So this isn’t a post about how strong or weak guardian is. It is specifically about our talent tree and how I think all talent trees should be modeled after it.
That said, there are some problems with the talent tree, Berserk nodes gatekeeping being the main issue in my opinion, and then of course some talents that need better balancing, and some need moving around, like blood frenzy needs moved out of the bottom tier.
However, there are strengths to the tree as evidenced by the number of viable guardian builds. Having 4 columns in the middle, all very strong, but only being able to pick 3, is good design imo. all 4 are good, Which makes for interesting choices since you can’t have them all unless you sacrifice the bottom, which would not be worth.
Then onto the bottom. You have 10 talent points and 20 choices. Trees like prot warrior with 14 choices are boring. There is no trade off, you just grab everything because you can. Guardian druid is interesting because you have to choose between very good choices, obviously some of these could use buffs, but overall there are interesting tradeoffs to be made in the tree.
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You are Deos with inner Str.
I honor and respect you.
(There are a ton of threads about how Blizzard recently did Guardian dirty. Could contribute to any one of them, but it won’t make any more of a difference. They know; we know. Time to act.)
I think an easy fix would be to turn flashing claws and scintillating moonlight into 1 point nodes. That would give us 18 talent points to choose from with 10 points. Still get choices, but it provide for a lot more flexibility in the builds.
That, and remove reinvigoration as a 2 point node or swap locations with Earthwarden.
they should definitely be 1 point nodes.
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It would be an easy way to open up the bottom tier for more options between DPS and defensives.
Still would pale in comparison to the warrior tree, but would offer a lot of improvement in the guardian tree with minimum rework required on coding.
One point at their current two point value, or one point value?
one point, for the current 2 point value.
Neither of these 2 point nodes is game breaking power.
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Agreed, 1 point for the 2 point value. Flashing claws especially is undertuned imo for 2 points.
Yeah, simple fix, and opens up some more alternatives for builds. It would also put us closer to being inline with other tanks on the amount of talents in the bottom tier vs points available to spend.
BDK - 14 points in bottom
VDH - 16 points
Guard - 20 points
Brew - 18 points
PP - 16 points
PW - 14 points
IMO, both guardian and Brew need to reduce the bottom tier 2 point nodes.
It would still leave a bit of gap on magic mitigation and doesn’t directly solve that issue. Still think we need an alternative to IF to swap over to magic reduction or change our mastery scaling to give us bigger HP pools to compensate for lack of magic damage.
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