For anyone guardian druids who are looking to try a different build than the current meta, I encourage trying a right and left build while completely ignoring the center.
What you sacrifice in damage you more than make up for in mitigation. Dreams of cenarious is a 20-30 second lay of hands that will save healers from over reacting and using a big cd if your HP spikes.
Ursocs fury remembered over scintillating moonlight heals feels more impactful dealing with consistent damage.
Earth warden on tyrannical is crucial.
And the extra damage reduction from rend and tear makes our incoming damage intake feel bearable.
Overall, Ive personally found great success going into 15s with my current left and right build, having dropped the middle tree altogether. Incarnation is a crutch that serves to pad meters whilst leaving us vulnerable for the mechanics that matter.
Edit
I should have posted the actual build now that I think about it.
Alone increases your max health by 30% which is huge. Allows you to stack twice the amount of iron furs for your mitigation, and frenzied Regen can be spammed which scales off that increased health.
And being able to spam Thrash with Ravager and Rage = your own self healing. Side effect is huge damage. You become an unkillable DPS player at that point.
There was a reason it was so popular in SL
Edit: this isn’t an attack against your build. I’m not one to follow the guides as is anyway. Just pointing out that Incarn is more than just a meter padding ability.
That’s fair, I was overly critical on incarnation. I still think the upsides of it don’t outweigh the negatives which is why I believe bears are viewed unfavorablely in the current meta since the vast majority of guardians are utilizing the default incarn moonfire build.
That is a major issue though. Lots of players look at the top bears (where guides are also written from) and see them running the DPS build because the guide writer had the group to do so. So that’s what they run.
I ran NoW in SL because I PuGged and didn’t have the support to pull massively around CDs and enjoyed the healing that came with it. Felt more defensive and that’s how I played because I didn’t trust any of my healers (regardless of their experience).
Just so you know I do support your off the charts build. Just wanted to give a shout-out to Incarn for being a great tool still
If your build works for you, great; however, over-mitigation isn’t always the answer to timing a higher key either. The damage contribution from the tank and the healer matter even more the higher you go up the ladder.
I also think what you are not thinking about is an aptly timed Incarn means that you can spend substantially more rage and proc far more AtW group heals. For an organized group, this can be huge as it allows your healer to potentially stand and DPS for a solid 30 seconds while you heal your team.
Personally, for me, I find that DoC is a waste of a global and UF is overkill when I have nearly 8% leech and it’s typically 10-12% of my overall healing. Furthermore, even with UF and DoC, 7 out of 8 of my top heals are already purely passive anyway and I never feel in danger unless I’ve done something incredibly stupid.
Incarn has absolutely nothing to do with whether Bear is meta or not.
It literally comes down to the fact that Prot Warrior health bars never move, Ignore Pain is absurdly OP, Spell Reflect is huge on several really bad Tyrannical bosses, they have great mobility, and are packed with tons of utility like Shockwave, Stormbolt, Rallying Cry, AoE fear, Battle Shout, and is on the higher end of the tank damage just like Guardian.
Like I have always said, a great player can make any tank (regardless of meta or not) look really good, and that’s because skill wins every time!
IDD about that decided to try tanking on my fury warrior. Got some ilevel 333 sword and a green ilvl 302 shield. Without knowing what to press went into a heroic dungeon and pretty my hp never move at all
What a lot of people don’t realize with Prot Warrior is that you can literally jump into content that is generally regarded as hard for most tank specializations, be under geared, and you won’t even notice it; that’s how absurd PW is right now.
Even in SL for example, my M+ team had me try out PW in S4, threw me into a +15 at 218 ILVL, nearly 80+ ILVLs behind everyone else, and had no issue.
Now, take the SL Prot Warrior and make it even stronger; that’s effectively DF Prot Warrior.
But more importantly, Heroic dungeons are a joke. You won’t notice anything hard until you hit the +10 affix and then most of the hardness just comes with dealing with random players than mechanics.
I’m with the OP of this. I gave up galactic bear a long time ago. I saw some notes in here about incarn. Personally, I don’t see why anybody likes it so much. Yea yea, 30% hp and double IF. But that’s for 1 pull, maybe 2 at most then it’s on a long CD. I feel a slightly tankier build that is for every pull is smarter.
Besides, as one person pointed out. +10 keys are harder mainly due to the dps doing dumb stuff or pulling extra packs. Pop incarn then 2 pulls later dps aggros an extra pat then birds fly in and now you have 3-4 packs… too bad you already blew incarn and you didn’t spec for the extra talents
I go fully for high armor, earthwarden, super regrowth and then down the right for wildfire and sleeper.
Rotate those CD’s and use regrowth on the dps with wildfire planned pops lets you heal the party insanely. Use FR on yourself to self heal and you’re fine.
I follow basically this build, and have been advocating for it a bit. I prefer it over incarn. Never been a fan of it.
If i was in an organized group, sure. but with 95% of my runs being pugs, I prefer a little more tankiness.
I’m running basically this:
Sometimes I’ll swap out twin moonfire for earthwarden.
I found Elune’s was too much overhealing, and I love DoC. Getting a LoH every 20s is too clutch too many times with pugs. AtW, while fun on paper, usually ends up 75% as overhealing. Sure when it makes a difference, worth its weight in gold so I like it still.
With 10.0.5 this basic build will get more solid and have increased DPS to be back on par with Incarn builds for DPS, but with improved sustain.
Yes, PW is just stupid. I don’t even watch my HP on mine. It doesn’t move if I’m playing right.
The higher you go, the more you need to consolidate and make riskier pulls. The riskier the pull, having 30% more EH for 30 seconds gives the healer a much larger buffer on you while they keep the party topped.
Furthermore, the main reason people take it is to reduce the cooldown on Incarn/Berserk with the CDR talent below it more than anything else.
I don’t disagree that when you start getting into higher keys, which usually means coordinated groups, that Incarn has more value since you can use it to align with DPS and healing CDs.
For me, I’m just happy there are two viable builds with some minor variations in those builds to let me mix and match.
I have 2 premade builds. Defensive (Left & Right, no Incarn) for pugs, and offensive (right and Incarn) for guild runs.
Just PW…keeps pulling me away for tanking. I want to like it, and I do, just afraid that the nerf bat is going to come swinging.
I understand with the incarn being so strong and allowing 3-4 pack pulls. What I’m saying though is that incarnation is also a massive 3 min cd. And only lasts 30 sec.
So outside of incarnation you suffer a bit with the lack of other survivability talents.
I feel that a well coordinated and good awareness dps/healer team can allow a Druid to spec that way and be fine. But puggers will always do dumb stuff to where incarn becomes the oh crap button rather a progression button. Therefore, pugging might be better to simply use other static survival talents rather activated ones like incarn. Just my opinion from my experience.
But if we think about it too…how many pulls actually require a 3 min CD?
Hardly any. The pulls that require that kind of defensive playing are player made. If you pulled pack by pack, then Incarn isn’t going to do you any good because you’re not gonna need it. It would just become overkill at that point.
If you’re not playing aggressively enough (tank not needing big boy CDs, DPS saving big CDs for bosses only), then Incarn isn’t worth it IMO.
Does twin moons double the rage you get from galactic guardian procs?
This feels like it might fix something I’ve been feeling on my left-side build in that it generates way more rage. But honestly you’re missing out on 6% overall dmg and 6% DR, which at high keys is HUGE. In an 18 NO I basically get 2.1 globaled, and it’s that .1 that lets me react with a heal or a typhoon + run.
Our kit is just not good. And its partly because we suck so bad at magic damage in a game that seems centered around magic damage tank busters right now. Ones that are hard to dodge. (Storm elementals in NO, Void slash skeletons in SBG, Dark claw in TSJ, etc etc.) Prot warriors can spell reflect most of those. Plus their armor is actually really high. And shield block mitigates post-armor. Then they still have liberal access to IP. Most prot warriors in the 17-18 range still don’t even have to run defensive stance.
With our low evasion rate compared to the parry tanks, and the lack of a shield block, and no real magic mitigation, our model for mitigating has gone south. They could honestly fix it with a mastery buff. Make us the huge HP tanks again. That’s what we were when we felt the best anyway.
I agree with the mastery buffs. Since Guardians do not good reduction vs magic dmg, parry, or blocks, they should just give us massive HPs pools and let that be the tank identity. That is what bear is kinda supposed to be, massive meat shields. Also, for the love of god take frenzy regen off the GCD, best buff there can be!