Unleash the bear shaman

[Tyyr]

Are people really arguing that bear shaman is too squishy?
http://www.evilenglish.net/wp-conten...1716-ngbbs.jpg

Ye very mature and constructive post. Good job man! nobody here said the bs is squishy, learn to read ffs

From a pvp perspective, the bear shamen is the best healer out of the 3.

Thats intresting. Only in some games if u are the only healer on team and the enemy have good focus then yes bs might have the upper hand. For other games no

[Korando-AoC]

Don't compare classes with k/d count.
K/d, especially from pugs, is meaningless for several reasons.
BS is probably the hardest class to get a good amount of kills when you are a newbie, but with exp you can still get good amounts of kills and the same k/d you have on a Demo, Sin or whatever. K/D is more about playstyle (and accept or not to take risks) than skills or class strength.

About Bear Shaman beeing a bit weaker than other healers I partially agree.
But overall there are too many variables in a premade, first of all groups setup.
A ToS can be the best or the worst of the 3 healers, depending on both groups setup.
That comment from Northern is very correct imo.
BS is the class with lowest kills potential (unless goes for Muti, knows how to play a Muti build, and his groups plays in a way that fits well Muti gameplay style), but probably the one with best group buffs and enemy group debuffs.

Anyway yes, BS revamp was unfinished and mostly a fail.
There are several things that still needs to be fixed in BS trees.

[Tyyr]

I agree kd does not nessesary mean much as there is alot of tactics that u can use that will improve your kd but will be devastating for your team.
Like never hitting people with low hp ( because u wont get the kill) dont cc for your team mates, only using heal for your own dmg buff.
And yes sadly I see some people use theese tactics and yes they can get nice kd but they are gimping their team when doin so.

[Korando-AoC]

I agree kd does not nessesary mean much as there is alot of tactics that u can use that will improve your kd but will be devastating for your team.
Like never hitting people with low hp ( because u wont get the kill) dont cc for your team mates, only using heal for your own dmg buff.
And yes sadly I see some people use theese tactics and yes they can get nice kd but they are gimping their team when doin so.

Aniulka.
No need to say anything else mate about kd...

[Wheya]

The Bs is a little bit more sturdy than tos. The gaps in sturdyness between the 3 healer classes are not that great, though. The Tos should suffer more than bs/pom not because he is a lot more squishy but because he should be a lot higher in the position as priory target. This is because the tos is a much greater thread on the battlefield.

Unless the stars are aligned and your name is Lurvi the vast majority of bear shamans will struggle to get 1300dps single target dmg. This with pve gear and a pve spec that is completely different to a pvp spec when it comes to the combos used. I think it is safe to say a tos easily can do 20% more single target dmg on strawman than a bs which would be 1660dps. Correct me if I am wrong. I don't play tos myself.

A big difference between those 2 classes (you can apply the stuff that is following to other classes as well) is something I have not seen mentioned before in the forum. Let us assume we have a blue heal which heals us for 192hp, 2 green heals with 64 hp each, a hp pot with 70 hp, and a mage shield which absorbs 92 dmg each hit (this one gets even more tricky because in a combo finisher that is hitting 3 times this shield is applied 3 times so it is 276 instead of 92 absorb but same applies to spells like wof or stormfield etc). Just make it easy and add up this numbers to a single number/sec: 192 + 2 * 64 + 70 + 92 = 482. Of course this number is not the number you always get. I am fully aware that this number can differ greatly according to specific circumstances. Sometimes you only have one green heal, next time you have no blue heal, another time you absorb 276 instead of 92. Then things like natural health reg etc come into play. Nevertheless I think 480 is a fair avarage number. You can play around with your own numbers if you disagree with my numbers. In the end however you can not ignore there are numbers that decrease the dmg income you take.

Now let us look again at single target dmg of bs and tos. Bs 1300dps, tos 20% more dps = 1660 dps. Let us substract 480 from those dps numbers. Bs reaches 1300 - 480 = 820 dps, tos reaches 1660 - 480 = 1180 dps. The difference between those two values is 1180 / 820 = 1.439. My conclusion is: the tos very often in a pvp environment can apply 43% more single target dps than bs. (of course this 43% is not carved in stone, it's only an example that points in the right direction)

And now we can start talking about the difference between aoe and single target dmg.


Please don't get me wrong. I do not want to make look tos as an easy class like ranger. Tos is certainly one of the more challenging classes to play. In my difficulty rankings I've mentioned in a previous post I would consider tos to be on hard difficulty level. Respect to all those players who have chosen tos to play.

[Lurvi]

I know it was mentioned in the OP, but I will not drag PvE into this post, cause it is so different, and definately no point to mix them.

as for the the K/D way of looking at it... it is wrong... like already Korando said, those numbers are taken from PUGS.

"numbers speak for themselves"
0 kills does not mean you haven't been doing damage! bear shaman rarely do trash damage, so yes people will killsteal if targets aren't finished off.
when it comes to single target damage though... bear shaman can get killcredit because of low cooldown accessible damage, but surely it depends on the spec and execution.

in a spec with decent damage we have just enough burst to do maybe +4k damage burst quite fast on a squishy, and this is before many other classes get time to land their main damage, and we have it without much cooldown(s). I'd mark that pom and tos have more of this (~4k burst) kind of damage with ez mode aoe spells, and this is why they shine, though with a cooldown. premades often regroupings happen, so the cooldowns come back up and gg. but asking for bear shamans to get AoE damage... come on.

Khramps stating bear shaman is "the best healer", I kinda disagree because PoM heal the best with easily perkable crit bigheal + instant feat / 20 deflect + 25 deflect blessing of mitra.
(unless you drop SF or anti-cc, do you khramps?)
in that case they are more equal.

but what I think Khramps is thinking about is, bs has some other x-factors:
can charge in, disrupt a backline with instant booming roar, enable your team to push / stagger an enemy push. You could argue this is a tanks job, but bears have ursine bond, so why not?
has a lot group buffs and constant debuffs on enemies that no stats will ever show!
does not die that as fast as a tos can, giving enemy soldiers less ez targets to go for.

stop taking it to the extremes with examples guys...? 60% prot, lol are RF rings really so busted, you mean with electrical rune + rune of regrowth? and why is Aniulka even mentioned here?

Vasylyos and Tyyr is right imo that bear shaman needs a slight increase in mitigation, since the hp is so low, but not by much. We whined so hard on testlive forums when gear was revamped as FC tried to give us the same protection as barb in light armor, so they upped it a bit, but not enough. then next class revamp they left it halfdone. improved lycan bite isn't even working as intended. there is so much obvious stuff left.

is bear viable in premades? I think so. it depends on the lineup aswell. but like Wheya said, it's easier and safer to stick with tos.
need to experiment in premades. there is no point in theorycrafting before putting it to the test anymore.

[Edwardus]

stop taking it to the extremes with examples guys...? 60% prot, lol are RF rings really so busted, you mean with electrical rune + rune of regrowth? and why is Aniulka even mentioned here?

Exactly what i meant without the rf rings ( i still dont have it on bear) i have roughly 57 or 58 if i recall correctly. Plus you can mitigate more with stone hide "only deflects the incoming dmg does not improve your protection).Plus im almost at 10 with pom and since i have bear and tos at 10 and pom at 9. Comparing the 3 Pom its the perfect class, the class that can control an entire mini.And the tools pom has so make bear or tos blush..

[Lurvi]

all this talk about mitigation is based on how the bear shaman plays right now. if they fixed the class, it would be ok

fix Rune of Grounding, compared to Power of the Serpent Ring of the tos it's a joke, mainly because of the long cast. said it countless times: bears have sluggish 2h whitehit animations already to stagger spellcasts. this type of spell has to be faster. Especially since the extreme snare is a deathtrap. Give it de-toggle, so it's easier to remove.

just because how easy it is to get off PotSR in time the tos is more survivable vs. casters with the relatively low cooldown and extra mobility.

then Stone hide + Lycantrophic Bite as well, why are they spells and not abilites like cunning deflection? that we can use mid animation?

makes a big difference on a bear that already is struggling to find time and room to cast manifestations and runes between whitehits. There are more changes that should have been done (like buffing some manifestations) but these small quality of life changes would make bear much more solid.

as for a short window of +55% protection. imo it doesn't matter too much, because bear shaman is still a low hp target with slow defensive tools. no easy escape or instant save. besides, regrowth isn't a preferred manifestation either, but go ahead and spam if you like. Never played with t3.5 weapon though, so my perspective might be flawed somewhat, but 80 con doesn't change too much.

[Rathothis]

Here's an analysis of premade results which have recently been posted. Granted, this is based on very limited data (8 games, or 32 healers), and probably doesn't show much. Still, I find the result somewhat surprising, in particular for PoMs:

BS: K 6.11, D 5.78, K/D 1.06
PoM: K 4.55, D 7.27, K/D 0.63
ToS: K 10.62, D 12.46, K/D 0.85

[Caudilloo]

Here's an analysis of premade results which have recently been posted. Granted, this is based on very limited data (8 games, or 32 healers), and probably doesn't show much. Still, I find the result somewhat surprising, in particular for PoMs:

BS: K 6.11, D 5.78, K/D 1.06
PoM: K 4.55, D 7.27, K/D 0.63
ToS: K 10.62, D 12.46, K/D 0.85

While I agree the results are surprising I think they say more about a handful of players on poms and BSs then they say about their classes. I don't think you can even get a general idea yet with this sample size. The numbers are not nearly big enough yet to say something about class strength. For that to happen there need to be a sufficiently big enough sample size (without one player playing in more then 1 premade in the sample) to factor out different skill on players.

For example 1 exceptional pom that does 3+ K/D and would have played in 4 of these premades would have pretty much 180'd the results for poms. The same goes for one exceptionally bad BS that goes .2 K/D in 4 of these premades. With 8 minis used in the data it can even be unlucky where 3 times the team with the pom just happens to be the weaker team that gets dominated the whole game.

One option would be to go in the previous premade topics and pull all screenshots from those but this wouldn't be 100% accurate either because of class changes since then.

Then there are several methodological pitfalls and biases that are almost unavoidable.
For example because it are often the same players posting screens, those players will represent a unproportional large part of your data. Both including them and leaving them out will skew your results. Good example of this the threat that was linked earlier with the K/D data of all classes in PuG minigames/ The OP always played a HoX which influences the results in several ways. Classes good against hox look better and vice versa, and the HoX stats say more about OPs skill with HoX then general HoX results etc.

Then there is the point which Korando and Lurvi brought up in how far it is useful to measure the effectiveness of a BS (or any class for that matter) in K/D because of the way kills are counted towards players and various factors influencing that.

TL;DR While analyzing minigames this way can be fun I think you should be very very careful drawing any conclusions of which class is strong/weak based on it.