Druid section looks pretty terrible.
All Druids will be able to use Ferocious Bite , Barkskin , Cyclone , Stampeding Roar , and Ironfur regardless of their active specialization. Druids of any specialization will also now be able to use Cyclone and Stampeding Roar .
OK, but… this is making it sound more impressive than this is. For example, everybody had Barkskin already except Feral, so it’s really just “Ferals get Barkskin back”.
Likewise, druids of other specs already got Ironfur if they took the Guardian Affinity. Making it baseline is OK I guess, although it also adds to the problem of “any other spec has most of the Guardian’s toolkit”, which is already the case.
Giving Stampeding Roar to Resto & Balance is pretty dumb, because it’s been the only reason to bring a bear tank or kitty druid for a while, now. Hopefully you actually fix bear & cat so that they can stand on their own merits - are you going to do that?
The Affinity Talents associated with each specialization (Balance, Guardian, Feral, and Restoration) also gain an additional utility ability. Balance receives Typhoon , Feral gets Maim , Guardian gets Incapacitating Roar , and Restoration can use Ursol’s Vortex .
Some weirdness here, Typhoon is already available to everyone, so moving it into Balance affinity could actually be a nerf. Guardians can already talent into Ursol’s, but now it’s being moved to Resto. So we won’t be able to do the Ursol’s-in/Typhoon-out combo that we can do already.
So… a Guardian nerf? Not a big one, but a nerf nonetheless.
In addition, Heart of the Wild has returned as a Talent, providing an option for Druids who want to use off-role abilities during combat.
Heart of the Wild was never popular, because its 6 minute cooldown didn’t justify taking it. It also took bigs hits in WoD when Tranquility was removed from 3 of the specs. How about giving us back Tranquility, instead?
Guardian Druids in the Shadowlands can once again embrace (or bear hug) their brutish side with Berserk , reducing the cooldowns of Mangle, Thrash, Growl, and Frenzied Regeneration substantially, while also halving the cost of Ironfur.
OK. But where did the fear immunity go? Or are you just removing that?
And by “reduce substantially” I hope you mean “removed completely”, otherwise it’s just a (baseline) inferior Incarnation, no?
Can we get Rage of the Sleeper back, instead? It was vastly superior.
In any case, Guardian needs SUBSTANTIAL improvements on top of this, given the
absolutely deplorable state of the spec this expansion. Hopefully those will be coming.