My thoughts on Guardian Druid

Classes Druid
1

So a little background on myself I started playing WOW in 2004 and got into tanking heavily in Legion for M+ (because we always needed a tank) and that love for tanking has been amplified and carried over into BFA. Ive succesefully tanked up into +17s in Season 1 BFA with my other tanks and Im currently working on 15s in Season 2.

I guess what the point Im trying to get across is Ive done ALOT of M+ tanking across many different tanks. Warrior, Blood DK, Monk, DH, and now Druid.

Ive yet to take my druid into higher keys but can already tell the spec just lacks flow, DMG, and mitigation.

My biggest concerns are as follows,

  1. Frenzied Regen
    This has been completely gutted and quite possible one of the most underwhelming forms of self healing there is. ABSOLUTELY needs to come off the GCD. Warrior got their IP taken off GCD and they saw major improvements to overall flow, feel, resource regen, dps and mitigation with this simple change. This ability needs to return to its former glory of healing X amount of dmg done over the course X seconds, or alternatively (because that would be too close to Blood DK rune strike) at the very least heal a larger % of dmg taken.

  2. Maul.
    Maul at this time is only used if you’re overpowering the content and do NOT need to spend any resources on mitigation. This ability uses a large chunk of resources for a very poor single target DPS increase.

  3. Damage
    Both single target and AOE dmg is bottom tier for all tanks by a considerable margin. There is no give and take here as the bear no longer has the biggest health pool or the best physical mitigation. This leads me to their next flaw…

  4. Threat
    AOE and even single target threat generation seem to be extremely poor and mobs get pulled off the bear from DPS basic cleave dmg.

  5. Utility
    The overall tool kit for the bear druid is oddly restricted (lore?). To cast Roots, remove corruption, and Hibernate the bear druid must shift to caster form which is pretty much instant death. Why can they not cast several abilities in bear form?

Finally, why in the world has none of this been addressed? This discussion has been on going since BETA since the removal of the artifact weapon the core abilities and flow of the Guardian druid have not been replaced. This is so blatantly obvious by the entire community its astounding that nothing has been done or even DISCUSSED by the current development team.

Can we make bears viable again?

21 Likes
2

Well met. Having to forego IronFur for an underwhelming Frenzied Regeneration is most counter productive. The global cooldown, let alone the rage costs/starved conundrum, is a game breaker. We dont have enough baseline mitigation to opt for Bristling Fur in Mythic+. And would we really want to spam a talent on cooldown just to operate within norms? Geeeesh…
Honestly we are stuck choosing between too many talents, abilities, etc, and when to use said slim pickin’s.
Guardian: when all Your healer friends pretend to be afk until You log in a different tank class.

2 Likes
5

The 3 things that guardian “needs” to feel better

  1. FR off GCD
  2. Thrash applies stacking slow (~15% per stack would be fine)
  3. Some sort of DPS cd like ROTS

I mean, last night I did a 15 Atal with an undergeared Resto shammy healer and it was zero issue what so ever - not saying that we are fine, but we definitely are capable of doing 15s.

6

Stupid forums, this is my main from above

Just as a note, I do around 12k hps while tanking (I actually beat the healer on the last boss lol)

Oh yea, if you haven’t tried Bonded Souls - lol you have missed out, that sucker does ~1100hps per trait you have.

7

Not everyone has a 411 (!!!) ilvl Frost Mage in their group.

3 Likes
8

and its happened, guild has asked me to go boomkin since one of our raiders has a well geared prot paladin…

knew this day would come.

4 Likes
9

/bearhug for you :frowning:

10

Eh I did a FH14 with a pug that had a warlock that I out dpsed as the tank, and a shadow priest that only beat me by like 2k

Again, not saying we are ok… Just saying 15s at least last week were achievable even with a suboptimal comp

11

Bravo! We’re all rooting for Ya!! (at least i sure am)
Real talk tho, Freehold is by far the easiest 5man for Guardian, barely comparable to others. Brambles really shines there.
Do you have random healers in the groups too?
Also gals/guys, any bears still pushing, what + difficulty are ya’ll running with what ilvl?

12

Yeah I have to say, this expac made me straight up drop my bear tank. Last patch, even when us warriors were bad, atleast the spec was mostly face paced and had good CD rotation.

Bear tanks are just objectively bad, AND not fun to play. Crazy clunky, crazy anti synergy, 0 utility that another druid spec doesn’t bring. The spec just needs remade from the ground up.

Unfortunately I haven’t heard much from blizzard about it, and we had to wait all the way from 8.0 to 8.1 just for the 14% dmg

1 Like
13

Don’t think they are planning any more major changes to the class until the next expansion. I find it odd that this seems to be a new design choice to only do # fixes and save reworks for a new expansion. What’s wrong with doing a rework in the middle of an expansion?

14

Odd or just bias? In legion we had our Mark of Ursol removed as a major rework. Prot warriors by all accounts were fixed. Guardian druid post with over 1000 comments over months and not a word. I do not think Bliz cares.

15

Guardian has great azerite traits so they are kinda bandaiding the flaws with the spec imo.

16

Speaking of the seemingly large impact from AZ traits. I’ve been eyeballing Burst of Savagery the last couple days. Hoping to see gains in rage generation!?? Around the web its mixed reviews… Gonna try it out tonight, i figure this one def doesnt stack.
Who’s having luck with healing ones?

1 Like
17

I stack as much healing as possible (ysera + bonded souls + bubble/impassive if possible) and it definitely gives you good sustain, I end most instances with about 12-13k hps and about 14-15k dtps (require 3-5k healing on average from the healer) From what I have seen combing through logs, DKs have a similar healing requirement - they take more damage but do more self healing

In the end the biggest gap I feel is having a slow to do a little bit bigger pulls safely without requiring team coordination

1 Like
18

That is fantastic. Any thoughts on mastery vs versatility, and its affect on the az healing? Ive read a lot of specs az benefit from versatility, but it would make sense for our mastery to boost it. /shrug
Ive been plowing on my BrMonk, but really enjoy Guardian the most. My heart sinks when I think about queuing runs that require Vortex though. Bummer

19

Good Traits? Isn’t twisted claws still the best Guardian outer ring trait by a moderate margin, and a huge one in M+?

20

Twisted claws is really good if you can get it while not sacrificing sustain, in most cases it works out, but in my experience you typically want to aim for the sustain traits first and then pick the highest possible DPS traits you can on those pieces.

Basically go moderate defense with azerite and full offense with all the rest your pieces. This week most my runs have been 14-17k DPS tanking so it seems like a good mix

21

You want an actual healer’s opinion? Go blood dk.

22

Self heal bear seems pretty legit. If you get the opulence trinket it will shoot your self sustain through the roof even more.

Also Bears AOE damage is actually quite nice with decent dmg traits. Single target will always be trash though.