Guardian Druid "on pull" Problem

Classes Druid
21

Talents shouldn’t be taken to solve a fundamental problem.

It’s actually 3 stacks of Ironfur to reduce physical melee attacks by the same amount on the PTR right now. This is for an ilvl 90 Druid vs an ilvl 71 Warrior :sweat_smile:. No buffs/procs, trinkets, essences, etc.

Assuming a 2500 damage hit on the PTR…

Druid (level 50, ilvl 90 on PTR)

  • 0 stacks of Ironfur, 579 armor, 40.24% DR, 1494 damage
  • 1 stacks of Ironfur, 948 armor, 52.43% DR, 1189 damage
  • 2 stacks of Ironfur, 1318 armor, 60.51% DR, 987 damage
  • 3 stacks of Ironfur, 1688 armor, 66.25% DR, 844 damage

Warrior (level 50, ilvl 71 on PTR)

  • No active mitigation, 799 armor, 48.16% DR, 1296 damage
  • Shield Block active, 799 armor, 48.16% DR + 34.60% further DR, 848 damage

I’d love to see the numbers as a level 60 on characters with comparable gear. No Beta access though so :upside_down_face:. Maybe this is something that gets fixed or levels out at the new level cap. Tuning could be all weird on pre-patch right now. There’s any number of things that could cause this disparity.

Edit: I know they’re different classes with different toolkits. But there’s a few things about Guardian that make me wonder what the philosophy was behind the design choices. Like not being able to have active mitigation up before or immediately after a pull. (sans talents as pointed out by Tical).

1 Like
22

I’m not sure I agree with the OP’s original argument, but my recollection of M+ in 8.0 matches his. You had to be pretty desperate to consider a Prot Warrior or Guardian Druid. Prot pretty quickly got buffed into the godhood they still enjoy, but it was several patches before I started commonly seeing Guardians in the LFG tool again.

1 Like
23

Yeah my buddy was a Prot Warrior at the start of BFA and I had the unfortunate task of healing him. It was rough.

24

That was the general attitude at the time.
But again… from my experience, when I did settle on a warrior, it was a nightmare. When I chose a Druid, I was pleasantly surprised.

The worst thing about guardian druids in 8.0 was stigma. That’s all. They weren’t the same tanks they were in legion, and all the FOTM players cried on the forums and caused a mass exodus. That’s why the logs are void of druids.

The ones that stuck it out were more than capable despite our shortcomings. We weren’t the best… but we most certainly were not the worst.

2 Likes
25

Never!

Druid master race!

:bear::chicken::cat:

4 Likes
26

Whoa, I don’t know if I want to agree with that. Not on the internet anyways…

Master Class though (drake.gif)

27

I don’t have beta but i am curious how well using Convoke the Spirits on a pull would help with the initial damage taken and threat generation in M+.

28

Can we?
I would really love to, becuase you certainly havent.

Comparing block to thick hide?
No.
Cut the crap.

Guardians have earthwarden, which is essentially our passive block
30% damage reduction of the next 3 auto attacks every 6 seconds.

No.
This is incorrect.

Demo is 20% for 8 sec on a 45 second cd. (affected by anger management)

Guardians have:
Thick hide 6%
As well as Pulverize 9% or Rend and Tear 6%

So… 20% for 17.78% of the time or 12-15% All the time.
hmmm

Large Cooldowns

Sheild wall: 40% for 8 sec. 4min cd
vs
Survival Instincts: 50% for 6 seconds. 4 min cd and 2 charges.
oh yeah… and Barkskin: 20% 1.5 min cd

Healing
Ignore Pain
vs
Frenzied Regen + Yseras Gift + Natures Guardian

It certainly is easy to be this naive when you make up numbers, ignore facts and make bad comparisons.

4 Likes
30

It’s actually pretty decent.

I average between 6 - 8 Ironfur stacks every use so its definitely good for getting mitigation up, especially on a large pull. In addition with it being on a 2m cd, you pretty much have it for every other or every third pull and it provides a bit of passive healing combined with several Thrash and Moonfire casts which help with snap threat.

1 Like
31

At the beginning of BFA, it wasn’t uncommon for certain tank specs regardless of IO to be declined in favor of other tank specs. If the queue had a qualified BDK or BrM, it didn’t usually matter about your IO if you were Prot Warrior or Guardian druid, they out right skipped over you or declined you.

But a lot of that hatred was stigma driven by the community. It doesn’t help that a lot of players are mindless and can’t think for themselves and would rather make their own assessment based solely on what some streamer or raider proclaims to be the “rankings” – which mind you these opinions surface before tuning occurs and yet players still take it as fact.

2 Likes
32

This is actually a relevant comparison because block and Thick Hide are both passive forms of mitigation…

Unfortunately, I do not know much about Warriors and only have a basically fresh 120 at ilvl 365 or so in live… but on PTR it has a roughly 25% base block rate and about 35% damage reduction from block.

Given that information, one in every four attacks will be blocked, so one quarter, or 8.75% would mathematically be their passive damage reduction from block. Keep in mind this is on a very undergeared Warrior so numbers may be a bit higher on a geared one.

Tical… you keep going back to all these talents Guardians have access to when comparing them to Warriors. But everything mentioned about Warriors is baseline.

We have Ironfur, Frenzied Regeneration, Berserk, Survival Instincts, and Barkskin. Plus a passive 6% DR from Thick Skin.

First row is really between Blood Frenzy and Bristling Fur. Blood Frenzy is good in multi-target and Bristling Fur still requires you get slapped around since it’s based on damage taken.

Second row I guess you could take Renewal? If you want a paltry 30% heal on a 90 second cooldown lol.

Third row will be between Balance and Restoration Affinities. Mostly for Typhoon or Ursol’s Vortex. The bonus 5 yard range from Balance is really handy, Ysera’s gift is okay, but is wasted if you and your party are at full health.

Fifth row we can get more rage, more rage, or 30% more health every three minutes when we Berserk.

Sixth row we have Earth Warden, but it’s not like it’s up anywhere near 100%. If we take that we’re not taking either of the other two talents which reduce the CD on Survival Instincts and Barkskin, or increase the duration of Ironfur and healing of Frenzied Regeneration.

We can then tack on Rend and Tear which takes maybe 18 seconds to stack to three for full effect, and this needs to be done for each fresh pack in M+… or Pulverize which is a pretty decent 20% single target DR but takes 12 seconds to generate the two stacks of Thrash it consumes and has 33% uptime.

Warriors have Shield Block, Ignore Pain, Demoralizing Shout, Last Stand, Shield Wall, Spell Reflect, and Rallying Cry. They also have passive block which earlier was determined to work out to maybe 8% (probably actually more).

First row they can take Punish… basically more passive DR for just doing their rotation. 3% guaranteed. Most likely to average around 6%.

Third row they can take Booming Voice and get a free Ignore Pain when they use Demoralizing Shout.

Fifth row they can take Never Surrender and buff their Ignore Pain or take Indomitable and gain 10% max health plus more healing than a Frenzied Regeneration when compared to its “healing per cooldown second”.

Seventh row all three are great choices. Very noticeable cooldown reduction on Avatar and Shield Wall, or more rage and extensions on Shield Block, or a 33% cooldown reduction on Last Stand that also grants you Shield Block (35% DR on an undergeared Warrior noted above) for 15 seconds.

So yeah… maybe there’s some talents that shore up some of Guardians short-comings, but the talents for Warriors just make them better.

1 Like
33

Aside from bolster (punish is never used) Show me a warrior talent that adds mitigation they didn’t already have.

I’ll wait…

Their entire toolkit is damage or cd reduction.

12 at the most.

Do you count to 6 before using thrash on every pull? Stop that.

How much dodge do they have? Did you look at that? Its next to none. Are we going to compare block to other abilities and just forget dodge even exists? How convenient. I guess you must have realized that having 33% chance to avoid 100% damage is damaging to your argument… or you forgot.

34

Are you looking at Shadowlands talents? Or Battle for Azeroth still? Why would you not take Punish in Shadowlands? It’s comparable to Earth Warden in terms of mitigation when fighting 6 mobs, and pulls ahead when fighting more.

This is fair. My bad lol.

I guess you forgot about Parry?

35

The first row traditionally and I suspect this not to change as we move into SL is that Blood Frenzy will be the default talent for dungeon content while Bristling Fur will continue to be our raid talent pick. Brambles traditionally was mostly useful only for certain affix weeks, namely Skittish for slightly more AoE threat.

Overall I like this row as it stands because there is meaningful choice here. All three have a default mode of content you’d use them within and they focus on providing the player defensive aspects that have synergy with the content.

This row will end up being just like it always has, it will come down to your own personal preference, encounter, and situational use.

Guardian rarely took Resto for Ysera’s Gift in the first place, it was mainly for access to Swiftmend which can be super potent on Live for Guardian; however with the recent HoT requirements that’ll likely be less of a factor now.

I still feel the split here and making Vortex and Typhoon mutually exclusive for half the druid spec’s in the first place was a terrible move and just yet another nerf to the already pathetic Guardian toolkit.

Earthwarden’s power was largely inflated due to VoP during BFA. You might be able to get better up-time with it using the Ursoc’s Lingering Spirit legendary but otherwise its mostly trickle passive mitigation that we can only really benefit tremendously with during Berserk/Incarn only.

Personally this is probably one of the row changes I’m somewhat looking forward to because traditionally the pick has been EW for dungeon content, otherwise you took SotF for raid. The GoE talent simply just didn’t stack up nearly as good this expansion as it had in Legion.

36

The thing about common denominators is that they have to be common.

37

I guess the one benefit to the parry argument is that if you go Venthyr, Nadjia can teach you how to parry – yay bear parry can now be a thing!

38

Make sense please… Dodge and Parry have the same effect… they both negate the damage of an attack.

Parrying either resets your swing timer, or vastly reduces it… can’t remember. So it gives classes that Parry more resource generation from their autoattacks.

Dodge can be used against ranged attacks, which are few and far between, unless they’re spells, which can’t be dodged.

Druids dodge, Warriors parry. The result is typically the same.

1 Like
39

Oh my bad… do you not know what common denominators are?

I’ll make this real simple for you then.

Yes… but their values are different.

40

You’re so insufferable lol. The common denominator of Dodge and Parry are that they both negate damage. I guess you’re not reading everything because I clearly said that.

Their values are calculated based on your main stat and critical strike rating. Wait… is that another common denominator?

So yes, their values can differ based on how you gear your character.

1 Like
41

Imagine my frustration, trying to lead this horse to water.

Youre having an argument with yourself here. I never said this wasnt true.

Now you get it.
You cant cancel one out with the other if their values arent the same.

Good thing bears also have this passive. Pair that with the fact that guardians can achieve much higher agility levels than warriors can with strength at the same ilvl, and all of a sudden the values change considerably.

So… no.
I did not forget about parry.

https://imgur.com/a/jK6VzOp