**75+ Hours on Druid Bear feedback — Fun, Powerful, but Far Too Squishy in Late Game**

Hello GGG,

I wanted to give some detailed feedback after putting **around 75 hours** into the **Druid Bear** in Path of Exile 2. I genuinely enjoy the class — the playstyle is fun, the fantasy is nailed, and the damage potential is there — but in its current state, the bear form feels **extremely punishing and fragile in late-game, high-juice mapping**.

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## What Feels Great

* Bear form feels **visceral and fun** to play
* Damage scaling is solid, even into endgame
* The fantasy of being a tanky, frontline bruiser is very appealing
* Clear and boss damage can be excellent with investment

The issue is not damage or enjoyment — it’s **survivability**.

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## Major Problems in Late Game

### 1. Extremely Low Life Ceiling

In high-end maps with juice, the Druid Bear realistically ends up around **2.5k–3k life**. This is simply not enough for a melee, face-tanking archetype.

Even with high damage reduction, you still get **one-shot constantly**, especially by bosses or empowered rares.

This makes the class feel backwards — you’re encouraged to walk up to enemies, but the game heavily punishes you for doing so.

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### 2. No Real Ailment Mitigation on the Left Side of the Tree

One of the biggest issues is that **there is effectively no way to deal with ailments** on the left side of the red skill tree.

* No accessible ailment immunity
* No meaningful ailment reduction
* No clear pathing options without massive point investment

As a result, freezes, shocks, ignites, and other ailments frequently lead directly to death, especially when combined with one-shots.

For a melee shapeshifter that must stay in close range, this feels extremely punishing.

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### 3. Stun Threshold Is Not a Solution

Even when investing into **stun threshold**, it does not solve the core problem. You still die in a single hit before any of those defenses matter.

It feels like stun threshold exists on paper, but in practice does nothing to help the Bear survive real endgame encounters.

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### 4. Armour Alone Is Not Enough

The Bear leans heavily into **armour-based mitigation**, but in the current league and endgame environment, **armour alone does not work**.

* Large hits still one-shot you
* Boss abilities completely bypass your defenses
* Damage reduction feels irrelevant against modern scaling

Even stacking armour and damage reduction, you simply cannot mitigate incoming damage in a meaningful way.

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### 5. No Life Nodes to Support the Playstyle

There are **very few meaningful life nodes** available that actually help the Bear survive encounters. For a class that is clearly designed to be in melee range at all times, this feels like a major oversight.

You’re forced into a glass-cannon melee playstyle, which is the worst of both worlds.

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## How This Feels in Practice

In late game:

* You walk up to a boss
* You get hit once
* You die

This happens **even with high damage reduction, armour, and investment**. There’s no room to react, no defensive layers to lean on, and no way to build around the problem within the current tree options.

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## Suggestions

* Increase access to **life nodes** for Druid Bear
* Add **ailment mitigation or immunity options** on the left/red side of the tree
* Introduce defensive mechanics tied specifically to **Bear form** (flat damage reduction, conditional immunity, or scaling defenses)
* Re-evaluate armour's effectiveness for frontline shapeshifters in late-game content

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## Closing Thoughts

The Druid Bear is **one of the most fun classes I’ve played in PoE 2**, but right now it feels like it cannot survive the content it’s meant to engage with.

A melee, tank-themed shapeshifter should not be capped at 3k life with no ailment answers and no meaningful way to avoid being one-shot.

I really hope survivability for the Bear gets another balance pass, because the class is incredibly close to being great — it just needs real defensive tools to match its fantasy.

Thanks for reading,
— A long-time PoE player

it`s such a fascinating design approach: you are a enormous huge lumbering bear, you would think you are slow but powerful. but GGG decided to make him a glas cannon instead, and a super sluggish one at that. inverse is true for many enemies btw, so it`s screwed all around: you have super fast long range enemies with as high or higher health than hulking melee enemies, you have melee classes with useless armor stats. the archetypes seem to be very confused in this game

Squishy? Incoming gigachad titan player boasting about 60k+ armour, it’s a build issue or someshit.