Is it true that when tanking raids as a guardian druid, swapping to cat or moonkin to dps while the other tank has aggro is a dps LOSS?
Why do we have multiple forms if you’re supposed to stay in 1 form permanently?
There have been seasons and parts of seasons where this has been true, but those are the exception and not the rule. Most seasons, if you want to maximize your damage while the other tank has aggro, you will get more damage from being in cat or moonkin form.
With that said, at most levels, doing maximum damage on a guardian druid is not going to make a difference in your ability to kill a boss but being in a position to not die if the other tank dies, moves out of the range off the boss, or needs you to taunt early for whatever reason. Even when you would do more damage popping to another form, the benefit oftentimes won’t outweigh the risk associated with not being in bear form if something unexpected happens.
Interesting take. Though I’d consider Moonkin to be a pretty safe alternative. Extra armor (albeit not as much as bear) and you can position anywhere you want. So as long as you’re close enough to the boss to bear charge+taunt back in the action whenever needed, I’d prefer that form…if it did more damage.
There are a few things to consider here.
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Some bosses have mechanics that cause wipes if the current highest threat target isn’t in melee. For them, you wouldn’t be able to stand at range.
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Some mobs have frontals that could snipe members of the raid if you aren’t near your tanking buddy when they die, and standing near them not in bear form could get you killed depending on the boss.
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Shifting into bear form requires a free GCD. If you are busy casting spells in moonkin when your tank partner dies, you may not be able to get into bear form (and would be another GCD away to charge) before you take some damage.
Also please don’t misunderstand what I said about the extra damage not being worth it. Except in cases of really messed up tuning seasons, you will deal more damage in moonkin or feral when you aren’t currently tanking. The issue is that you will have very little time to react to get back to bear form and into good position may times if something happens with the other tank. There are a lot of times where if you are in position to recover, you can prevent what otherwise would turn into a wipe. And for most levels of content you could be doing, the relatively small amount of extra damage you might get from being in moonkin or cat form when not tanking is not something that will change the outcome of the fight; but being ready to immediately pick aggro back up might.
If you’re feeling safe that the offtank will be fine, by all means go moonkin, you should do more damage. I was merely offering a perspective why many bears won’t.
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100% true, but completely overriden by the fact that switching to moonkin and worshipping Elune for a while would allow him to be a moonkin worshipping Elune for a while.
It’s a very pro move in a stylistic sense at the least. I’d admire hard if I saw a tank do that.
NGL, I’ve never cared for moonkin myself. I’m the only druid I know that ran 0 points in balance as a resto druid in vanilla. Being an Elune Worshipper sounds more like a punishment than a privilege to me.
It’s a valid point, and it would be more compelling for me if they OP was going to be a worshipper of Ashamane. I was thinking solely about function when I should absolutely have considered form as well.
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Has to be a space between the brackets and start of dialog
Theres your culprit
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I award you one free internet.
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Aesthetics, and that’s pretty much it. Encounter design isn’t conducive to true role swaps mid encounter, and that’s intentional on their part. The fundamental problem with MMO encounter design is that if a role swap is viable, a mono role isn’t, so you either have scenarios where a bearcat/bearbird is viable, at which point the “meta” is to only ever bring hybrids, or they’re not viable, and you just stay in bear or cat or bird.
Consider the following scenario. An encounter where hogger pops out occasionally, and must be tanked. The group that brings a prot warrior to deal with it, has a prot warrior for the tank part, but is now missing a DPS for the rest of the encounter. In a world where bear swapping to cat was almost a DPS, you would only ever bring a bear for that hogger mechanic, so 1/25 of the slots is locked by a specific spec.
Edit: as an aside, you could make the hypothetical hogger weak enough to not need a real tank, but then you wouldn’t bring the prot warrior or the theoretical bearcat. You’d throw a plate DPS at it.
Or a warlock because apparently demon energy is sturdier than metal in WoW…
every time there seems to be a moment where “doing it wrong” comes up. its quickly nerfed way down to where you never do that.
in Shadowlands there was some fun cheese you could do with HotW Boomy/Feral Guardian spec +trinket + convoke. feels kinda silly 1 shotting players/ massive burst damage as a tank, but its a good silly, because you are supposed to be able to effective as other roles for those few seconds. the part that makes it silly is, this would tend to be more effective than the actual specs.
atm, a lot of the bear bonuses tend to be bear specific, so even though you might do more damage as a cat or owl on paper, its works out to being a lot less because of the bonuses.
you can however still be fairly effective as an off healer if you go down the healer tree. Heart of the wild and heal a damage phase when not tanking can be useful.
depending on the raid short comings, this extra healing could make up for a lack of healing in a phase without loosing a dps slot for another healer.