Circle 17

Form: Dragon, Python
Med: Flame, Tenacity (these are stupid annoying to use out of combat, my warding skill is 9!)
Berserk: avalanche
Roar: Anger, Hiss
Unspent: 2

Gor'Tog:
Strength : 30 Reflex : 17
Agility : 15 Charisma : 10
Discipline : 17 Wisdom : 14
Intelligence : 13 Stamina : 24

Training all melee weapons + LT, HT.

Capability assessment: Starting to spend more time swinging than bobbing which is nice, but still struggle to swing my Maul. With melee mastery leading my primary weapon by 25 ranks, and the rest of my weapons by 50 I don't have a huge problem hitting things.

Question1: Biggest problem is silver bears beat me up. Should I make strides towards Piranha. Problem is I need 6 slots for it, and Everild's Rage seems so wasteful on top of Anger the Earth. Or would it be better to go for Strategos Mastery for IF bonus? Earthquake, wail and wildfire all look nice, except they ignore my defense.

Question2: Interestingly I'm finding more defense benefit from stamina than reflex. Current TDP plan is to bump Stam to 30 and then follow lowest cost TDP. Might do Charisma to 14 as silver bears seem less impressed.

You should be going down the path that gets you powermonger first. Monkey is a great defensive bonus.

Anger the Earth does absolutely nothing useful. Everild's rage is very helpful. For now I would favor roars with a POWER contest (Str/Stam/Disc). These are important stats you'll naturally raise. Later on Cha can catch up.

Assuming you can handle the weight of what you carry, Reflex is your best defensive stat hands down. Your is relatively low.

Now let me circle back to getting powermonger fast. The issue is how many abilities you can maintain at once. If you go around picking up the good abilities, you'll quickly find that you can't maintain more than 1-2 of them, maybe 3. Powermonger lets you run multiple abilities much easier. Such that maybe you could run 4 abilities by lvl 40 versus needing to be level 60 or 70 without it. Those are kind of made up numbers, but not enitrely. I respeced all my ability points around level 50 and went from having many abilities known that I could use few of to getting power monger early and being able to run a net increase in abilities, even though I knew fewer.

Bottom line is, why learn more abilities if you can use them. Powermonger lets you run more at the same time.

Use fein, jab, and other moves that are conservative, like the other person said. And if all else fails, try something a little easier. Make sure your armor set up is reasonable (avoid mixing penalties) and you are traveling light.

Good luck!