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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If rolling abilities together is good, then you could make the same argument to just combine swipe and thrash with no cooldown. The bleed will still be limited at 3 stacks and you just spam swipe all day long. The instant damage of thrash isn’t that much better than swipe anyways.
Disagree. I think all tank specs should have a good single target stun baseline.
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It’s when Ironfur was introduced and they moved us away from their attempts to make us dodge tanks like in Warlords (which didn’t work).
So they removed our “spend rage to dodge” and gave us “spend rage to mitigate”. We got Ironfur, which increased armor, and Mark of Ursol, which increased magic defense.
But they quickly did an about-face and removed Mark of Ursol after the first raid tier. Removing a core class ability mid-expansion was (and is) unprecedented.
Also Frenzied Regen was changed in Legion to be a Death-Strike style reactive heal, where it healed for a large percentage of damage taken over the last 3 seconds. Not only was it a larger heal than we have now (when used correctly) but it also added much more strategy to the game. Frenzied Regen was massively nerfed in BfA, and continues to be nerfed.
We went from Infected Wounds, which we had had since vanilla (slows 1 target) to Bloody Paws, where Thrash applied a slow to all targets. Then that was removed in BfA and now we’re the only tank without a slow at all.
There were also cool things like Pawsitive Outlook (Thrash had a 15% chance to proc another Thrash, which then had a 15% chance to proc another Thrash, etc.). Moonfire reduced all damage we took from targets that it was on, etc. etc. etc. Rage of the Sleeper improved on the old Berserk’s fear immunity by making us immune to all loss of control effects, including knockbacks.
Legion was definitely the high water mark for bears. But it seems to have been almost by accident, since they undid almost everything during or right after Legion.
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Bear Hug stunned the bear as well. It wasn’t a good single target stun.
Imagine if Paladins’ stun was a channeled ability for the duration. It’s laughable.
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Yeah I do recall that. I played during WoD
Why not? Seemed ok to me.
Yup, I heard about that from Preach, and go figure, we have something interesting now but OF COURSE Blizzard had to take it away…
Eh… I honestly hate that about Death Strike. I’d much rather know that I’m going to be healed for a consistent percentage of my health than have some little meter fluctuating up and down a hundred times mid boss fight that I have to perfectly time just to get that MEGA UBER SUPER HEAL to boost my ego and pad numbers. If I wanted strategy I’d rather it go back to vanilla that healed depending on rage banked.
I like ya Tewa but any druid worth his salt would know we never had this in vanilla. Even if Classic weren’t a thing to refresh my memory i’d bet money it wasn’t in Vanilla. Pretty sure infected wounds was a BC talent we got… I just even checked the Classic talent calculator. Not on there. (Checked wowpedia. Was actually introduced in WOTLK)
Yup, more text book Blizzard druid hate.
Reminds me of burst of savagery, but ya know, worse.
Were these on that artifact tree thingie that is now depleted? Sounds like the DH brand.
That DOES sound cool.
Figures I miss the one expansion we were pretty OP. Some of those benefits from the Legion artifact don’t really seem like a redesign though. If anything i’d say the change from Cata to Mists where we went from passive mitigation to active mitigation with Savage Defense is an actual redesign. All it seems that happened was our active mitigation was just moved from dodge to armor.
You can see the artifact traits on
https://wow.gamepedia.com/Claws_of_UrsocDon’t forget Intimidating Roar, the talented upgrade of Incapacitating Roar. It was an AoE disorient effect that did not break on damage. They took that away, too. That was a fun ability. 
Also, Fae Silence from Cata maybe? Anyway, that was another fun ability they removed.
I agree. The talent should enhance that baseline stun. Maybe the talent modifies it to be a shorter length AoE stun, like a Shockwave, which would effectively address the Intimidating Roar removal.
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Oh, you just know its coming on a legendary in the next round of updates.
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soo. 4head. guardian druids have been the first tank class to clear a M+15 each expansion on time. Additionally they’ve had a single player on the top leaderboards pretty consistently. They just don’t have much representation because people think they are boring (probably correctly) and they lack a unique utility. ( they have a lot of utility but not unique, especially with resto druids in the group)
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Yeah id say 5 druid players in the top 1000 for the world is pretty low representation.
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People that say guardian is boring and press 4 buttons, i’ve never seen them use all the additional utility.
- cat/boomkin weaving
- Offhealing between pulls
- Decursing/depoisoning
- Brezzing
- Tanking high enough content that micro-managing ironfur and frenzied regen are off CD
- Typhoon into ursols for a crappy aoe grip
- moonfire (and galactic guardian talent which you should be taking)
- stamp roaring at ideal times for mechanics/between packs
-swapping to travel form between packs when possible. - De-enraging mobs of which there are a lot of even in low level dungeons.
Generally the people saying its boring do a crappy rotation, mishandle defensive’s, tanking normal dungeons or low M+ where it doesn’t matter if you even bother to play correctly. In this scenario, the other tanks are all a lot more engaging and fun.
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With the exception of cat/boomkin weaving, every Guardian druid i’ve played with does that.
Can’t cat/boomkin weave if you’re constantly tanking M+ 
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Yes. but they also have the current highest IO score outside of a prot warrior. They aren’t really weak. People just don’t want to play them. Although this might change with a guardian druid coming back for high-end raiding (if he plays it, Sejta)
This is absolutely false.
I think you added 1 too many zeros.