Warden's bear...

mague

Hi,

i main the warden since Morrowind and have seen this and that. Overall the state of the bear is ok. But a there is always room for improvements

1) In dungeons the bear is immortal. Outside the bear is squishy since a few patches. Cant remember when this startet. Skyrim ? I think he needs a mitigation, resistances an HP buff. Doesnt hurt PvP and in dungeons he is already immortal.

2) No health bar under the characters HP bar like in some other games. If the bear remains squishy, as metioned in 1, then i have to heal him. My main heal would be Fungal Growth, but the mushrooms use a cone. Without a HP bar i never know when to turn to him and heal him. Vigor is a solution but not a warden skill and a health bar would be better.

3) He does not gain anything from HP builds. Impaling Shards + Arctic Winds are a fun build for overland and soloing. The bear should scale from HP if HP is the highest resource. Wont hurt PvP because Impaling Shards is stationary and no one uses the bear anyways.

@the_devs : Did you buff the glow on weapons from lotus and netch (crit chance and weapon damage)? I dual wield and in a dark room it really hurts the eyes in 1st person. Please have a look.

etchedpixels

1. The bear behaviour is morph dependent. The eternal guardian morph respawns if it dies and is more magicka oriented. The wild guardian morph does more physical damage but doesn't. For most things the respawning bear is probably more useful - and more annoying for the enemy in PVP because people tend to wear heavy armour so you want it doing them magic damge

2. Generally only AoE heals target a pet, and even then if there is a number of target cap it will do players before pets. Lotus should heal your pet IF there is no player in range. The other half of the answer unless its changed over time is settings->nameplates->health bars to on although I just let my bear respawn.

3. For a tanky toon you slot the bear when you don't have a group with a decent healer or when soloing. Stick 50 points into strategic reserve and your bear is a free big health regen as you've got 500 ultimate all the time if you don't use the bears mostly ineffective ultimate swipe.

As to the glows - people have been complaining about the bright white transition flashes, the lack of an accessibility option for bright light (or indeed for much else) since the game came out... with no response. Somehow I don't think it's going to happen until accessibility laws somewhere force them to.

You may be able to play with the gamma/brightness settings to reduce the problem. I'm a Linux not a Windows user so I don't know if there are also tools to cap brightness or block flashes in the Nvidia / AMD graphics tools.

The other thing that's far too hidden for pets is targetting - you can target your pets (and companions) with a key if you set it up right.

phaneub17_ESO

Always go Magic Bear, why? It will always do more damage because of Piercing Cold passive. While its normal swing won't have any noticeable increases, the swipe and activation attack will do considerably more damage. Whether you're magicka or stamina focused, Magic Bear does the most damage. No reason to go Physical Bear unless you really like the look of it.