Bear form is a dmg sponge, can soak up the most beating, but damage is really weak indeed.
Gotta disagree with you. If for some reason bear form is supposed to be a tank form, I gotta say, 30 hp + 12 AC are terrible tank stats. It suffices at level 2 against goblins, but not much past that.
Bear form is just a 30 hp meat shield at most. Can do more melee damage outside of bear form with just shillelagh + dip.
I think it is kind of a fundamental problem with 5e druids, they should have given the animals different abilities etc, but made them scale like the
Summon Beast spell from tashas for example, instead of just unlocking new forms. Because that necessarily makes the old ones useless after a while, and gives a lot less diversity of USEFULL forms than it seems at first.
Especially because beasts become more and more rare at higher challenge ratings.
