Hello, I am a 13 year Feral/Guardian veteran, and I am deeply saddened at the state of both specializations currently. I’d like to make recommendations of changes for the Guardian aspect.
When comparing tanks, I take into account 3 things:
1: Active Mitigation
2: Self-Healing
3: Damage Dealt
For example, Blood Death Knights are good at damage and healing, and lack mitigation. Warriors are good at damage, mitigation, and healing currently. Unfortunately, Guardian is only decent with their active mitigation, and their damage and self-healing are relatively sub-par. This results in Guardian’s play style being: pull, AOE briefly, and kite while healing, or risk dying. This severely reduces the damage and threat output of the tank. A group of skilled DPS players can easily produce enough threat to take aggro of multiple creatures, potentially resulting in a wipe. The change I’d like to recommend will primarily increase their self-healing, allowing them to survive well enough to more effectively deal consistent damage to creatures, resulting in increased threat generation. This change will also affect their Secondary Stat weights, which will also result in a potential slight increase in damage.
The level 90 talent, Guardian of Elune, currently provides the following: “Mangle increases the duration of your next Ironfur by 2 sec, or the healing of your next Frenzied Regeneration by 20%.” The change I’m recommending is: “Mangle reduces the remaining cooldown of Frenzied Regeneration by 2 sec, and increases the healing of your next Frenzied Regeneration by 20%.”
This change will sync well with the two Azerite Traits, Burst of Savagery (Consuming Gore grants you x mastery for 5 sec and has a 15% chance to activate Gore) (Gore: Thrash, Swipe, Moonfire, and Maul have a 15% chance to reset the cooldown on Mangle, and to cause it to generate and additional 4 Rage.) and Gory Regeneration (Mangle extends the duration of your active Frenzied Regeneration by 1.0 sec, up to 3 sec, and Frenzied Regeneration restores an additional x health every sec.) Gore, which allows Mangle to be used more often would allow Frenzied Regeneration to become available more often, and the additional healing would prove beneficial for moments of increased damage taken.
Additionally, increasing the uptime of Frenzied Regeneration will affect how Guardian Druids view their Mastery stat. Mastery: Nature’s Guardian “Increases your maximum health and healing received by x%. Also increases your attack power by 2x%.” A Guardian Druid stacking Mastery will have greatly increased overall health, which will affect the healing of Frenzied Regneration since it heals for 24% of the Druid’s maximum health. More health, more healing. Additionally, the healing received will increase Frenzied Regeneration’s healing further, on top of the healing done by the group’s healer. Finally, stacking Mastery will increase the Druid’s attack power, allowing them to reap the benefits of this increased survivability, giving Druids the option to stay in the fight, rather than running, and dealing more damage overall in the meantime.
TL:DR; Guardian Druids die too easily, forcing them to kite rather than fight. To prevent them from dying as easily, their self-healing should be made better. Increasing Frenzied Regeneration’s uptime will allow Guardian Druids to fight longer, increasing damage and threat generation.