Ironfur should just be removed. It is THE worst addition to guardian spec in history.
Bear use to be the high armor / high hp tank with passively strong defense. Over the years, with the talent/spell changes, guardian has become one of the most complicated/bloated tank.
The spec already has too many defensive cds: ironfur, barskin, frenzied regen, surival instinct, incarnation, lunar beam. not even mentioning the new apex one.
And bear have 3 abilities competing for rage: ironfur, maul/raze and frenzied regen. (compared to 2 from warriors: shield block, ignore pain)
IRONFUR is THE problem here. It is a spammable/stackable ability that needs to be constantly watched and it only adds armor.
It is so boring that some players even just macro it. And it compete rage with more meaningful abilities like maul/raze, frenzied regen
Ironfur should simply be removed. And its armor should be baseline, just like bear use to be - high armor tank.
The spec’s rotation will be much more fun and resource management will be more fluid just by removing it.
As a tank, the primary “game” loop is dealing with incoming damage. Mitigate, avoid, heal after… for bear the basic tool is Iron Fur. It’s kinda our equivalent to a warrior raising their shield.
I don’t want to loose that game play, that sense of my hand on the wheel as I play. And it is different than major kool downs that are more like shifting gears than turning the wheel.
I get wanting to do more damage (me too). But coming up under the other guys guard with a satisfying upper cut… that’s secondary to keeping my own guard up. I wouldn’t want to see Iron Fur go away or become something automatic, I think I’d get bored with bear if that was the case.
Of the two druid “type” tank, the one that burns all rage on Maul’s or the one that burns all rage on Iron Fur, I’ll take the one doing Iron Fur, as a healer, to heal please. That Armor mitigation makes a big difference in preventing whole % of damage as opposed to a flat amount with Maul and absorbs. Far more stable life to manage and heal i find as well seeing druids use Iron Fur.
Try suggesting a different option. But in any case, something needs to be changed, as it’s unacceptable that the bear has such a critical resource consumption choice between a sharp increase in survivability and very low DPS, or a sharp increase in DPS with very weak survivability.
I suggested combining these two abilities into one, similar to the Prot Paladin.
But you haven’t tried it.
Try it, then tell me how it feels.
There are plenty of other things that distinguish a good bear from a bad one, and they don’t taste so awful.
So, thanks, but yeah.
Dont think combining or getting rid of ironfur would really solve the problem since theyd just give bear another active mitigation ability in its place, but an extra not spammy interaction would be nice.
Something basic like ironfur reducing your next maul cost by (x) stacking and maul reducing your next ironfur cost by (y) to add a rhythm between the 2 and fill the mitigation helps with damage slot its lacking compared to prot warrior or paladin without removing the need to still think about rage at all.
And then unnerf the mastery cause big hp big heals is fun.
Ironfur and Mark of ursol were an okay combination in its original iteration. It created a neat choice of “do I need more armor. Or more magic mitigation”.
The problems started when they removed Mark of ursol, and made bear baseline armor worse in some effort to increase the value of ironfur.
What I’d like to see, are three major changes-
Baseline armor needs to be increased to at least be equivalent to plate classes outside of ironfur.
Ironfur should either be made either something that happens due to maul/raze being used, or at least made into an ability with charges. “I don’t have rage for ironfur” is just too painful right now.
I would prefer to see our active tanking to be something that gives us dramatically increased EHP, like a way to convert rage into max health. Or to be fancy, some mechanic involving letting bears go deep into the red on health rather than dying. That is in my opinion, the real niche they stole from bear, big health bar too angry to die, and replaced it with some goofy pane of glass that shatters if they don’t have ironfur and/or cooldowns running.
If they made it the full active mitigation when combined instead of just a nice to have bonus like urscos fury currently already does for maul and thrash, theyd likely end up massively nerfing maul/raze’s damage to compensate it no longer being a choice for rage use. Like they did for UF right before launch.
Which could be solved by them rebuffing thrash swipe or mangle but its blizz theyre not gonna anytime soon.
There’s nothing stopping them from nerfing Maul’s damage when combined with Ironfur, and, for example, increasing the bonus from Apex talents, or, yes, increasing the damage of other abilities. There are plenty of options. The main thing is that gameplay on the bear would be much more enjoyable than it is now.
I have. And id rather not play Bear as a DPS character.
Its better now than it was with ToI game play.
Theres no reason to combine the abilities and reduce the damage. You can just leave it as it is and still have the same DPS output
And where? I see the maximum key you have on your tank this season is 13. I can complete key 13 without using Ironfur at all.
What does ToI have to do with it ?
If they combine abilities, you won’t be able to spam Maul like Ironfur, since his GCD is much higher, and he shares the same GCD with other abilities, unlike Ironfur.
That is, use a build without apex talents, without raze, and spend all your rage solely on ironfur.
Yes, you can do that, but your DPS will be much lower.
Bear is already considered the “easy” tank to play (basically Mangle, Thrash, Swipe as filler, and Ironfur is your active mitigation.
Having some type of mitigation is something that every tank has. That being said, the spammy nature of Ironfur definitely is not “fun” (having to spam a button multiple times to increase your armor 3 or 4 times, is kind of weird) - I wouldn’t mind if they made it passive somehow, to be honest. Something should definitely go in it’s place, though.
P.S. they could do something as simple as increasing baseline armor to 1 stack of Ironfur, and then allowing Ironfur to stack 3 times instead of 4 would help.
It’s been a minute since I’ve played Monk so I’ll have to get back to ya on that…
I know they recently make Brew easier to play by making one of their brews a passive, but they still have to manage Celestial Brew and…I’m not sure if that’s it honestly.