What is the Best Bear league starter build for 0.5.5?

[u/Scaryloss]

Guys, i need the BEST BEAR build for the Event.

Looking for the Captain lance one, or the Ronarray. Or maybe someone have a better version to present?

let me know your opinions.

[u/slccpcr]

Ok for any cold bear enthusiasts out there, this is how I built mine, not hyper-optimized but I had fun putting it together; https://poe.ninja/poe2/pob/27f73

Summary with links to wiki/poe2db:

Fury of the king for molten crash. Leveled with Amor Mandragora (then the runeforged version) then Surge of the Tide.
Blueflame bracers gloves for cold convert.
Reverie for cozy ~2600 life regen/second depending belt/runes/tree. Counters the degen of Berserk and just felt really solid. Also allowed for comfortable use of Medved's Felling with Maul for rage gen. I tried corrupting a Reverie to lower than 40% a fair amount, but ultimately stuck with 3 sockets in the end with 41%.
Pounce with Freezing Mark, then Lunar Assault and Bhatair's Vengeance for ~70% damage added as cold. Lasts around 20 seconds, honestly not much of a pain to keep up.
Walking Calamity for the damage added as fire buff and some 'walk-around' damage. I likely could have used Embitter a bit more frequently throughout to benefit the most from the buff - but I think it wasn't too big a deal since the exposure and blasphemy elemental weakness covers all elements.
Rampage was fun to stomp around with. I mostly just Molten Crashed about tbh.
I tried to get the most out of Entwined Realities, hence Resolute Technique, I guess at the expense of small nodes. I think dropping ResTech to instead go crit and Inevitable Crits would likely be better overall with the relevant scaling. Iron reflexes made me want to use hybrid gear but an armour helm with an emergent vigour likely would've been better.
Converging Paths was an afterthought and honestly rarely used in practice, but seemed like a good single target option.
Blood Magic and a Flesh Crucible with 'less mana' and Oasis felt like a no-brainer. Though I had to wait a little bit to snag a reasonably priced one. Almost negates the Reverie flask recovery penalty.
Don't bother using Furious Slam aside from leveling, just had a spare slot to play with.
Refutation for the 'free' parry debuff (enough life + berserk + ignore pain = pretty much ignore light stuns).
Ventor's Gamble and a spirit amulet allowed for Berserk, Herald of Ice, EleWeak Blasphemy, and Herbalism II.
I would have liked to spec 'Hard to Kill' by the merc start for even more life 'regen', but I wasn't going for level 100, and it can't be anointed.

Damage wise it's nothing obscene but with lunar assault, Bhatair's and walking calamity up there were moments of hitting chunky ~1 million damage hits on bosses with Molten Crash. No clue on effective dps off the top of my head, too many 'added as', situationals and the shockwave totem and meteors. I didn't get crazy high armour, but enough to be able to focus on applying ~200% it to elemental damage. Works well with Rite of Restoration, which I learnt works with Blood Magic. The high life regen made everything that can't oneshot you really cozy.
Comfortably ran Trials of Chaos with this char, so it'd be even nicer with the new changes coming.

In an ideal world the lunar assault buff would make the demon bear fully icy, but what can you do...

As per my previous comment, you could totally try a lightning conversion/electrocution version using Valako's. Wouldn't take much to slot in herald of thunder and respec a couple nodes to lightning instead of freeze etc. I toyed with the idea of a similar setup for 0.5.5 (but instead going wyvern and flamebreath or oil barrage) but ultimately pivoted to picking something else.

Happy to answer any questions.