Hello.
Today I will be talking Guardian Druid, class tree, and some other things. I do not expect everyone to agree with my opinions, and that’s ok.
After reviewing the changes the Paladin class tree received, where they tweaked some of the nodes to change how they work depending on the spec, it is quite sad to look at ours.
Wasted Points
This season for M+ has a couple of dungeons where Remove Corruption is quite beneficial (it wasn’t really used in Season 1), therefore we have to waste even more points than before.
To take Remove Corruption, we have to take
- Rejuvenation
- Swiftmend
Most bears will want to go into Nurturing Instinct (+6% magic damage) and Astral Influence (+3 yards on abilities). To take those, we are required to take:
- Starfire
- Moonkin Form
- Sunfire
What do all these spells have in common ? They cannot be casted in bear form
That’s right. To pick the talents that benefit us and/or the group, we have to spend 5 points into abilities that we cannot use while performing our main role.
Casting any of these spells while actively tanking results in us dying in the high majority of cases.
That’s not even counting our of our capstones, Protector of the Pact, depends on Regrowth, which also cannot be casted in Bear Form (unless talented into Dream of Cenarius, which is another 3 wasted points, this changes in 10.1.5 but the point still remains)
Redundance in spec trees
Every Paladin spec had Divine Toll in their spec trees, and now it has moved to class tree. Everyone (almost everyone?) agrees that it was a good move. It made sense to move it to the class tree.
As of right now, every Druid spec has a choice node where we have to pick between Convoke and Incarnation, and a node below it that empowers either. Why are these not in the class tree ?
We are the only class in the game with 4 specs. We are the most hybrid class in the game, our class tree is without a doubt the hardest to get done right, but I feel the effort put into it was clearly not enough.
Guardian Tree, and making people want to have a bear in their party/raid
The Guardian tree still has a lot of 2-point nodes. In fact, the 4th row of our tree is exclusively 2-pointers.
Guardian received some changes in 10.0.5 in our talent tree, but since then not much has changed. More is coming in 10.1.5, those changes are good, but they are not going to make us a desired spec. When was the last time you heard someone say on a raid boss “I wish we had a Guardian Druid right now, this would make the fight much easy !” ?
We still don’t bring anything unique to our groups. In fact, the single little thing we had (Front of the Pack, movement speed increase and radius increased from Stampeding Roar) got removed in 10.1.5. Granted, no one ever used that talent (it’s a good talent, just not worth spending a very expensive point on it).
Mark of the Wild, Roar, Innervate are all things that other druid specs bring, making bear the last spec you’re looking at when looking into those buffs for your raid.
There are so many possibilities the devs could give us, even some of them already exist (ie: PvP talent Grove Protection. It would be easy to incorporate a nerfed-down version of this in our spec tree).
Some other classes / specs are getting major rework while still being brought to the very top end-game content. Meanwhile Guardian is sitting on the sidelines at the top, getting some band-aid fixes here and there.