As it stands Guardian druid brings nothing that other druid specs can’t already bring making it incredibly difficult to justify bringing one to anything. We used to have After the Wildfire but it’s been nerfed so hard its not even worth the talent point.
It doesn’t even need to be something new. The Guardian druid PvP talents are fantastic examples of things that could be brought into PvE. Demoralizing Roar would be a fantastic pickup. Prot Warriors have had it since forever. Grove Protection as a nice AOE DR that can be strategically placed. Hell, even Den Mother as a nice buff that stacks with Fort to add some additional tankiness to the group.
Every other tank has some unique utility specific to their spec and it’s high time Guardian got the same treatment. We’re the red headed step child that nobody wants to acknowledge
Guardian druid needs a radical refresh. I’ve been playing delves as a bear and the rotation/animations are pitiful compared to other specs.
Mangle, Maul, Raze, Ironfur all have weak animations and sounds effects
Rotation consists of mashing a handful of buttons as they come off CD, nothing feels meaningful or hard-hitting
Cooldowns are plenty but all underwhelming visually and rotationally
No good alternative to Ironfur spam, Maul and Raze are both weak and GCD-based
Arcane bear is severely underdeveloped, feels like it got a few hand me downs from balance. Where is the astral/alternate bear form with unique abilities and animations?
Losing the 3 yard melee range feels especially bad on bear and there aren’t good AoE snap aggro tools
Utility is underwhelming (Typhoon and Ursol’s Vortex have overlapping slow effects)
I miss that off healer thing they had going in DF. AtwF getting brought back to 200 rage, DoC getting an increase when used on others, vigil working on aoe damage, anything to undo the nerfs would be nice.
Bear doesnt have an aoe silence, or aoe stun, can only force grips with the gimmicky vortex typhoon thing, so letting them be a group support tank wouldnt be a bad niche.
Passive aoe group heal in AtwF/vigil, only tank with access to a mana tool in innervate, symbiotic for priority heal targets, DoC for the bug emergency heals; but they need to be tuned up and the spec tree trimmed down to make those abilities worth it again.
Frenzied Regen needs to be oGCD. It makes no sense that isn’t, really, and I wish we could have options for talents to make Ironfur last longer, or something that refreshed it outside of another Ironfur, so rage could be used offensively more often.
Exactly! While I’m not a fan of imposed visual changes that you can’t opt out (e.g. Priest’s Oracle), if they manage to make it glyphable, a starry overlay, like a more modern astral form, would be very fitting for EC.
Other than that, there’s a talent that specifically changes Thrash into an arcane ability, I wish we could see that in the animation: a blue energy swirl on top of the regular animation.
I agree some added utility would be nice. But can you elaborate on this please? Like what does prot pal or brewmaster bring that their other specs don’t? VDH I can kinda see with sigils. I don’t know much about warriors. BDK I don’t see much difference either.
Bdk has mass grip, better normal grip cooldown and since anti-magic zone scales off of max health their group DR is about double that of unholy or frost. Also has the most self reliant/self destructive playstyle of tanks, since theres nothing a group can do to save a blood dks but good ones dont die til the scalling oneshots.
Brew is in the same situation as bear where it doesnt really have anything special as a spec over its class. It also has pretty meh class utility so its just kinda sad overall right now.
Prot warrior niche is currently theyre very good at damage, ~35% higher then the tank median, both single target and aoe. The only thing close is a blood dk with perfect blood beast procs and thats entirely rng. They also have the most controlled mitigation for some of the smoothest damage intake among tanks over a dungeon. Pretty sure their aoe stun is also slightly better then fury or arm’s version but cant confirm.
Prot pally has mass aoe silence with divine tol, a constant second interrupt with avengers shield and is the only tank with a true immunity (that also taunts), ontop of a cheat death and a mini niche with off heals when their mana allows. Theyre pretty overloaded now that they dont have the least mitigation of any tank anymore.
Generally the break down is pally and DH are the control tanks, warrior (and usually but not currently brew) are the high damage done low damage intake tank, DK is the self heal grippy tank, and bear is kinda the hybrid of self heals and damage mitigation.
It had a couple niches that they removed since the legion rework, the off heal tank, the 2 minute exodia tank, the magic mitigation tank, the learner tank, but none of them were allowed to last more then a season and a half.
One of the problems is that removing affixes stripped bear of some of its niches. We were the best necrotic tank, easily taking that debuff to 99 stacks with incarn. We were one of the best sanguine tanks with typhoon and ursols able to quickly move mobs out of sanguine or off mini bosses and bosses before they die. Probably the best explosive tank (especially in DF) with one moonfire pretty much one shotting them.
I have the exact opposite experience. I feel like when doong delves guardian Druid is one of the best class I play (I try it with a prot pally, port warrior, furry warrior, VDH, HDH, WW monk, frost mage, BM hunter, demo warlock) guardian Druid is only second to prot pally. They are very tanky, good AoE damage, good self healing.
No. We weren’t forced into kite tanking when we had incarn. You could take stacks all the way to cap, then use typhoon + ursols to drop them if the pack wasn’t dead when incarn ran out. Incarn pretty much let you ignore the affix.
I think if they’d unnerf guardian mastery/health scaling, adding some utility centered around trading a chunk of health to power an aoe heal, and/or an aoe bubble could have made for an interesting direction with the spec. Gigantic mega huge health bar, that you can use at the correct time to help out survivability of the group.
Maybe some extra talent/interaction with symbiotic to redirect incoming damage from whoever it’s attached to, to yourself.
Would probably be a fine line between it being way too strong, and being useless though. Case in point, our current single target off heal talent, and our aoe heal talents are both pretty meh, and awkward to use at the right time. (We are GCD locked most of the time, so sparing a GCD for instant regrowth that doesn’t even do 20% of someone’s health bar is barely worth, and wildfire just goes off at random. Completely uncontrollable)
Warriors are all about armor, DK’s are vampires, Monks staggers… I think the idea of a healing tank plays well with the huge health pool and guardian myth/story.
Seems like they’re trying to make guardian a “healing lens” where heals pumped into the druid tank (or self healed) scale and go pour out to the party or raid. And I think this model has a lot of potential.
Natural Recovery, Innate Resolve, Reinvigoration, Lingering Healing, Nurturing Healing… all seem to stack or magnify what comes in. With tweaks After the Wildfire, Symbiosis, Dream of Cenarius could then heal out (sorta like Disc Healing).
They keep teasing the idea (pre-nerf After the Wildfire was powerful). They just need to commit.
Paladin is the only one that has the most and, often required, utility.
Brewmaster being at the bottom of the totem pole bringing what I consider negative utility to a group.
I want forming a group comp to be more interesting beyond “get lust and brez class”
There’s nothing really notably interesting about tank comps, what I can list off the top of my head:
Paladin/priest comp perfectly cover each other’s weaknesses usually.
VDH and magic dmg comps
War, non-intellect comps I guess? But not really a thing
Brewmaster/Pres Evoker: golden hour is amazing with stagger but that’s it
Druid when wildfire was good: melee comps I guess
I’m kind of reaching here.
Like, paladins honestly are perfect in representing what you would think of a paladin in an RPG with their utility. Blessings, defensives, protection, healing, (they shouldn’t be the gods of interrupts imo)
Now think about everything you imagine about druid and bear druid archetypes in games/DND and what unique utility they could provide to stand out.
I miss when Druid was the best off tank cuz it could shift into cat form and shred (literally, lol)
If they would make cat form worth it like it used to be, I think there could be potential to see Guardian as a high damage tank for raid bosses.
As far as mythic +, no idea on that one. I know there is talents that buff cat form (defensively) with the new hero tree but I havn’t messed with it, really.
Blizzard kind of painted themselves into a corner with encounter design.
Damage intake is too bursty, so the old niche of ‘takes more damage overall, but has more EHP’ kind of got deleted. In the current game, it would be too strong.
As an offshoot of above, a support tank that can off heal effectively now and then isn’t quite viable when people who take damage, tend to just evaporate out of existence, except for a few choreographed AOE burst things.
Tightly tuned, and in the case of mplus, infinitely scaling content kind of requires that the tanks have same ballpark damage, or the lower damage ones might not be viable. So there’s only so much variability in damage output you can have as a defining factor.
Even if they made a few differences in terms of ‘this tank does super big pulls, but doesn’t do much damage outside of big pulls’, pull sizes are limited more by people getting blown up by casts/untauntable stuff. So everyone kind of has to pull similar sized packs, except paladin who can lockdown multiple mobs with interrupts all on their own. Reverting the stop change would maybe open up some diversity in how different tanks operate, but it would also go back to mega pulls that they seem to want to stay gone.
