How to Make Guardian Good

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.

6 Likes

I really like the idea to change the talent to include a CD reduction for FR! This synergy could even become baseline.

There are a good number of ways to improve on the spec. Putting a slow back into our rotation would go a long way in kiting.

2 Likes

I wanted Blizz to add Ursol’s Vortex for Guardian…and they did, on the same talent row as Wild Charge. Because of this, I am incredibly unlikely to take Ursol’s Vortex over Wild Charge. Wild Charge is just too good for the mobility it gives us. Ursol’s Vortex (or Wild Charge, really) being baseline needs to happen.

Also, make the Mangle - Frenzied Regeneration cooldown reduction idea baseline as well. Those two changes and we will be decent, I think, without much else having to be reworked.

Although, all that being said, my dream is for Pulverize as a mechanic to be baseline, but maybe take the mitigation away unless it is talented? It just sucks for pulverize to be a talent, because it makes bears rotationally more fun, but pulverize isn’t always (though sometimes is) the best mitigation, so sometimes you take Rend and Tear, and sometimes you take Pulverize, but I miss hitting that button to eat my Thrash stacks :X

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I read I am a 13 year old lol

I’m gonna play Devil’s Advocate a little bit.

My guild’s main tank is a guardian druid (ilvl 401). We are 8/9 H (Jaina at 9% best pull) and 1/9 M (lol). We’re not bleeding edge, by any means, but we’re doing alright. We do 10s and are pushing into the 11 to 12 range. Once again, not bleeding edge, but we’re doing fine.

Our main tank being a guardian druid has not been a determining factor to impede our progress. Sure he might require a little more healing and might take some more damage than if he played on a different class and was of a similar gear level, but it has been largely irrelevant.

Now, I’m not saying that guardian shouldn’t receive some tuning. I agree that it should, and that Vengeance DH should as well. This was much more evident in the wrath timewalking event recently. I tanked a Pit of Saron on my monk. I was able to pull more than one pack consistently with relative ease. Then I got on my druid and tanked Pit of Saron on that character.

On my monk, it was a pug, with a sketchy group. On my druid, it was a full guild group with people that I trust. I pulled the caster with adds into the first two big skeletons, just like I had on my monk. Even with 2 stacks of iron fur, a frenzied regen, and a barkskin and a Pain Supp from my healer, I went down like a sack of potatoes. With the monk, I used dampen harm with no externals and didn’t purify off any damage. I walked over one healing sphere. I never dropped below 50%.

It felt like old school feral tanking when you went all dps talents and all dps gear, but you are in bear form to “dps tank” back in the day. Ya’ll remember that? We were squishy as heck but were almost another dps.

Except this time, we’re full tank, do half the dps, and we are probably squishier than we were back then.

Since it is easy to keep iron fur up all the time, it needs a buff. They could remove the stacking component and give it a significant increase in effectiveness (extra applications would add to time instead of independent auras that “stack”) and give us some way to reduce the cd on frenzied regen.

They could also give us a block mechanic. You can’t tell me that a big ole bear can’t block an attack. It doesn’t have to be as strong as paladins or warriors, but the ability to reduce the damage of an incoming attack (outside of DR from armor) would significantly level out the damage intake. They could do something like that for VDH as well (“You cross your blades to block an attack…” fill in the blank).

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I haven’t really played guardian since Legion (just starting back on the bear) but this is my take on it.

  • Take Frenzied Regen off the GCD.
  • Revert FR to be based off damage taken again, not a flat % it is now. If they wanted to keep it as a flat %, then give us an ~8 second buff after using FR that gives us x% leech. This leech benefit could be baseline in FR or included in the benefit from the GoE talent.
  • Give us Rage of the Sleeper back. If they do not add a small leech component elsewhere, then they could include the Embrace of the Nightmare leech benefit here. I’d rather see it tied into FR though.
  • Bake Adaptive Fur back into us baseline.
  • Bake Scintillating Moonlight into MF baseline. Honestly, if they tuned this properly, we wouldn’t really need Adaptive Fur.
  • To help with damage output, give us back Pawsitive Outlook as a baseline in Thrash.
  • General number tuning for damage. I’d suggest higher initial Thrash damage but if they added Pawsitive Outlook I think this wouldn’t be needed.

I think that would be more than enough without any major changes in terms of talents etc. Some of what made us great in Legion should have been kept. I think the issue wasn’t bears being OP in Legion, but other tanks not being comparably tuned.

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In raids you likely aren’t going to see the pitfalls of Guardian as much if your raid size is on the larger side. You might notice the strain a bit more if your raid group falls in the 10-12 people size, but that also often depends on how good the other players are at avoiding the avoidable damage.

When it comes to smaller group content like dungeons, you’re going to notice Guardian’s pitfalls much faster and they’re going to be more impacting due to the smaller group size.

What is often missing from conversations about specs not being capable to work when under pressure is context – what level of pressure, what is the group composition, whats the player’s current gear look like, what stat priority are they focusing on, etc.

What you have provided here dives pretty well into context and suffice to say I believe your Guardian is only scratching the surface of challenging content given their gear item level alone. I think if your group were pushing M15s and up; you would likely have a slightly different perspective.

You didn’t mention your group setup for M+, but that is yet another absolutely critical point for a Guardian. While composition can impact how fast you get through the dungeon; its more critical for Guardian. Being able to snare mobs or provide AoE stuns can be critical in high damage scenarios and being a tank that brings neither of those things forces you to think about the anticipated support you’re going to need from your group.

This is a scaling problem that is a side effect of class balancing at max-level.

While Blizzard may attempt to make a concerted effort to balance classes to be somewhat competitive at lower levels, its not definitively done and isn’t always going to be the case because max-level balancing is far more crucial since that is where the majority of the player base exists.

That said, if class balance isn’t right at max-level or the spec only has a partial toolkit relative to other classes of the same role, we can easily deduce that scaling in systems like TW will be wrong and what one tank can do most likely won’t be remotely possible by another.

In my experience, Guardian only feels as though it excels right now when we gear sufficiently enough to simplify and trivialize content. If we’re thrown into a situation where gear is on par with the difficulty, we’re going to feel it far more than other tanks.

In my case this last round of WotLK TW I used by Warrior and Guardian druid. I noticed my warrior did more damage and took less damage than my Guardian druid.

I do agree that IF should get an armor buff, but I don’t necessarily agree with your assessment of how to augment IF here – at least not baseline.

There are several dungeons and situations where its actually quite prudent to try and get multiple stacks of IF in order to maximize our survivability, particularly in heavy physical damage dungeons like Freehold.

I actually think what you described here could actually make an interesting talent choice that we pick based on the dungeon or content we are doing. Obviously for trivialize content this would likely be the default. I think the idea you’re trying to aim for here is to be able to keep IF up easier allowing rage to be spent on more costly options like Maul?

I don’t see Block being thematic for a bear but I can see parrying attacks. If a DK can parry an attack, I see no reason why an agile bear cannot.

The Guardian toolkit needs quite a bit of baseline rework. I’d rather they start there instead of trying to bake fluff into talents. We already have enough dead choices and I’d say the EW/SotF/GoE row is one of the best rows we have right now because the choice is dictated by the content we’re doing.

With the right azerite trait choices, this isn’t needed. While it was great during Legion, Twisted Claws paired with Wild Fleshrending does near the same but rather than that being tied to Thrash damage it is all about Swipe now.

I think you’re focusing too much on how Guardian played in Legion and trying to mimic that behavior in BFA – but that isn’t how the spec is now designed and it doesn’t have to be with the right azerite trait combinations.

Thrash is now an ability we hit every 5-6 seconds to maintain a bleed on the target to empower our Mangle to do more damage. Since Mangle already hits like a wet noodle, this bleed is crucial for threat.

But more importantly, Thrash is the means by which we stack the Twisted Claws buff which increases our agility by X amount which means our attacks do more damage and our active mitigation is stronger.

Again, if you want AoE damage, stack 3 Twisted Claws with at least 1 Wild Freshrending and you’ll notice a significant damage difference in AoE and not to mention a substantial damage reduction if you can maintain the TC buff.

Nice, I haven’t looked too much into the azerite traits or how they play out yet so I admit (again) my comments were a bit premature. I do focus on Legion since that’s the last experience I had with bear tanking since I don’t consider 1 night of islands in heirlooms to be valid experience haha.

I am glad the damage can be offset with some azerite traits, but to your point (which I agree with 100%), baseline abilities and interactions need worked first. Being able to make it up through the xpac systems is great, but I would expect the end result to be similar to Legion… once we move on from those systems, the spec feels like an incomplete shell.

When I mentioned adding a leech component into FR, I would rather see that baseline rather than tied to a talent. I’d still like to see the SM damage reduction added into MF. I’d still like to see FR taken off the GCD and reverted to be based on damage taken, not a flat %. Beyond that, I will have to get into the azerite traits and finish leveling my druid to really feel and see the impact everyone else is.

This gets brought up quite a bit and I’ll be honest, I’m not sure having FR scale based on the damage taken window like Death Strike is the answer either.

I think one of the real reasons that players view FR weak is a combination of several things:

  1. They miss the immediate gain of using it like Legion.
  2. They don’t stack ample versatility.
  3. They tend to focus too much on the short-term rather than long-term gains.

With the BFA design with it being on the GCD, I think (1) is the largest culprit. While FR does heal for 6% on use and the remaining 18% over 3 seconds; that just doesn’t scale.

The whole reason FR was changed in the first place was to differentiate it from Death Strike and to move Guardian away from using FR as a reactive tool but rather a damage smoothing tool. But when the damage out paces the healing aspect by fair margin combined with the fact we can’t parry, our mastery was neutered from Legion, and our armor/stamina bonus was reduced coming into BFA from Legion… where does that ultimately leave us?

Will scaling FR based on damage taken by some factor help? Sure. But that deviates the design goal of Guardian from its initial path rather than trying to find a solution that fits the design goal but also addresses the design’s pitfalls in the first place.

Perhaps additional charges and reduced re-charge time might be helpful? Either way, it needs a pass and discussion to see if there are anyways it can be improved to better the QoL of Guardian tanks.

I did present another solution which was instead of having scaling to give it a small leech buff after. No need for additional charges and gaining something like 10-15% leech for 8 seconds after use may be more in line with damage smoothing rather than reactive damage healing, right? I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on that. I am sure you can pick apart why that would or would not work.

Possibly.

The nice thing about the Legion version of FR was you could use it both for a reactive model and a smoothing model because it was guaranteed to heal for a base amount regardless. So it became a player choice based on the encounter whether you used it for reactive or smoothing.

Right now, the current FR design doesn’t lend itself very well to high damage reactive healing model anymore and I think that was an experiment the designers wanted to see play out and determine if that was going to be problematic.

I do think leech actually would work nicely here because not only does it compliment the idea of damage smoothing, but it allows FR to be used in a more proactive way to anticipate and smooth hits since the leech aspect lasts longer than the flat heal over time. That ultimately gives the healer a bit more time to react which is absolutely needed at the highest ends of content.

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Instead of everybody thinking of ways to re-invent the wheel for the thousandth time, Blizzard just needs to give us back what they took away at the end of Legion, and add some QoL stuff like making all mana-using spells castable in bear form.

3 Likes

I think wild charge should be baseline and Overrun should be a talent.

1 Like