Continuing the discussion from Midnight: Curse of Ula’tek PTR Development Notes:
Bear is already very powerful during Incarn, and doesn’t need it to be buffed. Please consider making Wild Guardian buff baseline abilities, and not be tied to Incarn at all.
Where did you see this buff?
It’s a talent that resets the cooldown of abilities that would be 100% ready during Incarn when the reset occurs.
So, it’s a talent that does nothing but summon two spirits once per Incarn cooldown, which will provide a tiny bit of resource and a tiny bit of damage to a single target, not even in AoE.
It’s a talent for simply laughing at such a flawed design, and not take it for any build )
It isn’t helpful to the developers to just say it’s bad. We need to give advice on how to improve things.
During Incarn bear already generates lots of extra rage, and rage spending abilities cost 1/2. It’s a very powerful cooldown compared some other tank cooldowns like Pally Sentinel, and anything that makes Incarn better is kind of a waste.
And we saw in 12.0 the problem where Incarn was so powerful, and outside of Incarn bear couldn’t hold threat, and we got the huge thrash buff that put is in the terribly boring, though very powerful Thrash/Moonfire rotation that we are in now.
So my suggestion take the Incarn buff out of Wild Guardian. It’s a wasted buff that doesn’t help bear provide much benefit. Instead make that final point of WG buff baseline abilities, and not Incarn so that we aren’t overly weak outside of Incarn.
I am not opposed to the spirits be summons that improve us while they are out, however the whole stated goal of this patch is to reduce the impact big cooldowns make where all our damage is concentrated in them.
This was the issue for DotC echo of ravage bears for the first tier, and these new apex talents look like they are making the same mistake.
Either the summons are very strong, which makes Incarn a huge portion of our damage again and we’d have to be quite weak outside of it, OR, the summons are weak, in which case the 4/4 talent is essentially never taken and people only take 3/4 for the Mangle/Maul bonus and Mastery.
They would be much better off to up the proc chance of the 1/4 talent to say, 10-20%, then allow the spirits to increase our chance to proc Gore.
Then, the 4p could be changed to be a straight Mangle damage buff. Make it deal 30% more damage and cleave 2 additional targets baseline.
Dunno about you, but I’d take that.
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Adding to make it easier to read:
Rank 1
Spending Rage has a 10% chance to awaken a guardian spirit for 8 sec, which attacks a nearby enemy when you cast Thrash or Mangle. While active, your chance to proc Gore is doubled.
Rank 2
(1): Mangle and Maul deal 20% additional Nature damage over 12 sec. Your Mastery is increased by 3%.
(2): Mangle and Maul deal 40% additional Nature damage over 12 sec. Your Mastery is increased by 6%.
Rank 3
Mangle deals 30% additional damage and cleaves 2 additional targets.
This hasn’t existed for a long time now.
Firstly, it’s long been known that this is useless.
Secondly, we don’t just need to improve something; we need to completely redesign it. And suggesting new design ideas to a developer is completely odd, since it directly fulfills their job, and they get paid for that work.
Rank 1 of the reworked Apex is frankly awful for an Apex Talent. Yeah, it summons a pet that “attacks a nearby enemy” and maybe they will make that pet do absolutely cracked damage (though I doubt it), but a pet doing damage won’t affect our gameplay, gives us no direct defensive benefit and I personally don’t think is very fun. If we compare this to a very similar Apex, Blood DK’s, we can see that their randomly procced Dancing Rune Weapon gives them parry and damage reduction, as well as an additional copy of their Blood Plague debuff on enemies hit by Blood Boil while it is active. So, it is still a passive pet spawn, but it provides a clear up-front defensive benefit, as well as a lingering benefit from its DoT, while also mirroring all their abilities and not just auto-attacking a random mob.
However, the other part of Guardian’s Apex Talent won’t affect our gameplay, either. We want to hit Thrash (and probably Mangle now) on cooldown regardless of whether this buff is up or not, and while Mangle can have a second charge with the Harnessed Rage talent, you really can’t “pool” Mangle charges to spam for extra rage during the Apex’s window with how frequently we get resets from Gore. So, the Apex Talent becomes “doing your rotation has a chance to give you some extra rage, plus a random single target damage proc.”
Rank 2 and 3, well, you added Mangle to the existing talents and these were decent talents already, so I guess it’s fine. I will say that it seems in line with other 2 and 3-point Apex Talents. It would be cool if the damage was Arcane, or even better, Arcane for EC and Bleed for DotC, so that its damage would interact with our talents even a little bit, but whatever.
Rank 4 is where it goes off the rails for me though. ANOTHER Mangle reset? I already outlined how rank 1 of the Apex doesn’t really influence our decision making because Thrash doesn’t have charges and the two charges on Mangle already refresh quickly because of Gore, and now we have another reset?
Mangle is almost purely single target (during Incarn it cleaves to 2 additional targets) so being flooded with resets during an AoE pack is going to be almost entirely wasted. Even if the extra rage on Mangle from the Apex stacks with Gore, Thrash is almost certainly still too valuable to skip casting in favor of an empowered Mangle. Thrash not only stacks and refreshes Rend and Tear (a talent which increases our damage done to and reduces our damage taken from targets hit by Thrash), but it also has a chance to recast through Flashing Claws and Thrash provides both rage and an absorb shield with Ursoc’s Fury. Furthermore, even with the 100% damage bonus to Mangle from the 2-piece tier set for Guardian, Thrash is still pushed ahead through its own buff from the 4-set!
Now, the reset on Thrash from rank 4 of the Apex is somewhat better but as others have astutely pointed out, tying the guaranteed procs of the Apex to Incarn is really clunky, because during Incarn you are casting Thrash every other global, so, to me, it seems like it incentivizes not pushing Maul during Incarn since a Thrash reset during Incarn is useless. Except Incarn lasts 30 seconds (even longer with the 4-piece set bonus!) and that’s a long time to go without pressing Maul when you are being flooded with resources, plus usually in M+ by the time Incarn ends you are out of the danger zone for that pull and thus you are incentivized to save the buff even longer. You can see how a small design choice compounds and becomes something that is, at best, meaningless, or at the very worst, punishing to players who play suboptimally.
Also, the redesigned Apex talents really kind of step on two rather unique new talents that we got in Midnight, Sundering Roar and Waking Nightmare. For those that don’t know, Waking Nightmare is a passive talent which randomly summons a pet that radiates low damage in AoE, attacks a single target and mirrors our Thrash casts. It’s a bit underwhelming right now, to be honest, for many of the same reasons I outlined in the Apex feedback above: we have no agency over its appearance or targeting, it doesn’t affect our gameplay, and provides no defensive benefit. Even the so called “mirrored” Thrash casts do not stack the Thrash DoT on its targets and do not contribute to an absorb shield through Ursoc’s Fury. It is strictly a damage talent.
Sundering Roar on the other hand is an ability which does decent AoE damage, resets the cooldown on Thrash, and allows the stacking bleed DoT from Thrash to stack beyond its usual cap for 8 seconds. Sundering Roar as a talent is much closer to something well-designed, as it allows the player to decide when to activate the reset on Thrash. Its main issue is that its best use-case is inside of Incarn, yet, as before with the Wild Guardian Apex talent, resetting Thrash during Incarn is meaningless. You use it during Incarn to get an extra 5 stacks of the bleed DoT, which is otherwise essentially impossible outside of Incarn due to Sundering Roar’s meager 8-second window.
The point is, these two capstone talents are basically Rank 1 and Rank 4 of our new Apex talents already, and have their design and uniqueness diminished by the Apex. Surely there is room for something new to be created for our Apex talents, instead of serving reheated leftovers to us under a new name.
In summary: The Apex talents are entirely passive, provide zero direct defensive value, won’t affect our gameplay in the slightest, step on the toes of talents which were literally created and added to our spec talent tree for this expansion, and could potentially punish players who use it incorrectly.
I agree with everything you said, EXCEPT, I do not want any apex pets providing us any sort of defensive benefit (outside of rage gen, which is fine). Seeing how well random, uncontrollable procs have worked for defensiveness of BDK and VDH is a big NO THANK YOU on random defensives.
It can be damage, that’s fine.
Though I’d rather they focus it more on buffing Mangle to make the core of the spec better, instead of just pumping damage into silly pets.
Guardian
Apex Talents: Wild Guardian has been updated –
Bonus rage moved from rank 1 to rank 3.
Base chance adjusted to 10%.
Spirit rage generation increased to 8.
Rank 3 grants one guaranteed spirit and increases Thrash and Mangle damage while a spirit is active.
Much, much better.
40-50% uptime for Incarn ? Interesting.
What is this from?
spirit rage generation, +5 sec incarn from set, more haste
Ohhhhh I see….. I wouldn’t bet on getting Incarn below like the 1:45-2min mark without some interesting conditions, but who knows.
Also…… looking at our tree with all of this in mind, the bottom of our tree is still so bloated. With the change to the apex, making it attractive for EC builds, there is just not enough talent points to get the talents you should have for an EC build, even skipping EVERYTHING having to do with Maul/Raze.
Using: CgGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAgZmxsYmZMziZxwMLAAkIAAAAAAAAAzYzAAAAQBAAA2AAAAsYZDAAMA
As a base for an EC build, trying to get things like Moonless Night, EF, or any of the new talents like Harnessed Rage, Waking Nightmare, Sundering Roar….. these are just going to be dead talents.
I really wish blizzard would clean up the bottom of the tree. Merge some talents, make it easier to pick others….. we have so much bloat there and this apex change (WHILE GOOD) will very much so show how few points we can spare.
I think the newest iteration of the Apex talents are much better, but something that pushed me off of Guardian and onto other tanks is all the small CD windows that you have to manage. With Sundering roar, Lunar Beam and (only in raid currently) Red Moon. In my humble small brain opinion, I enjoyed Guardian when it had a clear and relatively easy flow to it. When most other classes got pruned of abilities at MN launch, and now in 12.1 pruned of high dmg CD windows, it seems strange that Gdruid got inflated with spells, and their whole apex talent and bottom half of the talent tree, is all CD related. I have a similar complaint for Balance druid, but less so and this isn’t the right place for that feedback.
I can admit that GDruid was a bit boring before, but I don’t want a 30s, 1 or potentially 2, 1m CDs and a flexible 3m incarn CD. There’s already a lot of free procs with mangles, galactic guardian, and now the new apex talents. It could just be me, but it feels very unpolished and there’s just a lot going on.
This is already in the game right now )
With this patch, the cooldown of Incarn will be less than 1:30, with a duration of 35 seconds.
Currently on PTR, if you press Mangle when you have a Ravage proc, it deletes the proc and you get no damage from it. Hopefully this bug is fixed prior to testing.
That’s good news, but have they fixed the spirit Bears running amok?
I assume the currently popular degen thrash/moonfire spam build is going to be ruined by the 12.1 patch? Confirmation would be nice thank you.
yes
/10chars
That’s sad but I figured the fun wouldn’t last.
If it makes you feel any better, you CAN still just do that as moonbear, it just won’t be optimal. Replace the Moonfire spam with Mangle any time its up and you can just pretend its the same, since Thrash is still really strong.
On a more important note, has anyone been able to get the apex talent to proc while a current spirit bear is active? I’ve tried for many hours but haven’t seen a single proc during an active proc. I don’t think it has an internal CD, as I’ve had procs within a few seconds of dropping a previous spirit bear, but no procs while one is active.
If I try to force it, using the guaranteed bear on Incarn, it appears to despawn the currently active bear and only have 1 spirit bear active at a time. The animation for the first bear stops and I only get 1 Spirit’s Wrath per Mangle or Thrash press.
If so, this feels bad, since it effectively removes our ability to proc our apex, during our apex.