What do you guys think? think it’s time to celebrate, a few things to tweak but these are huge.
So here’s the way I see it.
-
Rage of the Sleeper is too good not to pick up. RotS + Windscar Whetstone (2 min cd) and Storm-Eater’s Boon (3 min cd) is OP as hell. 30% leech, 15% damage increase and an AOE that does about 100k dps for 6-10 seconds in packs. If you rock both of these trinkets you’d have a huge aoe nuke + heal on a very short cooldown. 3 out of every 4 RotS pops will have one of the trinket nukes. For the one that you don’t, you can…
-
Incarnation. Save this for the dangerous packs because it’s a full 30 seconds of immense survivability.
-
Because of the iron fur buffs, Thorns of Iron is going to do a good chunk of damage. It’s already doing about 4% of my overall damage and I don’t have Layered Mane or Reinforced Fur. I’d say it will probably jump up to about 7%-8% of overall damage after the buff and taking the new talents. This works out because it’s on the way to get RotS
-
No more moonfire talents big sad, but a 50% absorption shield from Raze/Thrash damage is too good to pass up. So we fill out some left side talents and pick up Blood Frenzy to help our ironfur spams even more. Staple Vicious Cycle/Tooth and Claw to buff Raze, and of course Ursoc’s Fury.
Build is below:
https://www.wowhead.com/talent-calc/druid/guardian/DAAAOVFERKhVESEEVAVBA
Preferencial talent picks: Rend and Tear, Untamed Savagery, Ursoc’s Guidance, After the Wildfire.
Seems like they are further pushing tanking to the left side of the tree. Moonbeam druid will die completely if the shield is too good. I’m ok with that, but it’s a lot clunkier to run the PvP build in PvE.
Edit: I’ll try it, and if it solves the short comings I’ll give tanking a shot again. I swapped to Resto and started making progress in Mythic+ again. I’ve seen 1 Druid Tank in the 12+ bracket since then. Most people won’t invite a Bear to group currently (myself included).
2 Likes
Without the damage reduction of Moonfire, it is not necessarily stronger than before
Yeah but moonfire is crazy expensive to build. You’d need 2 points in mid tier and 5 points in capstone tier to make it work properly. Otherwise you’re wasting too many gcds to utilize it, or it does minimal damage and doesn’t heal enough.
Unless you only want it for the single target DR on tyrannical weeks, then you can drop Raze and Blood Frenzy and put those two points into Scintillating Moonlight.
This is going to be a pretty rough build. You’re giving up both scinitillating moonlight and R&T, which are both pretty big passive DRs.
If they don’t fix TnC not affecting magic damage I’d go so far as to say this would be non-viable in a lot of tyrannical weeks once you get ~18 range.
I could see it working pretty well on Fort weeks though.
Need to combine some bottom talents, the bear will have a qualitative change, abandoning the moonfire and using the absorption shield does not improve the survivability
Swipe gives a 6% reduction and 6% damage increase, so it’s really not that different. Swipe prob takes longer to stack though. Since you need 3 swipes. Double Swipes help with that though.
If you choose to swipe to reduce damage by 6%, you cannot choose group mauling, unless you give up the sleeper, but this is impossible. So the new talents designed by the designers are all rubbish
1 Like
Given none of those buffs helps with the issues Bears actually have, I’d going to reserve judgement until they release whatever ELSE they are doing.
Getting trucked by magic damage isn’t going to stop with those buffs, especially since many of them require talenting into talents we don’t currently take and we are SUPER HARD PRESSED for talent points.
But, they did say they were working on it, so maybe by Friday they will have a good set of changes for us.
It could happen.
1 Like
Unless they unnerf Incarn and buff UF back to 70%, the left side of the tree isn’t good enough to make you give up MF damage and DR.
Thrash spam with 70% UF was something you could build around. Both of those things are gone, so I wouldn’t count much on it unless there are is alot more changes inc.
1 Like
Dream of Cenarius is typically around 20% of all my healing so giving that up seems unlikely, but the main problem I see with such a spec is that I never have enough rage to do both Iron Fur and Raze/Maul. It’s one or the other, with one better for physical and the other better for magic. Both approaches come with 4-5 supporting talents each that preclude getting those talents for the other approach. At least not without giving up talents, like DoC, that are needed for dealing with and recovering from big attacks.
If Lunar Beam turns out to be a busted healing CD that does low to med damage, I think arcane Bear has an interesting build next week.
Its the mid plus right arcane Bear build, but focusing on all short CDs to cycle through.
Barkskin, RoTs, SI X2, FR X2, lunar beam, and 1 min convoke. Incarn is fine and all, but convoke might have some value with iron fur, layered mane and Reinforced Fur buffs. Depending on how strong these buffs are, I’d be interested in dropping atwf and pick up guardian of elune for extended iron fur durations.
Pair all this with thorns of iron, I wonder if the damage output of that talent would actually be decent.
It’s all speculative and could be trash, but it’s exciting to think about.
If not, the shield buff is gonna make Left Right Build that much stronger.
Don’t know what Lunar Beam is trying to solve. If it’s a damage cooldown, it should almost always be kept on cooldown, so the healing is overhealing. If it’s a big healing cooldown, it does something that DoC and FR and Renewal and Well-Honed Instincts all already do, with many of those on shorter cooldowns. It’s fine though, every tree needs a Lightwell.
2 Likes
You’re running higher content than me by a couple levels so maybe I’m wrong, but are we dying to lack of healing? I think I die almost exclusively to getting absolutely chunked by notoriously hard hitting mobs.
I think most of the time I die, I still have FR’s up, I just wasn’t prepared to lose all my hp in that 1-2 global period and couldn’t react fast enough.
1 Like
Nah bear does plenty of healing, to me the whole problem is entieely just not being robust enough.
4 Likes
The extra healing is nice since it was completely useless before but i still think LunarBeam should have its damage replaced with constant applications of moonfire to all targets while its up, 10% dr on all mobs in 12yrds for a mini demoralizing shout on moonbears side of the tree.
Smooth out some of the GCD bloat and damage moonbears go through on pull and just be more thematic than another moon spell with no actual interaction to the moon kit.
The issue with we need our mastery increase, base armour increase in bear form and give it a buff like when in bear form our magic reduction is reduce by 15% and Irnofur and our abosrb shield from trash, maual, raze also applies magic damage reduction.
Hmm honestly unless it’s a fortified halls of valor high key, I’m not really dying unless I make a mistake by failing a mechanic or have overpulled. I struggle more on fortified weeks as the constant damage intake exhausts my CDs or drains my healing too quick. Tyrannical is actually my preferred week.
The split left right build is strong enough for me to smooth out the damage taken so that me and the healer can handle it.
The dps I’m playing with all understand the major pain points of the dungeon and are hard stopping a majority of group killing abilities.
I cycle through my CDs to handle the tank busters. But most importantly, I know when it’s time to kite. Rather than brute forcing the deadly encounters, id rather typhoon and vortex my way out of trouble.
We say the same every alpha…and beta…and 0.0.5…and 0.1 etc etc…
The gameplay is deteriorating while the focus on esports is escalating.
Lots of good stuff in DF…classes/specs did not keep up with the rest.
1 Like