Lacerate, Tooth and Claw, Pulverize baseline/re-added would make the spec enjoyable.
Rend and Tear applying a slow with Thrash would be nice for kiting weeks/bosses.
Not even sure why Maul is still with the spec currently. Absolutely redundant ability without Tooth & Claw.
Moonfire applying a silence like Faerie fire did would be nice too if they don’t bring FF back.
The difference is you can do other things while RJW is ticking almost twice a second for free threat for you.
Thrash is a measly 9% attack power damage on application, almost non-existent.
I understand, this is the literal definition of anecdotal evidence, which is by definition, meaningless.
I think its relevant because it addresses the fact that you are locked into swipe spamming to generate sub-par threat. It highlights issues with both enjoyment and mechanical usefulness.
Bake swipe AP damage and threat into thrash. Let druids press something else.
We don’t need Lacerate back, it was removed at the community’s request and rolled into Thrash.
It’s a pointless button to add.
And I can do other things while Thrash is ticking. RJW and Swipe are not comparable abilities on several fronts. In fact, Monks have nothing comparable to Swipe at all. Keg is on a cooldown and costs energy. Blackout strike is not aoe and on a cooldown. Tiger Palm is filler, but not aoe and costs energy.
Swipe is aoe and only costs a GCD. Hits sufficiently hard to keep aggro against most DPS. So not stupid. I won’t argue how fun it is, because that is 100% subjective.
Yet I’ve pulled mobs off of DPS who pulled with it, while I haven’t with RJW. Explain that with numbers you apparently don’t have.
Have you tested it? The reason for presenting empirical data is so that it can be tested again. If you hold to your models and do not test, you’re actually not applying proper science to the question, but dogma.
And be one more class sitting there waiting for buttons to push or relying on Moonfire for something to do? No thank you. I deleted my Warriors for a reason.
No you haven’t. Stop lying.
Would that be so terrible to have something to hit besides swipe?
Quite a few times while in leveling dungeons, actually, where any disparities in equipment are nullified.
Once we get to a point where my Druid barely has Benthic gear (since he just hit 120) and I’m doing WQ and a Demon Hunter with Mythic Raid gear and eye-beams it, yeah, it doesn’t do so well.
I’ll just take this as an indication that you haven’t actually tested it.
To what? A non-AoE? That would be stupid for a role that is meant to keep aggro on a crowd surrounding them. Nothing? So waiting on cooldowns to clear just like the Warrior?
Since it is spammable AoE with no other resource than GCD, it at just about the right space. If you want to replace it with something else or add to it, it would either require Rage to work like Maul, be on an cooldown like Thrash and Mangle, or require another resource like Pulverize.
So, Swipe isn’t stupid. It may be boring, but it isn’t stupid.
I don’t know how recently you’ve played Warrior, but “waiting on cooldowns” isn’t how I would describe it.
Tanking on one right now, getting melee’d by the 122 dungeon bosses for 370 damage feels so strong.
The problem in the analysis is it uses absolute numeric reference for damage taken. Convert the damage taken as a percentage of health pool - the reason this matters is that a bigger sponge provides an additional layer of mitigation.
The difference between warrior and druid total health likely won’t be enough to matter too much in the result and I assume warrior will still be slightly ahead; however, this is more for the sake of a true balanced comparative view.
I believe Guardian Mastery needs much better tuning and possibly additional benefit to healing received, along with some extra passive self healing than Restoration Affinity to be competitive. Big armor is whatever for bear, but big sponge is what the design goal has been. That shouldn’t come as a penalty to your healer (unless they’re going for top parses /s).
Looking back at that sarcastic comment really has me wondering if that’s why it goes as-is instead of being tweaked. The monk bonus healing ability from crit counts as the monk’s healing. Maybe the druid extra healing needs to count as the druid, so we can actually see some progress on that front…
Warrior’s rage system is pretty much ideal:
Obviously specs should have unique identities so I wouldn’t want a carbon copy of Prot Warrior, but it would be nice to have some more decisions with how we want to spend rage. Baking Twisted Claws (increased Thrash/Swipe damage after using Maul) into Maul as a baseline effect would go a long way to introducing some interesting gameplay decisions. As it stands now, especially with DPS mostly coming from TD procs, you don’t lose much taking Maul off your bars and adding /cast Ironfur to Mangle and Thrash, which is kind of sad from a gameplay loop perspective.
Mastery shows up as “Nature’s Guardian” in Details.
I agree that Mastery needs to scale better; it has yo-yoed in value since its redesign in Legion. It would have been pretty funny to see what Guardian would be like in BFA if Mastery scaled better with 21 ranks of Masterful, almost a permanent Vamp Blood
The backpeddling on guardian makes me wonder if Blizzard wants guardian to just be an offspec. I have been using balance to farm gear for guardian/feral from start of BFA. Is this Blizzards intention?
Not going to lie I have been having so much fun in guardian both pvp and mythic +. But I’m new to bear and tanking in general so that might be why. What are some ideas to make the spec more fun?
There are hundreds of posts on this forum from the last few months about this.
There are posts in the Shadowlands alpha forum about this.
There’s a 1200 post thread in the BfA class development forum about this.
I’d start by reading those.
All the same, this seems to be the active thread on the subject.
I’m not too worried about how different tanks perform against other tanks, I assume the differences are just a question of tuning; so I don’t care if Monks generate 1216% threat vs. Guardian 864% (as long as this gets tuned) but what does bother me is that Guardian game play is just plain boring.
I’ve said before, and I still think it’s true, that Guardians just need more buttons.
I’m a liability on Mythic Nzoth because I’m not a Brewmaster, so I care a great deal.
Just like I cared on Mythic Azshara, when I couldn’t teleport through solid objects to break line of sight, like all the Brewmasters were doing.
It matters. That’s why everyone uses Brewmasters in progression raiding: They’re just really that much better than everyone else.
Kinda like top 500 m+ runs has 3.5% guardian representation…and those 3.5% are done by 2 players ^^ (it was a month ago, or so, at least)
So it is lacking all over, even if some people call it “viable”.
If the current guardian abilities/numbers was tuned to make an impact, would people still think it was a boring spec? Like what if guardian mastery scaled 3 times more than it does now, so we actually had the highest healthpool and got proper bonus healing. Would just the feeling of being good at…anything…change it from boring to fun? I mean, I have leveled all the other tanks, and dont find them to be alot more fun after a couple of hours.
Sounds more like the encounter is not properly tuned, or people have a higher expectation of all tanks based on what one can do.
Oddly enough, I find my personal healing to be vastly better as a Druid than I do with the Monk. While the Stagger helps, the lower armor doesn’t seem to help as much in the most common scenario, surrounded by trash. What one can do at N’Zoth is rather pointless if you never get to N’Zoth.
I rather disagree, I rather that what buttons we have be more useful, or if we get more buttons, it comes from our Affinities.
It’s more than just N’zoth, Brewmasters have been the supreme tanks in WoW for most of the time since they were introduced.
They were the supreme tanks in Mists of Pandaria, and then again they were supreme in Warlords of Draenor, in Legion they were top 3, and in BfA they were supreme again.
That’s a pretty good run.
I remember Mythic Blackhand, where the tanks were supposed to kite the Demolishers around the room; that’s how the fight was designed.
Then it turned out that Brewmasters were just so indestructible they could just stand with their back to the wall and face-tank the Demolishers.
I also remember in Legion when everybody was flipping out about bear tanks on Star Augur, when the truth is that there were 3 tanks that were able to solo-tank Star Augur (which is how the fight was done on Mythic) during progression: Druid, Death Knight, and (of course) Monk.