How would you make Tank and DPS Beornings viable for high tiers?

[Omen_Kaizer]

Just as a thought experiment, I've been wondering what it would take for Beornings to be competitive tanks and dps in all tiers of endgame PVE content. I'm a Captain/Warden player, primarily, but I put a lot of effort into my bear.

As tanks, I think beornings are already good, clearly the second best tanks at this moment. They're stout and have a lot of utility available. But they're overshadowed by captain tanks and beorning healers to the point that there's no debate on which tank is better, no wiggle room to run beartanks in the hardest content. A game is healthier with choicesp. As it currently stands:

• Damage reductions: Captanks and beartanks have comparable passive net damage reduction. For a captain, 63% mits & -30% inc dam [with tome of D, not counting the other sources that are not always on] equates to incoming damage being reduced to 25.9% of baseline 0% mits and 0% inc dam. Beornings with Tome of Defense and guarded up are looking at net reduction of 22.5% phys and 31.5% tact. Beornings benefit better from outside %mit buffs and Captains benefit better from outside -% inc dam buffs. Captains have a few <100%-uptime sources of damage reduction, though.
• Self-heals: Speaking more anecdotally since I dont have any good parses saved and haven't looked at others', feels like for self heals Y-B captank > B-R beartank (was #1, before U27) > B-Y beartank > Y-R captank.
• BPE: For what it's currently worth (trash and boss autoattacks), captanks have far better BPE from some whopping +5/6/8% buffs available to them at 100% uptime, vs 0/0/10% at 50% uptime for beartanks.
• ICH: Beartanks have pretty good inc heal, but captanks have more.
• Morale: Similar morale if there's a captain of some sort in group with a beartank, but otherwise the captank is stouter (I build my beartank and captank basically the same).
• Aggro: Single-target aggro is no issue for either, and multi-target aggro is about to stop mattering too.
• Damage: Beartanks do far more damage than captanks, but the contribution isn't noticeable the way it is for a bearhealer; maybe I just suck at that aspect, but I get ~10k DPS on a dummy in a "tank" rotation with heals and debuffs and all that, vs 5k for a captank and ~20-30k for my bear healer--chime in if that fits what you see.
• Cooldowns: Biggest difference between the two is that captanks have far better and more cooldowns than beartanks. The big cooldowns, I'd almost rather have Thickened Hide than SotD, just because it can stack with tome of defense and other stuff for some potential cheese with the right support, though in practical terms I'd rather have flat -75% inc dam for 20s at <2m cd than (-60% + -10% + ??) inc dam for 25s at flat 2m cd. Beartank has no answer to the biggest cooldown Last Stand, which is huge, or To Arms, which is handy. If we had Orthanc-style difficult trash pulls or any other circumstance where BPE really mattered, I'd rather have Fighting Withdrawal than Counter. Traited Ferocious Roar is like a smaller, hollow Warriors Heart. Beartanks can stack Vigilant and Ferocious roars for big incoming healing modifiers, but the captain's smaller cooldowns To Arms, SB Call, and banner are net better.
• Utility: Captanks have Fellowship To Arms, inc heal banner + double rez OR full war banner + single rez OR ####ty war banner + double rez, and IHW. IHW is probably more impactful in 6mans than in raids unless you have two captanks (or just a sacrificial red capt, if you're avoiding a single burst/wave of damage and not successive DoTs), but I don't want to downplay how impactful it can be. Herald. Tactics buff. And a mark, either +10% inc damage debuff or a raidwide 4% HoT. And Motivating+IDOME, and a huge +70% fear resistance which is not so important in Remm. And Rally or Routing buffs to the fellowship (not so impactful when buffing healers/support in a raid, less so in a 6man with a red cap). Beartanks bring much less to the table defensively and more offensively, though they're apples to oranges. Bees & armor crush, offensive debuffs essential to any melee comp. Slam and Piercing Roar and Sac, defensively. But, the problem is...
• Redundancy: Unless you're running 3 Captains, either 2 reds because it's a multitarget fight demanding the kind of burst two oathies can bring (niche) or 2 captanks (not as niche, just only Rukhor in Remm). But you can't really have two beornings in a raid without them significantly stepping over each other in terms of utility. And heal beornings have won their place in a raid by being excellent raid healers with solid, unique support. Two Sacs would be pretty good if individuals got nasty DoTs. Two Piercing Roars is eh--you'll have one up whenever you need it (broadcasted boss attacks). Two armor crushes would be useful on paper, but that sounds like a nightmare to coordinate. Beorning's signature utility, phys mit debuff through Bees, though, counts for only one Beorning.

Ultimately, Captains are just better tanks with more in their toolbox, especially defensively. Bears are passively stouter (mits/inc dam, morale, inc heal) only when co-tanking with a captank because of Herald, On Guard, Motivating, To Arms, Banner, Reveal Mark, etc being shared. But even then, the idea of having Last Stand and IHW on each tank is more attractive in Remm and probably will continue to be in future raids without some nerfs to captanks and buffs to beartanks (and other tanks! But there are plenty of threads for them). I would reduce or remove the heal on Last Stand, possibly increase the base cooldown of one or both of LS and SotD.

As DPS, there's less need to get into the weeds. They just need more DPS and some unique support options.


To fix, or take a step towards fixing beartanks and dps bears, I'm thinking along of the lines of the following:

HIDE
Counter: gains +5% mits. Going from 75% to 80% phys mit reduces incoming common damage by 20% relatively speaking. 65%->70% is ~14% reduction, but folks aren't generally T3+ capped on tact atm.
Ferocious Roar and Bear Form: #heal the beorning equivalent to the % of morale gained, unaffected by inc heal. I.e., you'll be gaining full bar instead of empty health bar. Stancing is integral to beorning play, and beartanks shouldnt be punished for jumping over to man for a heal or self buff (and the self buff should work better!).
Weakening Strike: Slam debuff stacks with that of up to 2 other beorning's slams. That -10% each is additive to whatever net bonus a boss has (something above 100%), so you aren't seeing a damage reduction by 10% per slam.
Vigilant Roar (Tier 2 selected trait) and Rake (Tier 2 blue inherent trait) swapped. Claw Swipe becomes available on rank 1 of Rake; bleeds applied to Claw Swipe on rank 5. This is more for DPS bears getting both AoE and another bleed.

CLAW
Expose: becomes a man-only skill. Debuffs a target by -15% Crit D for 20s. This is a nerf to solo bears (they'll be fine) and would help group bears (current personal mits reduction is redundant to the raid's mit debuffs). Adds a needed and uncommon type of utility that synergizes with red bears being a crit class. All Crit D rating debuffs are broken, but % debuffs (burg C Gondor proc essence) work.
Execute: Make it give beorning a +15% crit chance for X seconds, likely best as a 5/5 trait totally replacing Turn the Tides (call it Avalanche or something). Red beornings would be encouraged to dump wrath as intended, because they wouldn't on net lose crit chance from wrathful--and if you're quick, you have a window where you have even higher crit chance, as you regain wrath while the Avalanche buff is rolling. Also fix its ability to crit.
Broad Thrash: rename it Big Swings or something, and add a 50% wrath refund to Executes that crit and 100% wrath refund if they dev.
Composure: bring it back the way it was before Bombadil. C'mon.
Debilitating Bees: move this over from ROAR, replacing Crippling Stings. Moors bears will be nerfed with the loss of a snare/slows I guess? Heal bears will be a little nerf but still be meta, but there will be some more choices to make because...

ROAR
Searing Stings: replacing Debilitating Bees, this grants up to -15% light mitigation. So they still have some unique offensive utility inherently but have to choose between phys mit bees and armor crush. Makes needed space for red bears to exist and blue-red tanks to exist again.

Legacies: I'm thinking melee crit damage and bleed damage, one more for each LI. That'll buff the utility (personal dps) of heal beornings too, which I'm not super comfortable with.


Hope to see a good conversation! Though the "why have more than one viable role?" question has been hashed out plenty elsewhere.