How do you Guardian druids tackle NECROTIC?

Hey guys…

This weeks affixes dont look so good for me.
How do you druids tank with necrotic? What is the best way to handle it?
help a druid tank out please.

Typhoon, vortex, roar and kite.

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And Honey Potpie.

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There are quite a number of ways

If you’re concerned about what you can do, that’s about it as a Guardian.

That said, there are other ways as well

  1. Balance druid treants
  2. Discipline priest Shining Force
  3. Monk Ring of Peace
  4. Shaman Thunderstorm
  5. Various snares from Warrior, Mage, Hunter
  6. AoE stuns from Demon Hunter, Monk, Warlock
  7. Warlock gate
  8. Life grip from a priest
  9. And others I’ve likely forgotten

My point is that Necrotic should be viewed as a group effort. While its something that is primarily a tank/healer mechanic, the group can help negate the effects of that affix entirely if you work together to overcome how it works.

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Necrotic used to be bad news for bears when it was magic damage, but was changed in 8.1 to be physical, so it should no longer be an issue.

Even just sitting there in bear form, with no mitigation up, is going to cut the damage by almost half.

So I wouldn’t worry about it.

I think the OP is more concerned about the healing reduction rather than the dot.

That honestly doesn’t change what Tewa said, it all goes hand-in-hand.

Prior to the Necrotic changes, as a Guardian you had pay far closer attention to the number of stacks because we had no way to actually mitigate the damage we took from the DoT itself, which often meant needing to keep more frequently, the potential to loose threat more often, etc.

Now that Necrotic is a physical damage tick, our mitigation helps against that which means we can actually take slightly higher stacks combined with proper cooldown management – that in turn is a net gain that we don’t have to kite as frequent or use gap creating abilities like we used to.

All physical dots are still bleed. They still ignore armor.

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I honestly could have sworn it wasn’t a Bleed; good to know I guess.

yeah… i dont care for the bleed. the heal reduction is where i get rocked. This week sucks… I"m just gonna not push this week i guess.

You have to kite. That’s the design of the affix. Between Ursol’s, Roar, and typhoon, on your own you should be able to get away reliably. Never forget your group’s ability to help with kiting either, as previously mentioned.

The main problem is that it typically still falls on the tank to make the first move to kite, and bears don’t have much good way to do that. Every other class has a way to bug out at a moment’s notice and avoid back-attack damage (strafing isn’t as good as it used to be when mobs fan out so widely around you), but bears only really get Typhoon which requires clear space ahead and doesn’t even work on a lot of mobs. There’s no baseline slow and you pretty much have to rely on food that didn’t even exist till 8.1. Talenting Vortex means losing your charge.

We don’t have a slow, but that doesn’t mean we can’t kite. Our ability to kite may not be as ideal or graceful as other tanks, but with group coordination, we can actually kite, we just need a little help.

My suggestion there is to use the dungeon’s topography to your advantage. If you find mobs wanting to fan out, find a corner and use it to your advantage. When you need to move away from them, you’ve got them nicely grouped, typhon/vortex them and either Stampeding Roar or Lightfoot Potion away.

Sure, but that’s also the case for snares and stuns as well. Those mobs which are unaffected by those abilities are often best pulled separately or skipped entirely.

I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but I think Wild Charge should be made baseline and they should return Intimidating Roar back in its place. It makes more logical sense to pick between Vortex and Roar than the current setup we have as a bear tank.

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Bears have a lot of things they have to talent into that should’ve been baseline…

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I agree, but I also think there is nothing inherently wrong with having to talent into abilities that actually allow your specialization to tackle a certain type of content.

On weeks with Necrotic, it’s nice to talent into something like Typhoon to create a gap between me and the mobs so that I can safely move away from them and allow those stacks to drop safely.

On other weeks like Fortified/Teeming, I like being able to talent into Vortex so that my group can drop all their AoE spells in a single spot, I move away form the mobs, their AoE remains highly potent against the mobs while me being out of melee range reduces the healer’s mana consumption on big pulls.

Its talent choices like that which I think are great ideas.

We then have talents like Wild Charge, Mighty Bash, and Soul of the Forest which I for the life of me can’t grok why they’re even talents in the first place. Why are those simply not baseline to the spec?

Nothing says that talent rows can’t just be a choice between X or Y rather than the current design of X, Y, or Z. That way they can hide behind fewer choices but allow those choices to have far more meaning while allowing specs to have more baseline functionality like they deserve.

I’ll take babysteps, so long as those babysteps are well thought out in design and a plan exists to expand on those steps in future iterations for the betterment of the classes.

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Certainly. For the most part I do like druid talents. Resto in particular is really flexible to push different advantages as needed. The problem with Guardian is that you have so many talents that if you don’t take them you feel like a half-developed class.

Hell, it’s one of the only specs in the game that doesn’t have a baseline way to explode away from danger.

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I don’t necessarily agree that we have that many. Which ones are you referring?

That has a lot to do with class history.

Guardian was the meat shield for the longest time. We had some really awesome defensive abilities that allowed us, combined with our natural defensive nature to take a boat load of damage and survive through it with ease. If a boss had a massive attack you needed handled, Guardian used to be the go-to for that.

But over the last several expansions, our niche has continued to be chipped away and other tanks have either been designed to be able to handle those things just as easily or those niches were given to new tank classes.

The one thing Guardian needs is a well defined niche which we no longer have.

Wild Charge. Bristling Fur. Bash. Every other tank has baseline on-demand ways to cross distance, generate resources, or stun. Most have all three. This is before even getting into the lack of niche – that’s just bare functionality.

Hell, we don’t even get a hard interrupt until 70. Produced some amusing moments leveling up when I got yelled at for not interrupting a caster to drag them backward, and I had to show them from the spellbook that I literally didn’t get that ability till Northrend.

I would disagree with this one. At least from what I do, I vastly prefer Brambles most of the time, although some exceptions like Zul blood Frenzy was amazing. I heavily dislike Bristling fur.

Well, paladin doesn’t even have a resource, though they do have horsey and Hand of Justice.

Warrior has charge and leap, shockwave baseline, but no way to generate resource without a talent on demand.

Death Knight has Deaths advance, which is like a worse Roar, they do have Asphyxiate although I don’t believe any way to generate RP on demand (?)

Monk of course has roll, paralyze, and leg sweep, but I don’t think any way to generate energy baseline

DH has of course Infernal Strike, although no baseline stun If I’m remembering correctly, and resource generation from Immo aura

So none have all three, although they all have 1.5 or 2.

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So do I. I can deal with early resource starvation. But from a standpoint of bare functionality everyone else has…

Fair enough. Still leaves us as the outlier with zero.

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