How to fix bear (Enhanced Version):
This is designed to bring bears up to the level of other tanks in design and enjoyment.
Spec Tree
- Drop Flashing Claws, Scintillating Moonlight, Fury of Nature, and all row 5 talents to 1pt for the same benefit
- Merge Berserk talents (Unchecked Aggression & Persistence) into the top talent on the tree (Ravage).
- Move Pulverize and Lunar Beam into the places vacated by the bottom Berserk talents.
- Change Pulverize into a 45sec AOE burst strike (350% AP) that provides 20% general damage reduction for 6 sec, allowing for strong group pickup.
- Scale Ursoc’s Fury, After the Wildfire, and Dream of Cenarius to the level of health/damage tanks are working with so that they are comparably powerful to where they were last expansion before the changes.
UF - 50% of damage dealt
AtW - 1500% of AP, increased range to 25yards.
DoC - 350% increased Regrowth.
Additional tuning
- Infected Wounds - Increase the effects of your damage over time effects by 20%.
- Ursoc’s Endurance - Swapped places with Gory Fur, changed to “Barkskin and Ironfur durations are increased by 1 sec when you Mangle a target. Reduced to 0.5 sec during Berserk.”
- Gory Fur - Changed to “Iron Fur rage cost reduced by 5.”
- Guardian of Elune - Changed to “Frenzied Regeneration also applies to the target of your Symbiotic Relationship.”
- Moonless Night - Changed to allow the direct damage of Thrash and Swipe on your main target to proc the effect.
General Tree
- Remove the talent Grievous Wounds and increase those spells by 10% baseline.
- Connect Starsurge to Sunfire, allowing one to skip Moonkin Form.
- Killer Instinct and Nurturing Instinct reduced to 1pt talents for the same effect.
- Primal Fury also increases Mangle and Shred critical strike chance by 5%.
- Symbiotic Relationship - Changed to provide 10% of the amount you are healed by any source to also heal the bonded ally for non Resto Druid specs. Changed to be persistent through death.
- Lycara’s Meditation removed. (This is too hard to make balanced without making it pointless).
- Convoke the Spirits - Moved to where Lycara’s Meditation was.
- Improved Convoke - Moved below where Lycara’s Meditation was.
- Heart of the Wild - Cooldown reduced to 3 minutes, duration reduced to 20 sec.
Druid of the Claw
- Make Ravage activate every 3 Maul or Raze you cast.
- Make Ravage not cost Rage and be castable in a cone in front of the Druid.
- Make Wildshape Mastery provide 100% of Bear form armor and health.
- Aggravate Wounds changed to provide 1.5 sec increase per cast, up to 9 additional sec.
- Change Tear Down the Mighty to reduce the CD of Pulverize by 15seconds.
Elune’s Chosen
- Moon Guardian changed to “Starsurge and Sunfire may be cast in Bear Form, and scale from your attack power.” (This both reduces the Rage income disparity between hero trees, and gives moonbears more to do than just spam Moonfire over and over for filler.)
Explanation of changes
- Dropping talents to 1pt talents has been something blizzard has done with every other tank they have updated. Removing bloat from the tree and freeing up pts to take things that people are never able to take due to too high of “required talents” needed.
- Build-a-Beserk has been removed from most other tanks for their main cooldowns, especially for talents that just make the talent usable in the content.
- Both of these talents are buried in tree and should be reachable earlier to promote their use in hero trees. Pulverize needs to have a reason to exist, and making it similar to warrior’s Shield Charge would do that. Bears already have trouble with high burst dps in M+ with aggro. This would give a pickup tool that provides a bit of DR on pull.
- Bear should be noticeable as “your group’s tank” due to the healing it provides to the group. It doesn’t have the mob control or group support of other tanks, but Druid is very focused on healing along with their mastery being healing focused, that making their healing talents usable and strong would give Bears an identity that would make groups feel “oh I’m stronger with a bear around because of this”.
- Infected Wound has very little value in the current game, but this would provide a very nice choice in picking this up. Very single target for moonbears, but Ravage would be able to AOE it.
- UE and Gory Fur changed to make that pathing less bad since more people will want to aim towards AtW now.
- Guardian of Elune changed to make more sense as a single target healing support vs AtW group healing support choice.
- Moonless Night changed to make more sense as a single target steroid.
- Removing Grievous Wounds makes sense to not force bears to take Rake unless they want to play that type of DotC rotation.
- Connecting Starsurge allows for moonbears to elect into extra spells.
- KI and NI 1pt change the same as others to remove bloat and allow bears to take more of their extras in their tree.
- Primal Fury provides too little for bears unless DotC.
- Symbiotic Relationship would make much more sense for non Resto Druids this way.
- Lycaras and the supporting Meditation talent are too difficult as altering stat boosters to balance that they make more sense removed and replaced with Convoke. Convoke is a common talent in all 4 Druid specs and should be moved to the general tree.
- Heart of the Wild is never needed for 45sec. Making it shorter but usable more often is more interesting.
Changes to Druid of the Claw
- Making Ravage be usable more often during Beserk downtime so it feels less feast and famine.
- Ravage not feeling like you HAVE to use it with T&C procs and to be able to use it even if your target moves outside the tiny melee range.
- Wildshape feels pointless at reduced defensives. If you are designing it to be able to tank for a few seconds in cat form, why make it less effective. The timer is the limiting factor, not how much damage you take since it is already only used single target situations.
- Aggravate Wounds changed to make more sense to players for increased timer.
- Tear Down the Mighty changed to work with the new Pulverize so that DotC has a high association with this talent similar to Lunar Beam for EC.
Changes to Elune’s Chosen
- Changed to provide more options in rotation other than simply pressing moonfire over and over. Mangle-Thrash-MF-MF-repeat gets old, but is the optimal way to play. Adding in the option of having a 6s base Starsurge would remove one MF from that rotation, and adding in Sunfire provides more to do in AOE situations.