Especially when it’s so one-sided.
I don’t get Moonkin Form unless I take Balance Affinity. Why does everybody have bear form, again? For free?
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Is there a blue post, as to the ‘why’ guardian is being designed this way?
Just to let the community know who is designing the Bear, and why they’re going the path they are?
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We get extra healing from heals. Given we constantly having damage intake, a 200 damage prevented is equivalent to 200 free heal. A 10% mastery is a multiplicative 10% passive mitigation. That’s super strong.
Looking at damage taken to judge bear is why people get mad at you. However, that’s not on topic.
I do believe most tanks now are boring, but to maximise the mitigation, we still have to time out ability. And the fact that ironfur can stack allows us to choose the timing window to double IF or to save rage. It is not game changing, but still some “depth” to optimise the play.
In the last run, I often tell the shaman to capa totem at the end of the IF buff, so that I can save some rage to double IF when they wake. It’s similar to warrior who used shockwave in between shield blocks to maximise uptime.
Guardian druid is kind of boring. But the design isn’t too bad at all. Easy to play at 90% effectiveness. I would say monk is very simple, 100% uptime of AM. That must be the most boring tank to play in 8.3
I hope they change our rotation a bit. I hate casting moonfire… looks so stupid. We have like 3 buttons to dps, 1 proc; our CDs toolkit is super simple.
I love these conversations because it forces me to look stuff up and learn.
Other tanks, please correct me if i’m wrong here:
Mastery was nerfed in legion from being best/good to be sub par. You have to stack so much mastery to get any benefit its nuts. You need 100+ mastery to get even get 1%. You are better off stacking haste versa to pump that rage generation and lowered ability cooldown’s. Any mastery rating you have should really just be incidental because you don’t have a better piece of gear for the spot.
Prot warriors have block(60% damage reduction) and critical block (80% damage reduction) from mastery, which is quite strong, and they get more of those stats from the same amount of mastery (~47 for 1%) versus the druid (100+ for 1%).
Both tanks get magic mitigation from mastery, guardians get a minor amount of hp and a minor increase to heals, for warriors it fuels attack power, which pumps up ignore pain shields. Ignore pain is a controlled 50% absorb shield with no cooldown, which is better than guardians ~10%-15% extra hp and extra heals which doesn’t actually reduce damage taken unless you get healed up. Prevention generally being better than reaction in wow for tanking.
The dungeon target dummy hits you for 15,000 damage with no armor on and unarmed.
4 cases here for warrior:
1a Warrior(465) with shield block and ignore pain up takes 358 damage, which is about 98% damage reduction.
1b Warrior(465) with ignore pain up takes 2231 damage, which is about 86% damage reduction.
1c1 Warrior(465) with block up takes 2073 damage, which is about 87% damage reduction.
1c1 Warrior(465) with CRIT block up takes 710 damage, which is about 84% damage reduction.
Druid(471) with 3 stacks of ironfur(85% armor) gets hit for 2400 which tracks at about 85% damage reduction. Nothing magically about the druid, just look at armor % and thats what you get. Mastery aside since it isn’t actually stopping damage intake.
With mastery accounted for you are looking at 87.5% damage intake at max armor, still lowish for the effort of continuously keeping 120 rage worth of spenders going. Considering that a warrior only pressing ignore pain when it falls off has this level of damage mitigation (re:no effort).
You can do these tests yourself or ask a friend or something. Its crazy broken.
Edits: Added percent damage reduction, and tried the dungeon target dummy in zuldazzar
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They haven’t discussed about Guardian design even during BFA testing. The fact that a Blue has been posting in the Druid forums in Shadowlands is disconcerting to me.
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Not sure how to translate kiting (low cd aoe snare+dmg) into damage reduction. But being the only tank without it, guardian druids wont be meta for anything for another 2 years.
4 years in the trash tier…thats longer than any of the shaman specs I believe.
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It is pretty lackluster, and the way armor works in the game, each additional stack of ironfur is half as good as the one you cast previously, so you are getting about 1/4 of the mitigation on the third stack as you did from the first.
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I think there’s too much emphasis on what we can do when we off-tank, when we dont even have being the main tank covered yet. Lets take it one step at a time here, color-by-numbers for the devs.
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Is it fun pressing swipe 900 times in a dungeon though? Look at the talent for brewmasters that make their aoe a fire-and-forget buff that just pulses around them for 8 seconds. That is amazing, and feels less like carpal tunnel.
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That would be Monks’ Spinning Crane Kick.
You want to know the best part?
In Shadowlands, their fire-and-forget AoE, Spinning Crane Kick, also activates their Shuffle mitigation. 
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I believe the last time blues posted anything about Guardian was during Nighthold, when they announced they were removing Mark of Ursoc. (Which was, by the way, unprecedented. Outright removing a core class ability midway through an expansion.)
Not a peep since then.
Yeah they’re talking about every Druid spec EXCEPT Guardian. It’s conspicuous, at this point.
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You’re using an argument of what is fun against an argument against stupid. You may want to rethink that strategy.
I’ve leveled Monks while Tanking, I’ve leveled Druids while Tanking. I say this because it is my best gauge of comparison as I haven’t pushed my Monks beyond basic gearing.
I’ve noticed Spinning Crane Kick to capture aggro only a little better than Consecration. The Keg and Breath are my go-tos for effectively maintaining area aggro with a Monk, as the SCK doesn’t cut it.
Swipe, on the other hand, I only have had to worry about it holding aggro along with Thrash against Taunting pets and the occasional aggro spikes of Shadow Priests and Arcane Mages.
So, complain all you want about it, I find it workable, and I rather a key press hit 5-10 things than just one like most of the other tanks can regularly use.
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I agree, I would like to see more of our affinity based hybrid be “keep tanking but also do this extra thing when needed”… e.g resto affinity should allow swift mend from bear form (as long as its not self cast).
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Rushing jade wind does 90% of attack power, and you can do other things, like keg smash or breath of fire.
Swipe does 30% of attack power and you can do nothing else.
Tell me again how swipe is better at aoe threat?
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I’ve played every tank at 120 except paladin, and guardian feels more like an unfinished class from vanilla than any of the other tanks. I’m watching SL very closely and trying to figure out exactly which tank i’m going to be playing if i stay at all at this point.
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I already told you, were you not paying attention? Swipe grabs aggro, Rushing Jade Wind doesn’t, in my experience. Probably because RJW does it in 10% ticks and isn’t designed to be the aoe filler. There are probably other mechanics involved that neither of us are presenting. Pretty sad considering that one is a Talent, even.
???
Is swipe a tank unique threat generator or something? (narrator: “its not”) Do you not understand how threat generation works in this game?(narrator: “he doesnt”) . I’m just messing.
Swipe hits like a wet noodle. It uses the exact same system as all the tank abilities. Threat works as follows, and its real simple, 4x damage done. This isn’t anecdotal about how i feel, this is how the game works mathematically.
School time. We will compare threat generation. Monks are an energy class, and are locked to a 1.0 sec gcd for ability usage, bears are longer.
Assuming the bear is gear at 470, his gcd will be 1.3 seconds roughly. If we assume you spam swipe for generation for 9.1 seconds, you can swipe 7 times, which is 30% attack power * 4 (threat) *7= 840% attack power aoe. You are globally locked during this, just spamming swipe.
Snap threat time, pressing keg smash and breath of fire does 86% attack power + 42% attack power, which is 864+424= 512 attack power. That is snappy! That’s like 4 swipes in the spam of a cast and a gcd. You can do that twice in 9.1 seconds (sans the second fire breath), so now the monk is up to 856 attack power worth of aggro. This alone is already doing more threat than all your swipes combined.
But that was two snaps. What if we figured in the aoe that has been running all this time? Well rushing jade wind doesn’t even run the entire 9.1 seconds, and it pumps out 90% attack power, so 90*4=360. Combine that with the 856 from the two snaps we have 1216 attack power worth of aoe.
So scoreboard time, druid 844% attack power all aoe, versus monk 1216% attack power all aoe.
And the crazy thing is, the monk wasnt even global cooldown locked. The monk could weave in 6 ish spells. 5 between the snap casts and 1 after when rushing jade wind fell off.
Hopefully you can see that not only does the monk have better snap aggro generation (you were worried about this), but the monk has better continuous threat generation, as well as the ability to cast other things like ring of peace or roll or literally w/e they want in their giant toolbox.
Do you still have questions about threat generation, or were you
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To top of those low numbers, we also got lower utility than the other tanks and no kiting ability.
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Or maybe RJW isn’t, or at least doesn’t grab it quick enough (which you apparently didn’t bother to read). Swipe is a baseline ability, RJW is a Talent, so not even fully comparable over all.
If Swipe hits like a wet noodle, then each of RJW’s is even softer, by a third. RJW is closer to using Consecration than to being Swipe in action, even.
So, I cannot rely on RJW to grab a target’s attention as quickly easily as I can with Swipe. The only time I’ve seen RJW grab attention is if no one else is hitting hit.
Of course, as I said, I rely on the Keg and Breath to grab and keep the aggro when I’m Monking. RJW may be good for helping to keep it once you got it (if you can get most of the ticks on them), but I haven’t seen it grab aggro off another DPS and keep it like Swipe does. Of course, Keg recycles more than fast enough that I don’t have to rely on RJW to keep aggro.
On the Guardian side, I’ve seen Thrash be a better Threat generator ON APPLICATION (as opposed to final tick) than Swipe or RJW.
Do you understand that I have this from actual practice rather than just relying on numbers? When comparing empirical evidence versus modeling, empirical wins out.
Does this arguement make guardian druids more fun or more boring?
Or…does it just qualify as spam and prevent any serious duscussion ^^
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