically, but there are a few other factors I need to consider behind the scenes before I do that.

As for wrath, the change I made to base wrath burn vs. generation in bear form actually shouldn't have made as big a difference as we're seeing - it's mostly just a convenience benefit and a minor wrath bonus in combat. More significant in blue line obviously, but still really only amounts to a total difference of 2 wrath/sec.

Thrash generating wrath obviously makes a pretty big difference and perhaps the two together are sufficient to explain the much higher wrath generation - but I'm still dubious. I think there's another source or bonus that I overlooked that got buffed by one of my changes that I need to re-examine, because yeah, the wrath REALLY floods in during combat. I fixed a bunch of bugs with other skills not benefiting correctly from things like legacy wrath bonuses, so maybe all together it is just adding up too much.

I don't want to choke it off mind you, but 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.

-Vastin

Dear Vastin,

I have the deepest respect for you and truly appreciate all that you do for this game. I would just like to ask you one thing, please please please don't mess with the wrath for the Red line solo player.
Before you made the changes there was no reason or actual way to fight in bear form for more than 15 to 30 seconds. Now, it's actually fun and resembles many solo players image and understanding of the Beorn.
If you want to make the changes for the leet raiders to the other lines to make it more difficult for them as they seem to enjoy, go ahead by all means. But please leave the Red line alone.

Thanks for your time.

[Menegris]

I want to mention that even with Slash working in beo form like on one of the Bullroarer tests (dunno if it was bug or not), even with that thing beorning already can play Red line/do dmg without need to switch in man form very often. Using Call To Wild, wrath potions, Expose in rotation (yes, only in beo form) and ofc Slash let you stay in bear form for 3+ min. I think its more interesting to maintain your wrath by your skills and rotation than just have permanent wrath. Here is a screen of 3 min combat bear form only before last big update (as you see no man wrath generation skills at all). Also it shows that earlier almost all beorning dmg was from Bash bleeds.

[Atreius]

Would it be possible to make shape shifting to be an immediate skill, like the previous skill was.
Currently changing forms feels much less responsive than what it used to feel before the update.

yea, I used to be able to use a skill like bash and immediately switch to man form while the skill executed. Now it's mostly like bash > wait for bash to end > actually able to transform.

Kinda liked it like it was before.

Good to hear and lot of changes are quite good you have made, however healing is overtuned in my opinion.

And I know you are still working with maul, not sure if you know this very annoying bug on it. Skill cost 20 wrath but you need to have actually over 40 wrath to it work. If you do maul and you have only lets say 38 wrath, maul will cancel almost instantly what means that you jsut wasted 20 wrath for nothing. This goes to all traitlines.

I always felt it was like this, but thought I just cancelled the channeling by error somehow.

Dear Vastin,

I have the deepest respect for you and truly appreciate all that you do for this game. I would just like to ask you one thing, please please please don't mess with the wrath for the Red line solo player.
Before you made the changes there was no reason or actual way to fight in bear form for more than 15 to 30 seconds. Now, it's actually fun and resembles many solo players image and understanding of the Beorn.
If you want to make the changes for the leet raiders to the other lines to make it more difficult for them as they seem to enjoy, go ahead by all means. But please leave the Red line alone.

Thanks for your time.

I am not looking to insult or be mean, but you are either exaggerating or maybe didnt play the class properly, or you also need to understand that you are playing the wrong class if you think staying 90% in bear form and 10% man form is a good thing.
This isn't the Guardian Druid from WoW.


Man form need to keep its weight (if it sucks then just buff it), you either rebuild the whole class to work only in bear or you just break the class. And Vastin/SSG can't/won't do that kind of heavy revamp, so our best option is to keep the class how it was built from the start and try to tweak it up to good levels of perfomance.

[Lampion-Snowbourn]

I'm definitely looking over the suggestions here for a polish pass, so thanks for the feedback! -Vastin

Thank you for that! I was wondering why it was released on live, even though it feels like it might be meant for Bullroarer, but now I see there's a lot more feedback coming from live.

Just a suggestion to stances: if wanderlust would be addition to bear form, then could it be that the default form is man form (stance), and you toggle bear stance with one button?

As you have to get out of bear form to use quest items, it's really necessary to put the stance to a shortcut, and one button less for shortcutting really makes the difference.

Thanks for the efforts once again!

[Pavlin]

I want to mention that even with Slash working in beo form like on one of the Bullroarer tests (dunno if it was bug or not), even with that thing beorning already can play Red line/do dmg without need to switch in man form very often. Using Call To Wild, wrath potions, Expose in rotation (yes, only in beo form) and ofc Slash let you stay in bear form for 3+ min. I think its more interesting to maintain your wrath by your skills and rotation than just have permanent wrath. Here is a screen of 3 min combat bear form only before last big update (as you see no man wrath generation skills at all). Also it shows that earlier almost all beorning dmg was from Bash bleeds.

Dear friend. First can i suggest you to NOT give feedbacks and bad ideas until you know the class.
Wrath potions ? Hello ?
Red beor can fight in bear for without need to switch to human from very often? Hello ?
In red bear you have one resource generating skill with decent dmg / but no more than that/ (Thrash), one bleed which you aply no more than 1 per 13 seconds (bash), one 30 seconds cd execute /which you need to use at full wrath/ and bees every 12 seconds. If you use Relentles maul for ST is fine, stil 30 sec cd skil.
So after you aply this rotation you have like 10 seconds thrash spam until you have your dots ready to reaply.
So far so good. As you say you dont need to switch to human form often. But you do. All skills i mention so far, will let you do less dmg than yellow cpt / if you use only them in rotation. Every fight you start with expose /human form skill only/ then you do 3 times thrash and aply all bear from skills i mentioned. Then you hit thrash again/ to keep it 3 stack/ then Slash / which move you to human form/ then biting edge to aply those jucy bleeds, then back to bear form and repeat.
You need to switch to human EVERY 15 seconds to keep your expose buff up / -40% target`s mitigation/

So 15 sec is not very often ?
And again, learn your class better. Then give advices. Some devs have bad habit to listen to all posts in the forums, picking the worse ones. And we dont want that do we...

Cheers.

[Deadly_Myths]

imo after some tests in redline on my bear, man form right now is so uselss. you can sustain wrath from trash in bear form so easily which is really bad and makes no point of man form at all. you don't have to worry about wrath at all which was the fun part before that how to manage your wrath properly.

[zipfile]

And again, learn your class better. Then give advices. Some devs have bad habit to listen to all posts in the forums, picking the worse ones. And we dont want that do we...

Cheers.

Much like you calling out other people who don't tank and then claiming Beornings have no AOE skills to grab aggro?

[Atreius]

Dear friend. First can i suggest you to NOT give feedbacks and bad ideas until you know the class.
Wrath potions ? Hello ?
Red beor can fight in bear for without need to switch to human from very often? Hello ?
In red bear you have one resource generating skill with decent dmg / but no more than that/ (Thrash), one bleed which you aply no more than 1 per 13 seconds (bash), one 30 seconds cd execute /which you need to use at full wrath/ and bees every 12 seconds. If you use Relentles maul for ST is fine, stil 30 sec cd skil.
So after you aply this rotation you have like 10 seconds thrash spam until you have your dots ready to reaply.
So far so good. As you say you dont need to switch to human form often. But you do. All skills i mention so far, will let you do less dmg than yellow cpt / if you use only them in rotation. Every fight you start with expose /human form skill only/ then you do 3 times thrash and aply all bear from skills i mentioned. Then you hit thrash again/ to keep it 3 stack/ then Slash / which move you to human form/ then biting edge to aply those jucy bleeds, then back to bear form and repeat.
You need to switch to human EVERY 15 seconds to keep your expose buff up / -40% target`s mitigation/

So 15 sec is not very often ?
And again, learn your class better. Then give advices. Some devs have bad habit to listen to all posts in the forums, picking the worse ones. And we dont want that do we...

Cheers.

You know, I think writing this rotation actually is a simple way to see why Wrath generation currently doesn't work in Red Bear.

This is why I think so: Before the changes (when Wrath generation sucked too much actually) you did this rotation, not only because you needed to do it to achieve 100% of your damage, BUT BECAUSE you also needed the Wrath it gave you. So it basically it was a natural thing, just the flow of things.

After the changes, the rotation is still pretty much that... the only change tho is that since wrath generation is a complete joke, you actually do this rotation just because you need it to unleash 100% of your damage, not because you also need the wrath. Because you probably don't, you probably are sitting at so much wrath since your Execute is on Cooldown, and u have simply 0 way to spend it beside Bash/bees every like 10+ sec.