Bear Apex Talent changes and other thoughts

Classes Druid
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This thread is intended to spark constructive dialog in response to the recent dev comments regarding updates to the Apex Talents for greater flexibility (whatever that means) and to alleviate pain points (whatever that means).

So… what do you think should be done to change the Apex Talents for Bears. The devs have stated that they are aware that a popular build (shout out to Awoo) does not use the Apex talent and, for now, they are ok with that. However they also said they were working on updating the Apex talents in a future patch. What would you like to see in the updated Apex talents?

Thoughts from this average casual:

Apex Tier 1- I don’t like the whole press a button to get access to another button. That just seems awkward. The idea of echoed casts is interesting for the rage spenders, but it’s really only going to have value with Maul. The IF echo pushes quickly into diminishing returns, especially if you’re using a No Maul/Raze build. And the FR echo is really only useful if you’ve also taken Natural Resilience.

Tier 2a/b - Passive Mastery buff is ok I guess, but dull. And Dream Guide? A passive that maybe you need it, maybe you don’t? We’re the tank. We’re taking almost all the hits. That’s out contribution to the team. Now we’re passively throwing out some emergency heals, too? That’s not particularly interesting. I don’t mind the tier being passive, but this doesn’t really feel like it’s something that should be a major component of what we do as the tank, certainly not something that’s the penultimate talent of the whole tree.

Tier 3 - Same objection as Tier 1 regarding Wild Guardian (but more so). I do like the empowered Maul, though.

I know these are just objections and not suggestions, but maybe other players can offer some ideas.

I do, however, have a suggestion regarding Raze and Ravage. Part of what I love about Bear tanking is that we are 360º tanks. We don’t need all the mobs in front of us. Our butts are as armored as our face. And Swipe/Thrash are 360º arcs. So, I’d love to see Raze and Ravage hit in a 360º field. I’d also think it would be neat (and I know this is a bit extreme) if Maul and Mangle automatically turned us to face our current target (so in a way those abilities wouldn’t have a “facing” requirement). These changes would definitely make the Maul/Raze/Ravage playstyle a lot more appealing to me, eliminating one Druid “pain point” of positioning.

Lastly, I’d like to see Heart of the Wild be a passive with an internal cooldown. Whenever swapping into another form (while in combat), the corresponding effect is automatically cast. In probably 15 years of Bear tanking, I’ve never tried the whole shifting to Cat during the fight style. Making it a little easier would encourage me to try it.

Remember, this is all from the perspective of a very average player who likes a simpler playstyle. Not OBR simple, but something that I feel I can execute fairly easily while primarily focusing on the environmentals (i.e. getting out of bad, gathering mobs, positioning, interrupting, defensive CDs, etc).

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For the apex, move its trigger from incarn to barkskin so its more available without being an rng mess like bdk.
Remove the second button hit to activate; you get the echo buff when you hit barkskin.
Reduce it to 1 charge of the echo instead of 2 since itll be availible 3x more often, reduces the back to back burstiness of it blizz seemed to dislike and caused the inbetween threat problems.
It makes the next ability thats used cost no rage so you can hit that echoing maul or ironfur on pull without worrying about following up with the other for threat or armor.
Dream guide part is fine, every tank needs a secondary niche/utility and off healing is fine for bear’s, not like its got amazing cc, aoe silences, or an immunity to play around the group instead.

For more general bear:
Make lunar calling change maul to arcane damage, if it reduced lunar beams CD and healed a bit through elune’s favored lile thrash EC would have a real reason to consider using it instead of spamming off gcd ironfur.
They really want maul to be important but EC has nothing to do with it outside of a pity 10% damage buff.

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I wouldn’t want an offensive apex ability to trigger from using a defensive. If you want to use your apex off cooldown it would feel bad to wait until you want to use barkskin to use it, or use it early and have one less defensive when you might want it.

At this point they should just make the apex talents a passive buff, or something similar to prot war where offensive abilities can trigger a bonus effect. They clearly can’t balance around all these modifiers (in this case to raze/maul/ravage)

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3rd Talent
While Shield Block is active, Shield Slam deals 10% additional damage and has a 20% increased chance to critically strike.

???

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The obvious fix is to decouple it from our already overloaded 2-3 minute cooldown. A cooldown that has pretty big survivability aspects that means you sometimes want to hold it in mplus for an upcoming big pull.

Remove that stupid shadow clone bear talent, give us a new 1 minute damage CD in it’s place, and tie the apex to that. Balance around being able to access apex every minute, and problem solved.

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Just copy from my own thread….

Wild Guardians
1 - Mangle deals 10% more damage and hits 2 additional targets.
2 - Mangle causes your next Thrash to deal 10% additional damage and your Mastery is increased by 3%
3 - Mangle causes your next Thrash to deal 20% additional damage and your Mastery is increased by 6%
4 - Mangle and Maul are empowered and deal 40% additional Nature damage over 12 sec and have a chance to grant you a charge of Dream Guide.

This favors our core abilities. It works perfectly with our Incarn. It makes both Mangle and Thrash feel core no matter your hero talents. It incorporates the ideas from the current apex talents without the parts that are impossible to balance, while not adding things that are overly complex or require extensive programming/testing.

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This is wildly incorrect. The amount of group damage is insane, to the point where many times I’m at full health with the rest of the group knocked down to sub 40%.

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So to combine those ideas, maybe something like:
2/3 - While Ironfur is active, Maul(Raze) does 10/20% additional damage and Mastery is increase by 3/6%.
This sort of promotes using rage on defense to also be an indirect benefit to your subsequent offensive rage spending. And similarly…
4 - Maul(Raze) is empowered and deals X% additional Nature(Arcane) damage and reduces the cost of your next Ironfur by 10 rage. This effect stacks.
This promotes using rage on offense to also be an indirect benefit to your defense.

Could something like this be enough to encourage the EC build players to start pressing Maul (or Raze) again?

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The apex needs to revolve around Mangle and Thrash. Those are the spells empowered by our Beserk/Incarn and pushing more damage into Maul is what caused the issues the first time around.

The extra dot is cool, but that is plenty.

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And ultimately, there’s no point in using Maul.
Maul needs to be changed. Like I suggested, for example, merging it with Ironfur, and then even the current Apex would be easy to balance, and it would already be pretty good.

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I see your point. I was looking to find a reason to press Maul. I like the idea of the defensive rage spender empowering the next offensive rage spender and vice versa.

Maybe Sheronir is on to something:

However, that seems like a far more fundamental change to Bears that would involve both trees. I don’t think it’s likely to happen in a patch that’s supposed to modify the Apex talents.

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Maul and Raze should be a replacement for a filler spell (Swipe or Starsurge in my opinion). It should be extra damage when you don’t need the extra armor, NOT the entire thing our spec is built around.

Ravage, since its the point of that tree, can be a priority button, but outside of that Maul should just be “more damage” if you have extra rage.

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Especially since it’s bugged and just targeting something that’s not in combat while a shadow clone Dread Shade is up will instantly aggro it…

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Ok. That makes sense. I’d like to try the Raze/DotC build, but for my tastes, it needs just a little more simplification. I know Arahgon and others would think that’s “dumbing it down”, but I really think that’s the direction tank rotations need to go. Awoo pointed something out recently that we all kind of already know, but it was nice to hear it. When a DPS makes a play error in their rotation, even a big one, they do a little less damage. But when a tank makes a play error in rotation, especially a big one, it’s usually a wipe. In a raid, it’s a full reset, repair, food, etc. And in M+, it’s probably a busted key. I think that’s a lot of the reason people don’t like tanking. So to me, the solution is to make/keep the play rotation simpler and/or more forgiving.

Ha! I hadn’t noticed that, but it’s kinda hilarious… but yeah, they gotta fix that.

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Make it good for players in all levels of content. Delve runners don’t need echoed Frenzied regeneration or Iron Fur. Not even sure how much raid or M+ players need these echoes. Make the Apex good for all players and it’s best as a heavy offense option apex. Defense should already be good for a guardian tank.

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Bear actually felt really good during M0 week, when we were all running DotC without the apex talents. All of our buttons felt worth pressing. Our damage was good. Our rotation was where it was supposed to be.

Then they nerfed us a ton and buffed the apex a ton. We lost sustained damage and gained massive burst. This made us OP in raids, but unreliable in M+.

Then they nerfed our burst, and buffed our Thrash. This made us weaker in raids, but turbo crazy in M+.

Then they nerfed our Thrash. Now we’re bad in raids, still strong in M+ though, but our spec feels broken and degenerate.

Apex talents were a mistake to try to force huge swings of damage into. They should be steady and consistent.

See: Suggestions for Bear 12.1

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Those are really interesting. I assume the whole Apex branch would simply be active all the time (as opposed to the current design of pressing one button to then be able to press another button to then be able to start pressing the buttons we actually want to press).

1 - I really like your idea of putting Mangle as a fixture of the AoE rotation via the Apex. Mangle always felt like it should be the button we most wanted to press. It’d be kind of weak though until after we hit level 81.
2 - Starsurge in Bear form isn’t bad, but is it necessary? Is it really doing anything that Moonfire isn’t doing other than a little bit more damage? Seems like little more than a “press this, pad meter” button. Maybe just adjust the Druid Tree talents that affect Starsurge to also affect Moonfire? That would open up some interesting choices there.
3 - With Mangle hitting 3-5 targets, is Swipe maybe encroaching a little into Mangle’s lane? Perhaps Thrash simply needs to read “Replaces Swipe”. So Thrash is for Bear and Swipe is for Cat.
4 - Buffing Flashing Claws and Fury of Nature to single point talents seems greedy. I’m sure there’s a need to be consistent with the number of 2 point talents in all of the class trees.
5 - I like the idea of Sundering automatically applying the stacks. 5 may seem a bit excessive… that’s a lot of juice on a 1 minute CD. Maybe balance it by bumping the CD to 90sec and dropping the damage component?
6 - Yes! The EC build should be converting all melee abilities to Arcane damage.
7 - Nerf Thrash I guess because Mangle would be in the AoE rotation and it buffs Thrash, so… basically a net zero but spreading the damage out to another ability? Makes sense.

Overall, I love these ideas. Thanks Gumble!

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  1. Is it needed? No, but spamming MF as a filler button feels bad with GG existing. Out of all the ideas, this one could be easily dropped and not change anything, but pressing MF multiple times in a row needs to die in a fire.

  2. Maybe, but again, I want buttons to press that aren’t MF, especially in DotC builds.

  3. We have so many talents at the bottom of our tree that have so much of our damage in them that we need to reduce the bloat.

  4. It is a bad talent without it. Right now it only really matters during Incarn, which is a pointless time to use it for its DR, just extra damage (which is what people use it for now). This button should be our Shield Charge bear version, which means it has to work on the pull. Without granting 5 stacks, it will never do this.

The rest I have no comment other than Yea.

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A brief description of Blizzard’s flawed philosophy )
There’s almost never a moment in high-key battles when a bear doesn’t need Ironfur, and can spend rage on Maul or Raze without Apex.

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There was in Dragonflight S2, where bears actually had Iron Fur that dealt damage and Maul/Raze that was used for damage/shielding. You used both and both had a point.

It is totally possible to make it work, they just have to actually spend the dev time.