Moze to me was a mech pilot first and a soldier second, all the in game lore and the game trailers show moze in iron bear, not moze running around with a gun.
While I feel moze should have builds devoted to her infantry play, I also feel like Iron Bear is a core concept of her character more so than previous soldier characters.
With these thoughts in play, Iron Bear’s current design simply does not work with this concept, and I feel like some players(myself included) planned on trying to build my character around using Iron Bear for most of the heavy lifting in my gameplay and infantry moze as a temporary status until I can get Iron Bear back.
Changing skill tree’s would fix this problem best, but a rework that large is unrealistic other than perhaps moving skills to other tree’s, in fact specifically I would suggest moving all of iron bear’s related skills to the Bottomless mags tree because that tree specifically felt like it didn’t have a core idea behind it and feels less specialized than her other tree’s.
-Demolition Woman stays focused on aoe weapons and grenades and should lose iron bear skills
-Shield of Retribution tree focuses more on incendiary damage and shields
-Bottomless mags could focus on Iron Bear and general gunplay.
Another Issue with Iron Bear is scalability into higher levels(seems to fall off in the 30’s-40’s area)
To fix the scalabiltiy and to future proof it for higher levels and better loot would be to have both it’s health and weapons scale off player gear.
------------------------------------------------Health Scaling----------------------------------------------------
Iron Bear’s armor should scale off the character’s max shields.
Alternatively, if you want to make players have a hard decision between damage and durability, make iron bear scale off health so thin red line would make iron bear squishy and any shields that reduce health would also weaken iron bear while artifacts and shields that raise your health would empower iron bear’s durability.
------------------------------------------------Damage Scaling--------------------------------------------------
While in Iron Bear you cannot benefit from any legendary weapon’s red text meaning you can only rely on pure damage to compete, thus all of Iron Bear’s weapons should scale off of the weapon currently equipped in the 1st weapon slot.
For example
say Iron Bear’s miniguns do 30% of the currently equipped 1st weapon’s damage(because we all know players are going to put something that hits hard in the first slot like a sniper or missile if this change were to be implemented)
while at the same time, Iron Bear’s railguns do 150% of the currently equipped 1st weapon’s damage
and say Iron Bear’s Bear Fist attack does 250% of the currently equipped 1st weapon’s damage
Obviously damage percentages would have to be messed with to balance the different way Iron Bear’s weapons act, but with changes like this even to builds not designed around Iron Bear, the Mech would still be an empowering ability even if there are no talents to buff it.
To me, Iron Bear being a buff to any build is a requirement because all builds must use Iron Bear so it should be a buff whenever you use it as there are no other options, this is not like other characters who can swap skills if they plan on building around a different aspect of the game, Moze has Iron Bear only as a skill so it must be powerful even if a player elects to put no skill points into the ability.
If anyone else has suggestions or disagreements feel free to share, I do not get angry from other points of view even if they disagree with mine, in fact having opposing views feels like the best way to strike a fair balance because in the end balance should always have some saying a mechanic is fine while others feel it is weak.