But only in the maintenancemode patch…when the expansion is basically over.
Its been trash tier the 3 patches before that, and will be in SL again.
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Bear rhymes with snare. Give us back that and we are at least viable for Mythic+
I also like the idea from others of incorporating combo points into defensives so there is some deeper gameplay.
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Did a Shrine key on my Monk tonight, was on the last boss, and was like “Wow, it’s so nice being able to actually slow this thing I’m supposed to kite.”
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That’s how the new wow system was supposed to be.
Simple default that new or average players can master.
Talents that can add complexity which more skilled players can extract more from the class.
That’s seems to cover everything but they failed to deliver it across the board.
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I’ve been levelling a Paladin. Was gonna make him Holy, but I just can’t get the knack of the Paladin healing style. I switched to Resto Shaman and love it. So I’m thinking I might go with Prot Paladin for Shadowlands. What do you think of Prot Pally? Just looking for options when my Bear goes on the shelf. 
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Prot Paladins have a great utility toolkit, but I can’t speak to how durable they are compared to other tanks.
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My resto sham heals for our raid group. One of our tanks is a bear tank, but we let a newbie come in with his prot pally so the bear tank can bring one of his alts in for DPS. The prot pally had roughly the same iLvl and was so much easier to heal. Durability/survivability was noticeably different. I did some “testing” and let the pally eat all 20 stacks of Vexiona’s breath on Heroic. I didn’t even need to cleanse the pally tank (let stack to 20 and sat for a bit before cleasne) whereas we have to double cleanse our bear tank (10 stack cleanse and repeat at the next 10). It’s not the whole story about the differences between the specs, but I definitely can ignore our pally tank more than I did the bear.
Thanks for the input. The basics of Prot Pally seem pretty similar to Bears with Shield of the Righteous being the analog to Ironfur and Light of the Protector being the analog the Frenzied Regeneration. The throttle is cooldown rather than Rage and your attack abilities reduce those cooldowns rather than generate rage to use them. But the added utility makes it seem like it’d be much more fun to play. I especially like the Avenger’s Shield tool. As the days and weeks roll by, I’m less and less hopeful that the big Bear reveal is coming.
Not to mention the other tank classes have some good…no… amazing covenant abilities to chose from, while bears have completely trash covanent abilities so far.
Avenger’s Shield is crazy because (unless they’ve changed it), it won’t break CC. If you CC something in a pack of 4, then throw Avenger’s Shield at another, it won’t hit the CC’d target.
I think it’s the only ability in the game that works that way.
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Prot pally is looking strong from initial impressions by various tank-focused players on the beta. They should have even more utility and group healing with the holy power system coming back. They also get more cooldowns like holy avenger and some nice talent changes. It remains to be seen if they will fold over like a wet napkin in challenging content when their SOTR charges are unavailable.
So far it seems that if you are an early expansion dungeon focused player, then prot pally is a solid choice. It will certainly keep you awake far more than the poor bear.
Also as a long time on and off prot pally main yes avenger’s shield is the best tank ability ever.
I think that guardian has lost a lot of its identity during BFA (and even legion imho) and it’s not only boring rotation or lack of active mitigation, but also itemization. Stacking ilvl (WoW is not destiny and it’s bad for an rpg when ilvl is the only parameter that you should consider) and versatility is not fun at least for me and it feels that I’m playing a target dummy that doesn’t affect combat at all.
I think that one of the best iterations of bear druid was in Cataclysm, and we can see why:
- Main stat was the crit rating. A very unobvious choice for a tank that perfectly aligned with bear’s class identity. The more you crit - the more shield procs you get.
- Bear’s basic health pool, armor and dodge chance was higher comparing to other same ilvl tanks. This alone made us specific because we don’t have parry and shield block. In BFA we just have same baseline stats as everyone else minus parry/block. Kinda weird.
- Leader of the pack - I don’t know why this was removed, I always liked feeling useful because of that talent.
- Infected wounds - slow is always great.
- Some other things like baseline pulverize and more fun and engaging rotation with procs and swipe procs, but it’s not as important as those 4 points above.
So I think it would be great if blizzard took wotlk/cata/mop version of bear and reimagined it for their new expansion instead of continuing what they do with guardian for the last 2 expansions.
P.S. Please, bring back old sounds or ask your game designer to play as bear tank for 4-5 hours. Those artificial scratch sounds are impossible to listen for long gameplay sessions.
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Can lunar beam be replaced? It’s really, really really underwhelming even on a row that is fairly underwhelming as it is.
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I dont understand this either, the spec has never stacked mastery to buff bleeds, it has never been about the bleeds. It has almost always been a versa stacking spec, but it occasionally diverges from the main, like during this patch with the availability of corruptions and the ability to go absolutely ham with %12 crit corruptions for those sweet sweet extra combo points.
Lower in several cases. We firmly run in the middle of the pack where armor or health pool is concerned, and the lowest where avoidance is concerned.
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Strangely enough, my Monk has about 90K less health than my Zandalari Druid in Guardian form, and my Guardian’s self-healing is vastly superior. That’s with with a 5 iLevel difference. My Death Knight on the same server has about 100K more health at about the same iLevel as the Guardian Druid. Admittedly, Monks are better known for their Stagger and Avoidance than Druids are.
I remember when Bear Druids of the Claw had the highest armor of any unit in Warcraft 3. I have also found it rather offensive that a freaking Druid snake can parry, but Druids in Bear form never have been able to.
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Watching the live stream now.
Beta drops next Tuesday… Maybe next expansion guys.
To quote what Ion just said and corroborates my experience as a longtime player, “The framework is complete.”
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It is confirmed…feral and gaurdian is trash tier in shadowlands…no more work to be done for us.
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“But the foundation is a complete disaster.” - Dreaux S Esquire, Bearer of Bad News
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Another Alpha with basically no changes to Bear, another expansion of being a trash tier trial tank. What a waste of time.
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