I have finally come to accept the fact that the bear has no place in Balefort Sewers, and only takes a spot that could be better utilized by a bird or Mage. For this reason, I will no longer be burdening groups with my bear. To understand why a bear is dead weight, we need to look at a good BS team and what their rolls are. I think the perfect team is 2 mages and 3 birds.
Mages in BS: Bird Escorts. Their job is to bull doze through mobs to get the Birds to the boss.
Birds: These are the rock stars. Their job is to kill the boss, and they are quite good at it.
Bears: Hmm ... I guess beckon helps gather the mobs, but that means one less mage to actually kill the mobs or one less bird to actually kill the boss. I have tried a bunch of different things to make the bear a damage machine, but it was a futile effort. There is no way they can compete with a bird for damage, because they were designed from the beginning to tank, and tanks are officially outdated technology in BS.
So what changed?
A Bears job ~used~ to be to protect the birds and mages and to absorb damage to keep the team from getting killed. But in BS, what is killing Mages and Birds? It sure isn't the mobs or even the boss, it's the fire traps. And A bear can't protect them from a fire trap. So the bear has officially lost his job to 'careful walking'.
So the question is, can the bear be saved? Only thing I can think of is make one of their skills deactivate fire traps.