Guardians, are you having [FUN] in keys?

Classes Druid
41

I dont particularly care whether Bear is the best tank for 14s or 15s as im not likely to go beyond 12s which it can do just fine. My issue is that I’m just not finding it fun to play at all this expansion, largely due to the build we have to play.

Spamming Ironfur is not fun. Thorns of Iron being capped at 4 stacks and feeling almost negligible in AOE isnt fun. Ursoc’s Fury Absorb Shield being so weak now isn’t fun. Being forced to play Moonbear all the time isn’t fun.

The vast majority of the problems I have with Guardian atm (as usual) can be traced back to the Talent Tree. To build for Thorns of Iron, which you have to at the moment in higher content, you need 5 points to grab all the supporting talents that make it worthwhile. To have your main cooldown Berserk/Incarn be worth using you have to invest 4 points in various places around the tree.

You can almost never play After the Wildfire anymore because the points invested in ToI don’t let you. You literally never ever take Scintillating Moonlight even though logically it would be a strong pick considering you aim to put moonfire on everything you’re fighting. Guardian of Elune is a useless talent that has to be reworked entirely to ever be worthwhile and notably has nothing to do with Elune either (No arcane bear tie ins). Convoke on Bear is a meme and literally never taken. Infected Wounds needs to either be replaced with something useful or tweaked to provide an additional dps or dmg reduction effect. Pulverize hasn’t seen play even in Raid in forever and needs reworking. Tooth and Claw’s debuff duration should be extended so the Ravage build’s dmg intake can be smoothed out more. Bristling Fur should be tweaked in some way to be more useful. Ursine Vigor (in the class tree) should also apply when you use Survival Instincts. That’s just what I can think of off the top of my head, sorry for the rant.

2 Likes
42

It is completely genuine, because I also accept and know the people who play at those levels will typically play whatever the current meta tank is to push rating. It easily explains why there are so many paladins. This isn’t new, it’s been this way since the inception of the game.

Tiring is the amount of forum posters who act like a class / spec is unplayable because it isn’t meta. The ratings clearly show bear can be played at the same levels. While it may need some attention, it certainly isn’t nearly as bad as you and others are trying to make it seem.

43

Somehow you are unable to comprehend that fun is intrinsically linked to performance. I don’t have fun tanking on my bear as I do on the DK, pally or warrior, if you didn’t understand that, please go and read my previous posts. Did I say a bear absolutely cannot time a +16? No. I really don’t understand the point you are trying to make. are you just trying to be contrarian for the sake of it?

Speaking of ‘peak forum drivel’…

44

Is it only ever black and white for you? There are nuances between what’s fun and what performs well, you speak as if enjoyment is a code. You respond in bad faith, there isn’t a discussion being had here so I’ll just serve you your own medicine;

Within 2 weeks I timed all the 10s on my bear which I all but abandoned playing after getting to 620 through mostly H raid and delves. I looked at builds, I used some and tweaked some then made my own build which you won’t find anywhere and timed my last few 10s literally last night. Despite finding success with my own build on a toon I never play and am no expert in, I can still have a critical perspective of the trees and baseline bear power. So not only do I perform better than you in M+ on your main bear tank, I can still recognize the overall abysmal state of the spec and its lack of fun. Oh yeah, and this is all in pugs, 0 premades.

45

You all need to learn to recognize the trolls around here. There are a few people with nearly no experience who constantly talk about how bears are amazing, yet never seem to actually play bears.

They always have some excuse for why they play balance or feral, but talk up bears like they never need any changes. It is just trolling. Put them on ignore and the forum becomes much less toxic.

(and the funniest part is when you ignore their account, to see the alts that they agree with themselves on disappear as well)

2 Likes
46

I still maintain that the best thing Blizz could do, short of a bigger rework, is to slash our talent tree a bit to free up some space. It wouldn’t change how bear plays that much, but it would even out alot of the issues bears have compared to other tanks for now.

We’ll see what 11.1 brings, at the rate this expansion is rolling out, S2 might just be the bear season again.

1 Like
47

When you present it in black and white and leave no room for discussion, yeah I’ll resort in kind until youre willing to hold a discussion. But youre not.

So, i can take my 77 warrior or whatever he is, level him up, gear him up in raids and delves, go tank a few 10s, and come back and claim that because i have more experience with a Druid, that Warriors are weaker and worse off than Druids and the data represents that, therefor no one should play Warrior because theyre not fun due to poor performance based off my anecdotal inexperience.

Cool.

:rofl::rofl: lets not take your 30 hours a week into wow and me putting my Druid on hold for multiple reasons as you performing better lol do i need to hop on and knock out the last 10s this weekend to show you i “perform” better because i did it faster? Lol

How is it abysmal when the top 10 bears are doing considerably better than the top 10 DKs (which you claim are so much better), and hand in hand with Warriors who were meta until Paladins buffs?

How is it abysmal when theyre litetally tied for second best tank? Your maths isnt mathing properly.

Your inexperience with the spec does not change what is.

1 Like
48

You literally parse blue, you may want to step off that high horse because it surely isn’t warranted.

49

Looks like I struck the sensitive chord, that was easy. Not only are you putting words I never said but everything you wrote is debunked by other posters, our back and forth isnt happening in a bubble, and I don’t feel the need to repeat what others have stated. I think you spend too much time on the forums, have a good day.

Oh yeah and you did not convince anyone that bear is fun to play, just fyi and onto the topic.

50

…i quoted the things you said…lol you literally said them

One. And its not debunked. The guy stands by what he says (bless his heart) when the entirety of the Dreamgrove (Druid discord) tells him hes wrong and has the numbers to back it.

Do you have anything to back your claims, or is it simply “i feel” with

?? Or am i putting words in your mouth again? Lol

1 Like
51

So, asides from quoting the ONE person / team occupying TWO out of the top three slots in the WORLD extremely dedicated to bear for many seasons…

When it comes to everyone else playing the game, I see arguments for if its mathematically POSSIBLE to play bear, but no argument for “IS IT FUN” or WORTH the effort for anyone else to play bear?

Most guardians seem to start quitting at the 2600 range, its not a score where you can say “bear is fine” or let alone downtalk others, as if there was no gap between them and the singular person a literal thousand IO above.

The curve isn’t healthy. We can’t judge based off the top 0.01% and ignore the massive abyss in the ladder where thousands of players should be.
I think its valid to ask why the dropout % is so massive, so early on.

52

Because most players don’t push that high. Quit trying to create a controversy where none exists.

53

Several thousand players on other specs proves this to be false.
I wouldn’t exactly call 10s “pushing high keys” either.

Irony of posts aside, can’t argue with the difference in representation with a gap in numbers of 10 to 1 ratio.

54

You realize just how disingenuous it is to compare rep to the meta tank right? Like, you can’t seriously be trying to make this argument…

55

It is your own argument and no, I think pointing out class imbalance and representation is factual, undeniable and related to the questions asked

It would be more disingenuous to come to a thread about the how enjoyable the standard / average experience is and (repeatedly) compare the top 0.0001% disregarding every other bit of data, replies, or even the topic itself.

Feel free to contribute providing your own personal experience with bear!

PD: In games, some people like to handicap themselves crippling their character in some way or another, while “possible” some challenges can be very time consuming or frustrating, which is fine when its a CHOICE, its not for everyone and only a few ever complete it that way.

Same deal in wow, except outside picking the spec, we did not CHOOSE bear to be / feel crippled, and while you CAN do it, most simply don’t find it fun or rewarding to go past a very basic level and it gets progressively worse around the midpoint, probably between +8 and +11s)

56

Then you’re daft and not worth the time.

57

Its not though. Simply due to how many people reroll over nothing.

Warrior was top dog for the first month or two. No one could touch them. They didnt take any nerfs, and yet the top 10 warriors are pretty well evenly matched to the top 10 Bears.

If Warrior is so good as to be meta and only lost its slot because Paladins damage buff gave it the meta slot, then there should be be a huge gap between these two. Yet theres not.

There’ll always be a big gap between meta and other tanks simply due to FoTM rerollers, so trying to use that as any indication is folly at best.

Bears are fine. Theyre in a good spot and i would argue take less effort (from a gameplay perspective) to push higher. Its not that Bears defensively are weak and cant handle large pulls when you get into higher keys, its simply their damage lacks behind that of a Warriors as Bears big damage is set into 2 minute windows where Warriors damage pops off as part of their normal rotation.

58

When the difference is small, people (not just the top 3 teams) still push on their fav specs, it is only when the gap in success to effort rate is big enough that you see everyone jumping ship.

Not to mention, if other tanks can do better control, interrupts, mitigation or damage all at once too!) you become an affix requiring everyone in the group to try harder for the same or inferior results. That alone will cut your success rate massively running with strangers.

Can you run with the top players in the world to compensate what bear lacks? yeah.
Will you be declined out every group a thousand score under what those groups can do? yep!

Look at S3 Dr for instance, top 100 for bear was around 3400. Meanwhile DHs had multiple thousands above that (and by extension anyone running with DHs)

I know I pushed to the point I was no longer invited (and not doing that ever again!) so I know the “bear can do it!” argument, but it would take a fool to say they were in a good spot, or that the kit was (and still is) very lackluster for the task. You could time it yeah, but it was like tightening a screw with a hammer.

In other words, as bear you could be in the top 100 for your spec and still be considered “low rated” painfully far from title 200-300 away. Should be enough of a hint.
(and that was before changes that heavily nerfed out utility further)

Is your bear by chance around or below the 2600 bracket? I’d like to understand from which perspective this comes from.

59

False. Most title pushers reroll. You can see this with the top 100 tanks. See how many of them have 13 weeks of keys under their belt as opposed to the 4-5 since the Paladin buffs

Paladin is king for this. Yet they werent meta until their damage sky rocketed. We see this season after season. Warrior didnt get any nerfs to their tanking kit/ability and and paladin didnt gain anything. It all came down to who was doing more dps. Even after the nerfs, paladkns are still doing more.

Bears didnt have anything special in DF S2 compared to any other season yet they were reigning tank for that season. There were 4x the amount of Paladins than Druids in the 20+ range, but Druid was the one at the top

Again, representation does not equate to viability.

Top DH in S3 was only 100 io above the top Bear. If DH was so much better and so much represented, why was there only 20 DHs above the #1 Bear? If DHs did it so much better and the rest of the Bears team had to compensate so much to make up for all of his shortcomings…why so few DHs above him? Why not hundreds or thousands? Out of the 80,000 VDH tanks than Bear tanks, with the class being sooo much better, surely there has to be more than 20 teams beating the bears team who have to compensate so much, right.

Its a bit premature since its not the end of the season so we dont know where they cap yet, but #1 tank right now, only 90 io above #1 bear. If Bears are in such a bad state compared to these other tanks…why is there such a small gap?

If this were the case, gaps would be considerably larger

Sure. But title is simply based on % of the very top score. This could end up true for the current meta tanks too depending on how far the best team is able to push in comparison to everyone around them.

For each key they succeed in, they just knocked another meta tank out of the title position.

From a gameplay perspective. Bears are one of the easiesr and most straightforward (thus) easiest tanks to succeed with. Its easier to go from being a good bear to a great bear than it is, say, to go from good Paladin to a great Paladin. Paladins have quite a few more nuances to break over that threshold than Bears

60

Wrong, bears had buffed Ursoc’s fury, which made survival scale up with damage, which scaled with amount of mobs onto a feedback loop. It was also very easy to do at the core level, add After the Wildfire heals from the constant raze spamming and big shields on tank, it was setup for success in most scenarios. (+ tier set bonus)

Bear was still vastly inferior in terms of its toolkit, but through number imbalance was able to brute force their way to the point it didn’t matter. Once that got nerfed, it fell off a cliff.

This whole argument is weak and criminally overlooks all the data, including the one that already refutes it in this thread.

It is silly to claim bear is in a good spot because a singular team composed of the absolute highest rated players in the entire world tailors around pushing with a guardian (and still fall short, without meaning to disrespect such great players)

What happens if we exclude those? what about the other 99.9% of the ladder?
What about all the people who don’t play at rank1 level AND (also) don’t have a rank1 with months if not years of high level experience tailored around playing with a guardian?

Yes, as already stated, the top 0.00001% aside, there are around three thousand DHs above the score that only 100 or so bears have achieved that season. And less than 30 bears above a midpoint where there are a thousand DHs in TWW.

And they most definitely are, if you are able to scroll down past the absolute top, the gap gets exponentially worse per slot in the leaderboard, in terms of score, keys and amount of people above that compared to meta, we are talking about several thousands per 100 of one spec.

Quoting the ladder while excluding 99.9% does nothing in the argument of how the rest are doing or enjoying guardian at a level that does not involve having a rank1 team on standby. If the requirements to play the spec is to be on the level of the absolute top players in the world, with a team of equal skill… then the only thing you’re proving is that there is something off about the spec.

By all means, since you dissected everything else I said in my reply EXCEPT one key question I asked, I will repeat it.

1 Like