I’ve been having a blast doing lower level content on the spec but am wondering how well Guardian does in higher mythic + content.
Also any advice is appreciated. 
It works just fine for pretty much all difficulties, though there’s a bit of a stigma surrounding them in really high tier M+ (ex. +25-+30). There is a grand total of one guardian with at least one +29 timed clear. The next best is two guardian druids with at least one +27 timed clear.
You shouldn’t have problems doing a +15 though.
The 3rd highest IO score tank on Raider IO is a Bear. Warriors have stronger physical mitigation and higher damage but Bear is very capable.
Personally, I’m having a blast with Vision of Perfection + Earthwarden + Incarnation and Twilight Devastation. It’s a silly, mindless style of play (keep up Ironfur and spam Thrash/Mangle depending on number of targets and how many Earthwarden stacks you have) but I think it’s fun.
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Guardian is actually terrible, but if you want to play the Essences and Corruption, any tank can do that equally well. Once Corruption goes away in 9.0, and essences in Shadowlands, you’ll find yourself up a creek without a paddle again, since Guardian is getting heavily nerfed in Shadowlands.
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What’s left to nerf.
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Can’t pop out for instant Swiftmend anymore, even with resto affinity.
Losing Typhoon unless you take (lol) balance affinity.
Pulverize will be 10 second duration on a 30 second cooldown.
Mighty Bash duration nerfed.
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Guardian performs just fine in M+. The rotation is a little dull for my taste, and most of us were hoping to see more changes for Shadowlands than we actually got, but if you’r enjoying it, most M+ groups are happy to have a bear. =)
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We still have legs, and the ability to move around. They could always take that from us too.
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Heres hoping the legendaries and covenants will help a little.
Right, because who would want to play an actual class when you can just play a band-aid every expansion, instead, right?
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I understand your point, but we’re all really in this particular boat together in a way. My fire mage does like… 15k dps without corruptions and essences and like 50k with them, lol. (I know, I’m super behind on both my characters but I only started playing BFA a few months ago)
With that said, I do think bears have a lot of design issues and are frankly really boring to play and I’d like to see them get a big design change.
Honestly I think they’ve never really been that fun to play. There was that one window in BC where Mangle was really strong (lol), that was fun.
The difference is that if you strip away the essences and corruption from a Fire Mage, or a Prot Warrior, or a Holy Paladin, you’re left with a spec that’s complete and works.
Strip these things away from bear, and you’re left with the hollowed-out shell that we started BfA with.
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Nah I didn’t mean to disagree with that point, it’s just that the corruptions and essences are supplementing a lot of class issues right now.
Again I totally agree that bears have it the worst of maybe any spec in the game, there’s a reason I don’t bother to play it. But the corruptions and essences are the fabric of most of the end game right now. My fire mage will still be a fire mage but his entire rotation breaks down without Memory of Lucid Dreams and becomes really, really boring. It’s not just the numbers that change, it’s the way it is played at all.
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We have been running 16s and 17s with five guardians and timing them. Timed a 18 junkyard and then did the 19 shrine 8 min over. Boss dmg is hard but aoe is nice.
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That’s because you’re exploiting a bug, though. Let me know how well your all-Guardian group is doing in December.
(Which is my whole problem with things right now, you aren’t playing a Guardian druid, you’re playing Strength of the Warden. The bug on that essence is FAR more important to what you’re doing than anything about the class or the spec. And what really worries me is that somebody at Blizzard is looking at this, and thinking “oh Guardian is great! they don’t need any fixes in shadowlands” because they don’t understand how you’re exploiting.)
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Frankly, I’m tired of the fact that a class/spec must depend on extra systems or concepts like Legendaries to be seen as equal to a class without those.
This type of design philosophy needs to stop.
Avid, well-known Guardian players have re-rolled over the last 4-6 years all because they too can’t be bothered with this design approach; their once beloved bear spec now left to rot by the devs.
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Playing a broken, incomplete spec is very different than a boring spec.
Maybe I can phrase it differently than Tewa here.
If you strip away Azerite, Essences, and Corruption from Guardian, you don’t really impact the rotation per-se (unless you liked Gory Regeneration or potentially Guardian’s Wrath), the spec as a whole remains status-quo.
What you would find is that Guardian’s overall survivability will take a drop and I would surmise that drop would be worse than any other tank. This mostly has to do with the fact the spec has been pruned for several expansions, we’ve lost aspects of our spec all for borrowed-power systems, and nothing is being done by way of class changes to address these concerns.
These are precisely the same concerns expressed during BFA alpha & beta which the Guardian community got absolutely zero feedback from the devs about.
I’m not saying that Fire Mage or any other spec in the game won’t have its own share of woes when these borrowed-power systems end in Shadowlands, but I do think that Blizzard has continually focused on a lot of the same specs over and over and continue to neglect certain ones and I’d like to challenge the devs to change that perception.
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I never got this argument for any class or spec.
When artifacts go away, you’ll be in trouble! When azerite traits are nerfed, you’ll be in trouble! Watch out when they remove corruption!
Don’t you see that everyone will just be propped up by the next thing?
End of Shadowlands: when we lose soulbinds, we are gonna be trash!
…until the next borrowed power.
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The borrowed powers are universal, though, so if they add X to bears, they also add X to Brewmasters. Which is a problem when, at a base level, Brewmasters are 10 times better than bears. Bear isn’t coming out ahead, there, bear isn’t closing the gap, bear remains firmly as the worst tank in the game.
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Strength of the Warden isn’t that overpowered in a five person group. 20 and 30 man raid, yes.
Twilight Devastation is what makes it work, although one bear in our group is stacking the bonus 12% vers things and he is doing massive pulls at 100% vers or higher, then using incarn. His dps is sometimes the highest in the group.
If you are saying that all corruptions are a bug, then yeah.