Tag: Beornings

[CC] Developers Diary – Beorning 2.0 – Commentary

After the news that SSG would team up with Fantasy flight games to offer a Beorning founders pack for their Digital cardgame Lotr LCG early access. They announced that a developers diary would come soon, but that it would contain more new then just that partnering. And boy it does. We’ll take a look at the different sections of the dev diary and i’ll give my thoughts about it. *Disclaimer – im still playing a beorning after all this time.

Developers diary: Beorning-(lands)

sir Beorning a lot
First and foremost we’d like to apologize for the level of support the beorning class has gotten since its launch. Over the past few months we’ve verified, after extensive internal testing by multiple developers, that the Beorning class in its current form has fallen behind expectations to relatable classes.

Suprised it took that long. Beornings never were bad, but always felt that something was missing

New loading screen?

While we feel that a multi purpose class should not outpace a designated class. The build-in sturdyness of a Beorning as compared to other classes does not outweigh the handicaps we build in their skill trees in most scenarios. While most reports we get from people about Beorning skills are what we consider functional. We accknowledge that the Beorning different class lines dont differntiate enough. But as Sir mix-alot once said, we like big Beornings, but development time is a scarce commodity.

Seems they do like their big beorning butts. Puns are always welcome. While i might disagree about handicapping an entire class in favour of overall balance. Balancing a non-tank spec to not be better then a designated tank spec like a guardian or blue captain.

But it’s time for the Bear to shine again.

*/Roar

Update 22.2 Beorning class rebuild
While we knew we’d go to North-Mirkwood and heard your grizzly cries about the beorning we had to wait to announce our plans. As of update 22.2 we will introduce a new Beorning. A better Beorning. We’ve rebuild the class from the ground up. Cause over time it became clear that a few tweaks or new skills wouldn’t be enough.

*/Roar harder

Looks the same, but also a lot of new options

The decision to rebuild the class with a different design philopshy was made. Each traitline will feel more unique with the sturdyness removed. Each traitline will have a unique set of skills as opposed to a skill changinng depending on your traitline. Half of the trait lines will be active abbilities and half will be passive traits.
Each passive trait will be focussed on its respective trait line. Red line passive will boost physical skills, yellow line will boost tactical or ranged and blue line will boost defensive skills. In early levels this will give the class a focussed play style. With later class skills unlocked it will allow each beorning to match their playstyle and grouping options.

If this succeeds this would such a great class. Having passive boosts to a beorning will allow us to build a true-swiss army knife. Running a 3-man and missing some dps, but also a heavy. Mix a tank heavy with some red passives. Or a yellow bear that can keep going into the fray in a melee fight. Like a donkey, lets hope we don’t get hit with a rock a 2nd time around.

Update 22.3 Beorning lands
Sterkist and langash quest chain for our Stronghold of the north update ended at the Forest gate, for now. In update 22.3 we’ll introduce the beorning lands as a free content region to every player that has bought the Beorning class. This update will feature a new class-quest chain that will give the Beornings their missing class point and a new armour set that scales with your cub as you level through Middle-earth.

The choice to limit content to beornings only makes me think it would be a smaller quest chain. Our missing allegiance quests for the beorning race? Scaling armour sounds works the same as the High-elven jewelry.

https://moth-eatn.deviantart.com/art/Beorn-34091658
Assault on the beorning lands

To challenge your Beornings versatility there will be a new instance that scales with the number of Beornings in your party. This instance will feature the growing onslaught unleashed by the goblins from the Misty mountains. Mix your bears and defend your home lands in a skirmish of epic battles.

Essentially a Survival of the Barrow downs that has build in scaling. Discussion about allowing other classes to also access this, but this would be great for other classes as well. Deeds are in place for Beornings, but having 3 wardens or 6 minstrels go toe-to-toe would be great as well. Function over flavour i’d say here.

All your cubs belong to us
After each class or skill revamp we have reset a players trait points or legendary weapon to allow players choose their new plan of attack. This is the first time we’ve redone an entire class though. After thorough discussion between the developers and Palantir group we’ve decided to give each Beorning class a free Aria of the valar and a set of the scaling armour and jewelry depend

ing on the level as of update 22.1. In addition each Beorning will be reset to level 14. We believe this allows every player to choose what they would like to do. Relive the questing experience with a fresh class and all the options avaialble at their paw tips. Or get their Beorning to level 105 with sufficient options to get their old Beornings back to level 115. If you decide to use the aria of the valar you will be given a level-reset token that is valid for 14 weeks.

No Beorning news would be complete without some controversy. I’m sure we would need to train our bears again, but starting over from level 14? Why 14? Allowing us to Valar our bears makes up for a bit i guess. Not happy with the valar, reset-token? But why give it a date stamp for 14 weeks?

Overall thoughts
A great and much needed effort to trim the fat of the bear. If eveything works out as we hope it will bring the beorning to the forefront without off-staging other classes. See you all on Bullroarer to make these patches a roaring success. First beta build should open up on 01-04-2018.

Update 15.2 Release Notes – Bullroarer Only

Update 15.2 is now live on Bullroarer.

You can read the full release notes here.

There area ALOT of changes to the Beornings

Some of the things that stuck out to me are as follows :

Beornings

  • While a bear, a Beorning has twice the melee range.
  • New Skill: Bear Up
    • Out of combat resurrection skill, unlocked at level 36.
  • Bee Swarm unlocks at level 14, down from level 28.
  • Rush unlocks at 24, down from level 36.
  • Rush’s sprint duration is now 12 seconds, up from 8 seconds.
  • Bear form now has a passive 10% Critical Defence while active.
  • Reduced all tiers of Thrash’s damage by roughly 25%.
  • When Beornings shapeshift, their main and ctrl quickslot bars now switch. You can turn off this behavior via an option on the “Quickslots” tab of the Options panel.
  • Beorning Bear Form skills now shortcut to the “Ctrl” bar by default when they are acquired.
  • Beorning heals should now be properly increased by out-going healing and Tactical Mastery.
  • New Beornings who use the Gift of the Valar will now be able to speak with Rathwald outside the Walls of Moria. Accept the quest ‘Beorning: The Sudden Arrival’ and talk to Hundi at Echad Dunann to obtain your milestone skill (if you never got it outside of Archet).

 

Pelargir

  • In Fellowship Retaking Pelargir, increased the time to earn platinum for Epic Foes Ugturu and Thisarti by a little bit
  • In Retaking Pelargir, there are now prompts to lead the party forward if you just stand around for too long
  • In Retaking Pelargir, there are now announcements of the arrival and defeat of Kisung Teng and Zagaroth, the non-secondary-quest Epic Foes
  • In Retaking Pelargir, some typos, text errors, and audio that wasn’t playing have been fixed
  • Retaking Pelarigr map notes are now correctly colored for secondary quests, and never overlap other secondaries –
  • Retaking Pelargir- When enemies clear out as Aragorn arrives at the end should be cleaner and timelier than it had been
  • Epic Battle promotion point cap raised from 216 to 236.
  • Retaking Pelargir – the failure / incomplete notice for Ship-Slaves will now only appear when it should

 

Music
NOTE: In this build the ABC playback feature does not work so notes will need to be played manually. This should be corrected in the next build.

  • The updates to the music system have once again been put into the game. Instruments have had their notes updated, cleaned up, retuned, and volume re-leveled to be consistent. Please let us know what you think.

New Roving Threats

  • As the War of the Ring intensifies, new threats have come to Middle-earth! Powerful servants of the Enemy can now be found in Angmar, Forochel, Western Gondor, and the Misty Mountains. For those bold enough to stand against these foes, new and unique rewards can be obtained by claiming the brands they bear.
  • Note: The existing Roving Threats of Central Gondor will also drop these brands.

General

  • The Full Screen checkbox in Graphics Options has been replaced by the Screen Mode dropdown, from which you can select Windowed, Full Screen, and, in Windows builds, Full Screen (Windowed). The latter option runs the game in a borderless window at desktop resolution.
  • A Reflecting Pool for Central Gondor can now be found in the town of Linhir, and it contains several instances from the region as well as ‘Even In Darkness.
  • A New Reflecting Pool for West Gondor added to the Court of the Prince in Dol Amroth Many instances added to the West Gondor Reflecting Pools found near Morlad and in Dol Amroth
  • When accepting quests, there’s a new indicator that shows you when the quest being picked up is repeatable.
  • Dead Marshes – Warband: The Lone Hunter – Sorzur is easier to defeat solo now
  • Moria Instance: Greet the Sun – You can’t go outside until after you talk to Svanr now
  • Located a possible culprit for unexpected shallow-water dismounts. Please continue to inform us of situations/locations where you were improperly dismounted from a Warsteed or regular Mount — but hopefully now you won’t have to!
  • Skirmish-specific stat breakdowns on the Skirmish Panel are sorted alphabetically by Skirmish name rather than randomly.
  • Several of the NPCs in Tur Morva were mistaking Beornings for Hobbits. They’ve been given some instructional charts and diagrams and should now be able to tell the difference. The hairy toes were throwing them off
  • The Clan Hunters around Aughaire were confused and believed they could drop pages for Beorning class books. They have been told otherwise, and they (and you!) should now be less confused.
  • The textures for the Suitable Tinder in Volume IV, Book 2 have been cleaned up.
  • Players who used Gift of the Valar can now pick up the quest “A Tortured Mind” in the Entwash Vale
  • The name of the alert that informs you of new Epic Battle cashout loot no longer mentions “Helm’s Deep”