You’ve interpreted my post as far more literal, and consequently, more offensive than intended. Leishaan is my little battle pet afterall, I was the one who let the kitten out of his cage.
He’s allowed to post, in fact I even complimented his big imagination, but those who are endlessly debating him over end-game viability and mechanics should be warned. Let him speak about class fantasy, leveling and world quests, reconsider your time discussing content he doesn’t do (mythic, dungeons etc). Or do, I don’t care, I do find amusement when that little tabby kitten tries discussing such things with the alpha cats and bears.
I do think all kinds of players should respect eachother though. Currently casual players are just spitting on high end players…whithout any understanding of what is needed from the class/spec at all. So personally I think its fair game to have a go at casuals who refuse to aknowledge that there are players playing at a higher lvl then them. It needs to go both ways not just the way casuals want it to.
Lie. I’ve said it shouldn’t be forgotten. That’s not the same thing.
And just because it is perfectly fine only for WQ or Assaults, doesn’t mean it should be completely ignored as if it didn’t exist.
Not to mention, I’ve presented the suggestions as questions to get people thinking about the ideas.
I post on my DK because it was the highest character when I started posting in the forums. I continue to use it because it helps me track what I’ve read and written in. I have a Zandalari Troll which is far better equipped now and I’ve started raiding with a Community. I haven’t done much on Mythic yet, but that’s due as much to bad timing as anything else.
But you’re just an elitist who wants to shut someone up so you declare disparaging things instead of actually considering the statements I make.
The sad part is, I haven’t said everything is fine, at most I’ve said it was situationally fine.
And I consider Druid one of my main classes. I just haven’t had the community to push content like others have till recently.
I still disagree. Windwalkers and Retributions can’t just start tanking right off the bat for any length of time past a quick defensive cooldown. Their healing is as anemic as ours is without Restoration Affinity.
Their Tanking and Healing specs really can’t switch to other roles as effectively as we can thanks to our stance/form shifting mechanic.
Don’t get me wrong, the harder the dungeon content, the less the hybrid nature shines, and being more focused is stronger. The same when everyone is new to a Raid, though it could be argued having that hybrid capacity could help, but too many people are too focused to see the possibilities and while we are still the most hybrid class, it has been vastly neutered over the years, especially since the Legion pre-patch.
I remember healing the second half of Bonemaw one time because I had already B-Rezzed the Tank already and the Healer went down. This was with Guardian Affinity. I haven’t been able to do that since the Legion Pre-patch. With the advent of the Artifacts, Blizzard chose to tighten down the specs in to only doing their role as much as possible, even forcing classes in to specific weapon configurations which were just optional before.
What are you talking about? Our “hybrid-ness” is locked under affinities and everyone takes restoration affinity because its the only useful one. Feral is completely useless, you will deal 5-10% more damage than in a bear form at most, balance is even worse.
Druid was hybrid before MoP when feral contained both dps and tank talents. In MoP is was splitted in “feral” and guardian. Nowadays it’s like every other class minus that we can’t heal in our form like prot paladin.
The more I think about guardian the more I like this idea… maybe if it cost you 10 rage per second to maintain the bear bonuses in other forms… so you miss out on all that mitigation but gain access to your hybrid abilities… putting up a full compliment of hots/dots/bleeds and back to bear without getting trucked.
I like the idea that changing out of bear form lets you keep your defensive capabilities for a few. I really want to have typhoon and cyclone usable together by bear again.
This is the thing I wish people would get through their head. Druid is NOT a hybrid, and has not been a hybrid for many years. This is ESPECIALLY true of guardian, who by the very nature of their role, can’t ever “change roles” in any meaningful content.
Even if some perfect scenario appeared, where guardian could pop out and get a heal off, my swiftmend does a whopping 101,000 healing at 473 ilvl. If I self heal, that’s an almost laughable ~1/6th to 1/7th of my health bar. On a 25 second cooldown, that also exposes me to being chunked super hard, and losing any value I might have got from casting in the first place.
Even a more perfect scenario, where I pop out, and start spamming my spells, I can get one swiftmend, three regrowths, and a rejuv off before I’m dry on mana. ~330k healing, which I’ve used in a few situations to help top people off while the healer drinks, but basically useless in the middle of any real encounter.
Blizzard intentionally gutted all of the hybrid specs, and made them for all intensive purposes, a single role in any given spec. Druid is no exception to this pruning, no matter how many times we’re painted as hybrids, that ship sailed years ago.
That’s not to say that Blizzard couldn’t in theory make our ability to heal/shift into interesting utility, but it would almost require changes that would cause people screech and demand we be nerfed back down. The ability to cast affinity spells INSIDE your main form, even if it required HOTW to be active, would go a long long way toward making it viable for more than just resto. No shifting out of cat to drop rejuv/swiftmend/wild growth, not dropping out of bear to do the same. Letting bears build combo points and pop a rip during their HOTW, or cast wrath/sunfire/starsurge within the confines of that cooldown.
In PvE, it wouldn’t be super strong, but it would definitely add interesting utility/choices to guardian. In PvP, it would immediately get either HOTW deleted, or our spec nerfed.
The problem is that the “bear bonuses” have actually been nerfed into irrelevance. There was a time where the dire bear bonus gave more stamina, AND more armor than an equivalent plate class, just by default. They gradually took more and more from direbear, and we now only JUST barely equate to a warrior in plate without a shield in terms of armor, and before you account for vanguard, which is mathematically about equivalent to having a 1 stack of ironfur up ALL THE TIME.
I had made the comment that my undergeared warrior felt less glass than my druid, but didn’t really understand why. So I set out to throw it all into a spreadsheet, and a 460 warrior has about as much armor as a 473 bear with 1 stack of ironfur up. This creates huge disparities in how durable the class feels in those instances where you don’t have a stack of ironfur up.
I’d actually much prefer they baked more of ironfur back into the direbear passive, and make ironfur cost MORE. To make it something you use to pre-emptively prepare for big hits, instead of the current system where if you don’t have 1 stack of ironfur, you just die.
Are you Bellular in disguise? Every time he talks about Guardian the first thing he says is it’sthe most boring spec he has ever seen in an MMO hands down.
It is fairly boring and mindless. There’s no interplay between the abilities in the kit. It felt ok in WoD with Tooth and Claw making Maul feel like an offensive and defensive ability and stacking Lacerates to Pulverize, Legion masked the issues with Legendaries that were well received but didn’t do much rotationally.
Moonfire is just damage, it doesn’t play into the kit or offer any bonus. Thrash has several talents that provide it with bonuses, but baseline it is in the same boat. Swipe is just damage as well.
Earthwarden and Galactic Guardian should be made baseline
Add a passive or some bonus to using Moonfire. Maybe the stacking damage done and damage taken debuff from Legion artifact trait, or let it apply Faerie Fire, which increases magic damage taken by 5% and let it stack with Demon Hunter’s debuff (since Monk debuff and Curse of Reck currently stack to provide +10% physical damage taken)
Re-design Lunar Beam to be an active ability on a low cooldown to apply Moonfire to all targets within an 8 yd range and increase Arcane damage done
Take Frenzied Regen off the GCD
Add a snare to Thrash and let Swipe reduce Thrash’s cooldown by 1 sec
Remove Guardian of Elune talent and give that functionality baseline to Maul, letting it increase the duration of the next Ironfur or Frenzied Regen and slightly reduce the rage cost
Replace Guardian of Elune talent with a situational magic mitigation talent, like Legacy of Ursol, allowing each stack of Ironfur to reduce magic damage by 10%.
Amen - it’s worth noting that I struggle to solo heroic dungeons as Guardian (not really survival as much as kill time for some fights) while my WW Monk breezes through them with ease. They are roughly the same gear. I understand that my gear isn’t even close to the best, but merely using the reference as a comparative basis.
It’s very bizarre to me that despite being told my Cat can off-tank better than my Monk, I haven’t found that to be the case since WotLK over a decade ago. Further, in the current iteration, I need the affinity if I want to “unlock” that part of my class. Instead, it seems like a lot of stories are fueled by nostalgia and not current design…
There was one case in Ny’alotha LFR where tank swap wasn’t happening that I filled in by going bear (LFR is horrible BTW). But I could have done the same with any other class with a taunt and a personal defensive (because LFR). Further, I lost almost all specialization usefulness by changing stance to Bear for almost no defensive gain… only an ability to taunt.
In actual challenging content, I’m almost always better off staying in Cat and working to kite and bleed or using personals, than I am to switch to Bear and lose all offensive capability (PvP may be an exception but only because of outlasting CC windows on supporting healers). This is by design - how it seems Blizzard wants the class to be. In most cases, the defensive capacity from Predatory Swiftness is better than any Affinity-less bonus of Bear Form, and only slightly behind Frenzied Regen if (1) the CD is available and (2) there’s no rage issues (at which point, Swiftmend would’ve been the smarter option overall).
Honestly, without the affinity, I shouldn’t even get the form if that’s how the class is going to be designed. But most of us here are basically pointing out that the class really needs a re-work, and just talking about different ways to go about.
To emphasize, the biggest problem is Guardian. While the spec is boring, and there’s not enough “Druid” in the Bear, the core dilemma boils down to this:
So far, there’s no solution from just Druid to this problem. In my eyes, that solution exists in a broader encounter design context. That is, improving the “hybrid” position of all tanks, so while the extra tank isn’t needed, they can cough GLADIATOR STANCE cough dish out some extra damage or float to an off-role supporting position (e.g. for Paladin).
…
But man… fixing those kinds of issues are massive amounts of work. And with tighter and tighter budgets, smaller and smaller teams, and needing to push the same revs/comps… It’s just not a realistic ask unless they move on to WoW2 or a separate dev company takes up a competing position and forces Blizzard to transform their position … And that’s really getting exemplified in the current content cycle. It seems to show that core classes get left consistent (at least since Legion) and other in-game systems (“borrowed power”) will be patched in to seal design gaps.
We just timed a 19 freehold and motherload with a all bear group and missed timing a 20 junkyard by something like 19 seconds. Really makes me wonder, if bears are so bad how incredibly high could you go with a all brewmaster group?
Our “hybrid-ness” is locked under affinities and everyone takes restoration affinity because its the only useful one. Feral is completely useless, you will deal 5-10% more damage than in a bear form at most, balance is even worse.