Less good is an interesting way of saying unusable. Fantastic design to make a covenant ability worthless for our spec.
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Eh. Probably unusable, yeah.
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Honestly with how many interactions in this game shift a Guardian out of form but yet a Balance druid can interact and remain in Moonkin form; I won’t be surprised if silly stuff like that make it to live. It frankly baffles me that they can get this right for one of our animal form specs but bear/cat be damned.
2 Likes
Just want to say first that I agree with you. Balance form and bear form should share restrictions or be granted the same allowances in terms on what we can or can’t do in form.
That being said… if we’re going to look at this technically in terms of how the Mechanics work, Bear/cat form falls under the classification of beasts. For example, They can be hibernated.
Moonkins are classified as humanoid. Therefore they don’t have the same limitations as beasts, and this is likely the cause of the disparities between the two forms.
It’s not a bug or glitch or some oversight on blizzards part. That’s just how things works. Regardless, it does need to be addressed.
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That reminds me of how Paladins could Fear Forsaken at one point in either Alpha or Beta. The players’ Forsaken characters were classified as Undead, so it made those certain spells of Paladins quite effective.
Once PvP was considered an option for a server that changed around quite quickly for some reason…
I spend most of each alpha/beta going around flagging quests and items that can’t be done in forms, or that shift you out of form.
I flagged a lot in Bastion, but then swapped to playing my Monk since then. Hopefully all the other cats and bears flagged everything in the other zones. 
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Based on the forums, there are like 2 Bears on Beta. So please do your best Tewa!
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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.