This is what truly proves the poor state guardian is in. Even with incredible DPS/heals they are 3 key levels behind. The tank is only 1/5th the group, 3 key levels behind is massive.
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Yupā¦if 1 dps was so much weaker than the others that he/she was holding the team 3 key lvls below others teams, that dps wouldnt be in the team anymore. Same goes for Healers.
The amount of work left for the rest of the team to do in order to keep up is massive at those keylvls. And no amount of whiteknighting will make up for it ^^
This is not a community problemā¦it is truly a class/spec balance problem. This does really hurt the lowest end off casual pug groups even more when the healer has to work twice as hard. Because the skill lvl or mechanical ability is not there to compensate for the low functionality of guardian druids vs other tanks.
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Ehhhhh, 25 ā 27 is actually about as big a gap as 23 ā 26 was. Maybe even more. The way late keys scale is really crazy.
What youāre seeing here is less to do with buffs and more to do with those top players just getting into their BiS. As they and their DPS add 1 or 2 more ilvls a week or get their rare trinkets/rings, they can push a little more regardless of what state bears are in. This is just a good push week after a couple weeks since the last good push week, and people have more gear.
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Its a big gap for top end players yes, but if druids are pushing to 25 now people need to stop complaining about 17 and 18s being too difficult. Even as is, if no more changes are made, druid tanks will push up to 27 by the end of the season and once valor uncaps most of us will be able to outgear some of the difficulty that 17 and 18s are causing due to lack of skill on our part (myself included). I think its just time to come off the ledge now and recognize some positive changes have been made. All this constant complaining about how underpowered druids are has made it increasingly difficult to find PUG groups
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I donāt really agree. Everyone was on the same gear curve. If warriors around i405 were doing 23s and bears around 405 were only doing 20s, that still shows there is a really big gap, and that the content poses a much greater difficulty for one spec over another.
Itās great that people with access to M+ vault and mythic raiding gear are now doing higher keys, but some people donāt have access to that and depending on their class, will have a much harder time getting 20s done
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I like the new-ish raze/ursoc fury/regrowth build.
Any build where i can be a second healer, especially in friggin dragonflight with these dungeons, is fine by me.
Makes me prefer fistweaver. For the plus dmg and passive healing and high dmg for a healer
I liked DoC before, but it was nerfed (from PotP I think) and then I never tried it again after the un-nerf.
yeah im just not gonna try anymore with druid , prot warriors are a 10000% better doing keys , the difference is substantial.
Ay thats basically how i an, switched to bdk and man its soo much more enjoyable to play.
Im not super worried about cd usage the whole key like i am with bear. Plus the playstyle just feels better, didnāt realize how bad and old bears playstyle really was until i really started playing a different tank.
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yeah i even went and tried new raze build that felt super chunky wunky , feels like bears are good for low keys 1-11 and normal vault.
The animation for raze is just bad. Feels very very wimpy, didnt think they could somehow make an ability feels soo irrelevant in terms of annimation.
Raze build is amazing, but itās balancing the damage you do, and the damage you take. The higher the key gets, the less thatās balanced in your favor.
Thereās not really a great fix for that though. If they buff our damage a lot, or buff the absorb even more, we just get more insane at low keys. Itās a great talent pairing but itās a horrible talent to try and fix any of our problems around.
I think they are struggling with making the class feel good while not accidentally making us OP or disrupting the meta. I honestly think if they just reduced the # of points in our tree, especially our T3, Iād be a pretty happy bear this season.
What I donāt want is to stay like this the whole xpac. That feels pretty disheartening.
They need to combine a few talents so we are not bottom heavy. We have the most talent points to spend in the bottom of the talent tree out of all other tanks.
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perhaps, however, The player behind that bear is actually very good from what i can see. so its not so much of a ācarryā as it is a solid team that is working well together.
but using incarn to spam FR is very low value. it isnt layering heals, its extending the tick which does nothing for large amount of incoming damage.
so its bad game play because you are wasting global for an extra second 2 seconds later. Spamming thrash at least let shields stack up if using UF but now even that has a cap. bad game play spamming a single button?
maybe, but it damaged the incoming mitigation by a lot.
you have to take Raze to negate the change, which is effectively a nerf to the lowest performing tank in M+
the buff to UF and the few other changes at least made the tree a functioning tree. one with choices and more than a single viable build soā¦ at least its in a ābetterā state.
Warrior trees from that perspective are probably worse because i dont see how they get build diversity, they pick up everything and are good to go regardless of the content.
going to need to see what bears are able to do with what we got before i can say for certain there isnāt āsomethingā that bears can doā¦
but if Bears could just get 5% damage Reflection baked into Ironfur per stack, that could solve the problem without being Warrior strong. 
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There are some pretty impactful small choices warriors still get to make. It doesnāt change their core gameplay much. Itās more like picking tools for the dungeon/group.
Picking up disrupting shout (only ever felt meaningful in RPL for me). Spell block. Shield Wall charges/CDR.
But largely I agree, warriors sort of get to grab their whole kit and then make tweaks. Honestly though, that doesnāt seem that bad? Iād def. appreciate having access to everything it feels like I needed in GDruid, and then have a few small changes be how I tweak my loadout to feel better in a dungeon.
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They need to do this, theyāve let guardian druid issues linger long enough that community perception is starting to solidify. āLetās wait for something elseā when a guardian druid applies to the group, and that wonāt go away unless theyāre dramatically buffed.
These tiny gradual buffs that donāt do anything significant for guardian survivability past 16s is getting old. Especially when theyāve been told for months how to fix guardian. Take frenzied off GCD, and give bears back their mastery scaling, and baseline armor on bear form. If I had 20% more health than the next tank, it wouldnāt be quite so awful that Iām taking bigger magic hits.
But instead, we keep getting random buffs to things like ironfur, which is an awful maintenance buff that kills us whenever it falls off. Or bear bubble, which is only really works well until damage out scales our damage scaling. The danger of tying bear survivability to damage done, our damage either scales as fast as the content, making us overpowered, or it doesnāt, and we brick wall in high keys.
Just a little conspiracy theory;
Maybe they keeping guardian in dumpster fire mode so that a future rework will impress the playerbase.
Paladin seems to be undergoing a rework, so maybe/hopefully guardians get a proper rework some time in the the not too distant futureā¦/hope!
starting to see this. took like 45 mins to get into a group. they didnt pick something else. they were still in LFG 10 mins later.
instead of getting 8 Keys for the vault i got 5 and ran out of time. had to last second Que LFR
L F R
to make sure could have sockets as an option. 
I completed my 18, but didnāt time it, mostly because I canāt aggressively pull like I need to.
Completed the 17 but didnāt time it for the same reasons.
Kept joining 16 COS runs that people failed on first boss.
Got frustrated and ran a 2.
Found another 16 cos and timed it.
At that point, my patience for the game faded and called it good.
Fully expecting to take the tokens when the vault doesnāt give me a decent 418 option again.
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Leveled my druid to 70 couple days ago, completed the Mage Tower, and started doing Lowby guild Mythic runs, and i have to say, fun interactions, but the defensives are quite lacklusterā¦i have a better time reducing my damage intake on my Vengeance DH than my druidā¦Iron Fur needs a buff, and a big one since that is our main mitigation tool for usā¦too small of a DR for something so important 