Anything that’s a problem for cat is also a problem for bear, so there are probably more Ferals catching things.
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I already flagged a number of problems in Revendreth for Guardian, but as I understand it there are more quests, so more things to re-review.
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I’ve been playing guardian a bit on beta but not as much as I’d like. What would you say the main issue is? I’ve been finding that, while survivability seems to actually be pretty decent, there’s just not enough damage output, and the gameplay still feels very outdated. Relying on a legendary to do acceptable damage is not fun.
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Conduits really needed to be big as far as damage output goes, and I don’t think they could have missed the mark more if they were trying.
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Who the heck knows, people come into the “regular” forums and say that Guardian is fine. Doesn’t need any fixes at all.
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Too many to count, at this point. I laid it all out months ago on the alpha forums:
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/feedback-druid-class-changes/490706/14?u=tewa-hyjal
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Unfortunately Blizzard has blocked off some of those easy fixes by locking things like Rage of the Sleeper behind our 1 legendary choice. Because why bother making things baseline and fixing problems when you can force players to use their legendary “choice” on something that then isn’t a choice at all?
I’m guessing the new “you get armor & health for 4 seconds when you go bear” is their attempt to fix the “rage on pull” problem, but it’s a conduit. Because why bother making it baseline and fixing problems when you can force players to use their conduit “choice” on something that then isn’t a choice at all?
Meanwhile, my Brewmaster works just fine without any of these things and becomes awesome with the legendary that adds a 2nd charge to Keg Smash and a conduits that do things like “shuffle adds up to 20% more to its stagger effectiveness” and “keg smash does up to 50% more damage to burning targets”.
They’re using borrowed power to make bear kind-of-functional (but not really, where’s our slow, again?), and using borrowed power to make brewmasters awesome.
The difference is simply staggering. (no pun intended)
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So, I would agree that the playstyle is not as interesting. But I would also suggest you take the class as what it is, and that is just a huge damage sponge. I have been playing with maximizing a mastery build, and near 2 million HP with procs. Combining that with the two Ny’alotha trinkets and survival instincts… it is making some interesting gameplay to say the least, regarding how much tanking mechanics you can avoid. I am currently working on my Heroic solo tanking, Mythic solo tanking will be next as soon as the guild gets there. I am playing it against what most people play it as, and it is seeming to be more fun this way. But I have always viewed and had great experience with mastery being the primary stat for druids, personally.
I tried a heavy mastery build for the first part of 8.3 but found it to be a dead end, Vers is more effective in both survivability and DPS.
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Speaking specifically for dungeons, Mastery stacking is a meme. In my opinion, 99% of people out there should just load up as much TD as they can and blast. Very few people are playing keys high enough where you are in danger of getting global’d with no counter play which is where the Vers amps are required.
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Vers amps aren’t just for globaled with no counter play, but they’re also useful for when you want to big very large multiple packs of trash, potentially with a boss in order to shave off lots of time being effective at cleave. This can be important depending on your comp and key level to get +3 timers or to upgrade that +2x key.
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I am still shocked that the psychus transition STILL forces me out of bear form. It’s little things like that, which convince me that they just don’t have a single dev/decision maker batting for guardian at all. There’s no real defensible reason for things like that, forcing a GCD to get back into form isn’t earth shattering, but it’s telling.
It’s such a trivial checkbox on any sort of quality control too, a box that just says “How does this clickable interact with bears/cats/moonkin?”.
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Yes I didn’t say that Versatile doesn’t have it’s uses, just that it isn’t applicable to 99% of players.
In keys at 20 and below, which is where the vast, vast majority of players are, playing TD7 is going to do much more for you timing the key than the Vers amp would. This was the context of my post. You can giga pull onto bosses all day long with no ranks of Versatile. At these levels you aren’t dying because you pull to much, it’s because of sub optimal play, and Vers amp won’t cover up THAT many mistakes.
⁸I want ferals bleeds to hurt again, like oldschool rogue poisons/bleeds
Here’s my 2 cents.
Guardian has been boring for a REALLY long time. At least the last few expansions. But Druids themselves were very fun. This hasn’t been more obvious since classic was released. Being a watered-down warrior that relied more on sheer numbers and didn’t have the baseline parent-class utility was boring then as well, sure, but the fact that we were that fancy little Swiss army knife with a cute but usable tool for a lot of different circumstances made it fun regardless. We can sneak around for quests and dungeons. We have heals for leveling and for pre-pulls or in the low or mid levels healing a dungeon with the right gear. Combine that with the few unique little claims to fame we had (Battle resurrection/LotP and Moonkin Aura/Innervate/Tranquility) and Druids were definitely enjoyable and desired.
But now, with no way of being a pseudo caster by swapping the right gear around since the stats are locked, the sub-par “affinities” and the moronic ability pruning, they took the “jack of all trades” part away and now we’re just a “jack of one trade”. I believe it was in Mists of Panderia where we finally had “usable in all forms” skills that I would say marked the peak of Bear tank design, at least in creativity and utility but WotLK talents like Nurturing Instinct that took some of our agility and translated it into healing had good synergy too.
All-in-all, unless we go back to a more traditional RPG gearing style where we can dictate exactly what stats we have, Bear druids just aren’t going to be fun like at all without major revamps, which I fear would just kill class identity anyway, kind of how Balance went from being about natural spells and attacks (Roots, thorns, treants, weather spells) to celestial spells that make sense for druids, yes, but sort of started superseding the class identity.
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They did a bear redesign, in Legion, and it turned out pretty good. The only thing missing was some more abilities castable in forms.
The problem was that they took the Legion bear, and they tore it apart. All we need is for them to put it back together again.
I think asking for ANOTHER redesign is not only unnecessary, but also dangerous. What if they botch it, and we end up like Shadow Priests?
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Go figure, that was the one expansion I, more or less, skipped entirely. I’m still p*ssed off about how dumb our animations look as we skate around in bear and cat form doing our slashing and swiping while our feet don’t move and it looks like we’re sliding around.
At least shadow has more than 2-3 buttons to press consistently
Just out of curiosity, what exactly was that “redesign” we got in legion anyway? I was there for the very last leg of the expansion probably already too close to post patch but I don’t really remember it being different than WoD
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I think button count is a poor measure, since Lacerate, for example, was removed at the bear community’s request and rolled into Thrash instead.
More options is good, as long as the options are good. Mark of Ursol was good, Fae Silence was good, Dream of Cenarius was good, Lacerate was bad. Bear Hug was bad. 
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