Yep, today’s beta patch pretty much confirms it. Stick a fork in the bear.
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Ehh.
A band-aid fix is still a fix. There isn’t a doubt these will help druids. An extra stack of thrash, potentially ROTS. It’s going to be felt, and combined with whatever we see on conduits, it’s perfectly reasonable to expect bears are going to be viable and strong even.
But it’s just going to be another case of can kicked down the road. It’s fine. I like bear. It’s strong enough to do anything now and will likely continue to be in Shlands.
I’d just like to see issues fixed so our fun legendary items could be fun, and not designed to fill in a gap that should be fixed.
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Except you won’t have these at the start, you’ll have to farm them up, and they can only go in crafted armor if I’m understanding the system correctly.
Is the crafted gear going to become obsolete like it often does, so these will only be for 9.0 / 9.1? We don’t know.
Another issue is that these legendaries help make Guardian functional. Meanwhile, other specs are already functional, and their legendaries just make them all that much more awesome and have them pull away from where bears are.
Have you looked at the Brewmaster legendaries?
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None of these legendaries bring a raid cooldown like the Blood/Warrior legendaries. None of them fix the overarching utility and control issues Bear has in M+. They are taking a subset of the interesting effects from Bear in Legion, and hacking them apart into mutually exclusive legendary choices. The spec is broken, giving us 4 mutually exclusive choices of the myriad of suggestions we have made to address the spec is not what we need. Congrats, we get to be bad version of a Legion Bear~~~
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Is it just me, or is there still no way to get a snare?
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May be via food buff again 
Curious why they decided to select those legendary perks - do bears have problems with damage or thrash stacks? As I can see only 1 perk is usable but again - prot warriors have a group/raid shield wall.
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It’s just a copy/paste of Luffa’s Wraps from Legion, oh mixed with the Legs I think.
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Yep, I got it. I meant they had so much variety of legendary perks that they can chose from - all those abilities from wotlk to legion that they took from us but instead 2 of 4 are some random useless thrash buff
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They probably just went off of popularity. The wrists/legs were probably the most popular bear combo used.
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True.
But none of those things make or break viability
It’s easy to sit back and talk about “viable” when you don’t do anything difficult in the game. Go tank Mythic Nzoth on a bear and then come back and tell us how much fun you had kiting Psychophages with no slow.
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I mean, but you did tank him.
Which again, makes you viable. This isn’t to say things can’t be better. But there isn’t really any content a bear tank can’t do.
I did it by relying on 2 Hunters, an Elemental Shaman, a couple of mages, and a Boomkin to make up for my shortcomings.
When you need 5 people to cover for you because you can’t perform a basic function that every other tank can, that’s not viable. That’s severely handicapped.
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The new legendaries basically confirm that i’m staying resto 
I was hoping to be tanking this expac but looks like i’m relegated back to Healing. Why bring a Guardian Druid when a Prot Paladin can slam someone with 400% Damage increased Righteous Shield in Mythic+?
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It’s fair to feel that way. Like I said, covering flaws is good. But you still did it.
A slow is a sorely needed tool for our kit. Not every class will have every tool, and that’s an extremely stupid choice by Blizzard when it’s as basic as slows or interupts.
Others can cover our flaws, but what do we cover in a group, a brez that a quarter of all specs bring, and… what? We don’t bring anything to a group that another can’t do better than us. Maybe there’s some niche for Heart of the Wild catweaving in raid, but the legendaries (and probably the conduits) don’t lend themselves to that. Cat Thrash and Bear Thrash are still two different skills that overwrite each other ffs.
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Stampeding roar is fairly powerful, albeit I do admit most of the time if people were doing mechanics right in the first place it would have little strength.
Good thing the Resto Druid can bring stampeding roar in Shadowlands, since they’ll have it baseline.
They’ll also be able to have Vortex AND Typhoon, whereas we will not be able to do that anymore.
We’re just getting boned in shadowlands, no two ways about it.
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Can someone explain me why Shadowlands’ talents looks like its WIP? Or did the ideology of a talent tree changed since it was last introduced in MoP? Why do we have 30% heal in mobility tier and HotW in CC tier? May be there’s still hope for us and those talents are not final?
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Are you kiting them from someone else, or kiting them to put them in to position?
If it is the latter, then Blizzard’s answer would be, go Feral, it does the same job as Snare by making you faster.
Not the best answer, though, especially if you want range or self-healing.
If you need 5 DPS to handle one job, there are other problems going on. Not saying a snare wouldn’t help, just wondering why you needed 5 to do one job you expect yourself to do alone.
Or was that list just who helped you out over the course of the fight? If that is the case, you presented the case some interesting bias.
Probably because it is.
Honestly, I have no idea, but I think it largely goes with some things being standardized and something to fill the void.
With Ursol’s Vortex being standardized to Restoration (isn’t Ursol the bear spirit who lead you on getting the Guardian Claws?) and Wild Charge still not being standardized after all this time, some things were needed.
I don’t think those were needed, personally, and I think we shouldn’t NEED a “mobility” tier of Talents in Guardian or Feral, as those aspects should be part of the normal toolkit. At most, they should just enhance the mobility tools we already have, such as Tiger Dash modifying Dash or providing a Blink, Wild Charge changing immobilize to a Stun, and Reverberating Roar reducing our Roars’ cooldowns and increasing their range.
Sometimes changes happen during Beta, after all, we’re still a few months away from release, but the class needs review from someone who is actually interested in doing something else besides heal.