Beorning... getting more and more frustrated with this broken class

[Dodgydruid]

I don't know if any Turbine Devs ever get to read in here, in the official forum, the first time I got to speak, I was silenced because of my not unjust criticisms of what is a broken class.

I operate three accounts, my youngest has my lifetime pre-founders account with the "extras" us testers got as a ty from CM and two others, this one is VIP, the other is ad hoc as and when VIP for me eldest daughter.

I have been playing computer games since the Times gave my old mum a Pong machine to review for the newspaper followed by a range of machines including the ZX80, Ingersoll Rand VCS (aka Atari) all through the home computer and consoles so my experience of gaming including being a quite well known tank in WoW, is quite formidable.

And I say here, whether Turbine want to put their head in the sand or not, is that the Beorning is a broken class!

I don't know what is in the dev's mind, being accused of copying Blizzard seems to be the main thing but bears whether ickle bears or great big lumbering grizzly's in the real world, in the books are quite top of the tree in the killing and rampaging, that is until you put one in LotRO where it becoms weak and piddly, easily beaten and lacking half the other classes innate skills and a total lack of end level armour puts it in a terrible position.

I have tried red tree, blue tree, yellow tree and really pushed it, I have spoken to equally frustrated lvl 100's who like myself are unlucky in not having a trailing healer to keep us going and soloing is dire, half the time the single heal doesn't work, I tested this tonite in the city guard patrol and when despite having my yellow cross triple effect heal going I was beaten into retreat by TWO WEAK CORSAIR THUGS which one of seemed to take no damage at all despite a raft of numbers pinging out of its portrait and my green +heals numbers puffing away, despite havin warding and battle lore running, major healing pot and STILL I died.

My lvl 82 hunter can tank and kill with impunity elite masters, warbands and mounted mobs are three shotted and I have not only my press onward which is an almost full to the top heal, I have my endurance stance auto heal quick shot and with a very high evade rating from agility, there is nothing it seems that can touch me...

The Beorning can stay viable in bear form for about 30 secs, Beorn was well known to wade into seas of orcs and battle for hours but not in this game so all the time you are spending a minute and a half to crank up to change to bear, I mean first time lovers last longer than a Beorning and now with that 2-3 second changeover lag between the two, watch the devastatings hit in that window so you have to forego the bear and heal up.

And so you make it to Dol Amroth and apart from the ultra rare might Nadhin, you drool at the armour on your Beorning trader and then see the weeks it will take you to get ONE piece, your tailors have got three teal types of end level armour but no might, might is only available for the heavy armours and you try to make the best of it with agility Nadhin or agility teal and its useless.

First things first, forget the criticism about the Feral druid, work the bear towards how theirs work, after all it was unashamedly and not a hidden fact that the feral bear of WoW was a direct reference to Beorn, make the blue tree a persistant bear state with massive aoe swipes and taunts and make the red tree a DPS friendly less armour more damage tree, the yellow should be perhaps a mix of that or a utility such as debuffing, Beorn was not known for his standing there and healing things and more for flinging swaths of dead orcs about the place, he didn't fight EVER as a man, he fought ONLY in bear form, what sort of writing would it be if the books said "Yes, Beorn waded in to the sea of orcs only to quickly change back to man to heal himself then whack a few to get back to bear form" or "Before the battle Beorn approached the enemy and asked them politely to attack him only one at a time because his defensive cone seems to be about five degrees arc in front of him and any one attacking slightly to the side might kill him"

I suggest that to fix things for now is to give the man an attached heal like the hunters endurance quick shot and the bear form one of the attacks not a chance to gain wrath but a guaranteed ability to sustain wrath so you can remain in bear form and make the Hearten a heal in both forms, operations wise, the defensive "evade" and parry cones for both forms has to be made almost around, if you go and whack a real bear with a club from behind it doesn't lose half its health and many stories of bear hunting would reveal that stabbing one in the side wouldn't stop it anytime soon unless you scored a direct hit on something vital, bears are like armoured tanks, Beorn was like an armoured tank so why make this class so easily defeated is beyond me.

And as I write this here, not far from the Professors home here in Dorset, I wonder how this is seen by the real fans of the books and I will have to say this is the first time I have seen this game drop the ball so to speak.

[oreyos]

Beornings in LotRO are stretching the lore, not matter how they implemented them. I'd rather have them changing back to man more often than having Bree town overrun by bears...

But at the moment the class is enormously overpowered (At least up until Moria (haven't gotten further yet with my Beorning))
Yes, there is a lack of might based medium armour, and yes, you will suffer from that at level cap.
No, I don't think they need to spruce up the class in so it can faceroll everything like the currently unbalanced other classes. (ie. All classes except the Beorning).

The idea of an MMO is to work TOGETHER. LotRO can be soloed from start to finish (except for some 6-12 man raids).
Yes, players are more solitaire these days, so it might have been a good decision to make playing solo possible, but on the other hand: Grouping with a few other (kin)mates, where you don't need to rely on self-heals and/or damage output to survive can be fun too.

[Killroy]

I thought it was interesting that they added a Beoring Class. I loved the books growing up, and I could remeber the chapter with them.
However, it was a small chapter, and the people where never trully spoken of again throughout the rest of the books.
It is kind of silly seeing a town run by humans, dwarfs or even elves, overun with man-bears (Luckly no pigs yet...so far *♥♥♥♥♥ shotgun*). Eventhough in the books there was no encounter outside Beorings home region. (If I remeber correctly)
But hey some people enjoy the class, and its not forced upon you.
Class limits are the only thing that makes no sense to me.

[Grannie1]

If you don't like it, delete it and play something else. Nobody's twiating your arm, you know. Personally, I'm having a blast with mine. On 2 servers. My first one is 66 or 67 now, and the new one on Brandy just made 31. Both are great fun, and I'm tackling (and demolishing) mobs a lot higher lvl with them than I ever tried with my other chars.

[Deklend]

eh, really my biggest gripe with beorning is it's racial trait weapon. As stated there isn't much info on the skinchangers as a race, but what little there is in the lore, and all other depictions of them in other games and artwork has Beorn or other skinchangers wielding an axe. Like to the point of it being iconic...so turbine has all these works of art to go off of, all their in-game art for the class even have them wielding axes....hell you start off with an axe. So they go ahead and give them a 5% racial trait boost to clubs. Makes sense right?

Honestly though I think all the racial weapon traits need a serious revamp, it wasn't so bad when it was just a 2% boost to auto-attacks, but now that it's 5% to all weapon based attacks, it's no longer an insignificant choice for some race/class combos.

[76561198077869228]

The Beorning was creaeted in response to overwhelming demand from the Players -- the Council, Raiders and PvMPers -- all of the vocal types on the forums.
Granted they all wanted a Ranger class to play, but that simply did not fit in the Lore at all. The same was true of a Paladin or Druid class character -- they simply were not part of Middle Earth. So Turbine hit upon the idea of the Beorning; despite the fact that Beorn had no place AT ALL in the Lord of the Rings -- he only appears in the Hobbit.

All that said. The class is still a Work in Progress. If you listen to Jinjaah and Felorn's chat on twitch yesterday there were two points made about the Beorning - 1 that it is still beind developed and 2- Turbine knows that there is no "might-based" armour beyond level 60.
This latter problem will be addressed after Update 16 comes out. Other tweeks are happening routinely with every new build on Bullroarer for Update 16.

[Darenk]

Not sure how you play, but it is pretty easy to get to full wrath within 10 seconds and return into the bear form. I always change back to man from for the heal, use one or two wrath refresher and go back when the cd is done. You should be able to do the DA dailes with no problem even with the 95 crafted gear.

[Running-Target]

i bought it and tried it, didn't like it early on, he is my storage character now at lvl13.