Try VDH, its 2 buttons.
Ha I actually starting messing with my VDH and brought it to raid last night. 20 ilvl difference, no corruptions and still working on buying essences and felt tankier than my Druid.
There is definitely more than 2 buttons but I get where you are coming from. I think that my Druid brings more to the group (Sigils vs Roar, Brez, Typhoon/Vortex) but i might feel different once I get some more time behind the wheel on the DH.
I like the simple nature of guardian and feel it should remain a very simple rotation with complexity added from utility they can provide - like affinities when off tanking.
Its what I play when I want to focus more on the game and less on what my character is doing.
What would be nice for SL is
if tiger dash did not drop you out of bear form.
If Maul and FR was off GCD
If thrash had a snare on it
If you could use swift mend\affinity abilities in bearform
3 Likes
IMO, remove pulverize from talents, keep the damage, remove the thrash bleed consumption, and make the attack apply ironfur to us while removing ironfur as an individual ability.
Replaced pulverize talent with something worth taking.
I would love to see pulverize being used cross board and not talented. I would also like to see maul taken back off the global and them give us a cool down to help us with magic damage and either a shorter timer on fr or another stack to burn.
Instead of adding renewal as a talent they could have that talent spot reduce cd or increase efficiency on FR.
Instead of adding renewal talent they could have added another baseline rotational button, or 5. Having your filler be an automatic AOE is incredibly lazy and stupid tank design.
Here’s a few minor things I believe could be added to the base kit of Guardians to add a bit more nuance while not being gamebreakingly OP:
- Gory Regeneration Azerite trait (hitting Mangle extends FR by 1 sec up to a max of 3 sec). It added a bit of rotational synergy, waiting to press Mangle if you saw a FR charge coming up, and it made lucky Gore procs from the Mangle feel impactful.
- Swipe Reducing Thrash’s Cooldown Maybe shave off 0.5-1 sec off Thrash’s cooldown when pressing Swipe. As Thrash stacks are a sort of resource for Bears through talent interactions, this would let us get our resources faster for better interplay with talents like Pulverize. Also this would greatly help lower geared Bears’ threat generation.
- Faerie Fire Returns as a Utility Debuff Having leveled up my classic Druid, grinded out dungeons, and tanked MC as a bear, I found myself really enjoying Faerie Fire, and it felt like the core iconic druid ability. I’d love to see Faerie Fire return and be given to Guardian and Feral as something else to offer to their party/raid. Faerie Fire could offer a stealth prevention ability and a +critical strike chance (harkening back to Dungeons and Dragons’ Faerie Fire which gives advantage on attacks and Leader of the Pack, the iconic Feral party buff).
6 Likes
Lazy? Maybe.
Boring? Quite possibly. In fact, I think this is why so many people think that Guardian is the most boring tank spec.
Stupid? No, it is actually quite useful in gaining the attention of that group of enemies around you. Being able to taunt multiple targets at the same time is always to a Tank’s advantage, and being able to do it regularly is priceless. The only one that comes close is Paladin, and they require a Talent to do it effectively (Consecration doesn’t taunt very well).
Losing this and Mark of the Wild are two of the things which didn’t need pruning in the first place, especially the Feral Fire version.
2 Likes
Says you. I like being a BIG BOY BEAR.
1 Like
It’s fine until a swarm of Psychophages die and you have to avoid the tiny purple swirlies on a purple floor.
The rotation is simple as all other tanks except BDK. Warr in general smash Shield Slam and Thunder Clap on CD. Monk is even easier, brew is on 100% uptime, hit Keg Smash and Jab on CD.
There is certain depth in bear play. WE can stack armor buff when needed, we can heal to recover from heavy damage period. If there is little chance of dying, we can spam maul to improve dps. It is not boring if we want to optimise the use of iron fur and regen. I quite like it. However, I hate the animal forms, so I stopped playing my druid. Can’t really comment on the higher M+. On paper, the kit looks good. We have AOE interrupt every 30s, quite good passive damage mitigation.
Bear doesn’t have many CD to rotate, but its’ fine, monk only have 1 or 2 as with some other tank class.
vomits explosively
4 Likes
Dude, seriously? You’re going to sit here and tell me because you can choose to not use iron fur and heal that guardian has some sort of secret depth to it? Then you’re going to generalize Warrior tanks as a two-button spec? Get out of here with that crap,
Actually our passive mitigation is pretty bad. A warrior standing there doing nothing has far more mitigation than a bear standing there doing nothing.
3 Likes
I did this math for people in one other thread, equally geared, a prot warrior with shield block up is taking like half the damage of a bear with 3 stacks of iron fur up.
470 prot warrior has (resting) 73% phys reduction from armor, and blocks reduce damage by a further 60%, and ignore pain again a further 50%.
470 druid has (resting) 65%, up to max 85%.
Both have roughly 40% avoidance (dodge parry)
This doesnt even get into the better control that prots have on mobs, nor how good prot warrior cd’s are compared the poor guardian druid ones.
People got mad at me for comparing a bear to a warrior for some reason.
3 Likes
My dodge is in the low 20’s.
1 Like
Weird, i’m 471 with 36.6%. Just more crit on my stuff i guess. Drops to 28% if i change out to all versa/mast or versa/haste.
Thrash.
Swipe.
Repeat.
1 Like
There needs to be a way for each druid spec to interact with the other forms.
For example:
Why even get Bear Form if you’re a Feral Affinity Moonkin?
Druid has more bloat because of this design philosophy than all the other classes and specs combined.
1 Like