Balance Affinity -> Inspired from Solar Beam. Challenge Roar --> “according to your affinity, gain a bonus effect.”
1 Like
So taunt all adds, but it’s a ST silence? Nevermind I’m tired I re-read it.
My opinion; if that was Blizzard’s plan to change Guardian I’d be playing Shadowlands.
4 Likes
Not quiet. You’ll have LATC – 1-2 targets will be hit. The taunt is there, mostly, to allow you to focus on the casters (if they are at range). The idea is that you might have a melee pile and you just need to bring casters in closer. You can pop CR, not worry about threat for a good while (8sec), and moonfire casters – interrupting/silencing them, causing them and letting them walk into the melee pile.
From there, you can do you AOE combo.
And ofc, CR acts as a mass taunt, which isn’t exactly weak by itself.
Yeah sorry I read it as “Causes a moonfire to silence the target” im sleepy
1 Like
im about to head off myself. so many tpyos.
Appreciate it, despite how moot it might be. I’ll be sure to save it just for next expansion.
2 Likes
These suggested changes look fairly impressive: the changes aren’t overly sweeping and dramatic, the complexity of the rotation hasn’t really increased all that much, it certainly seems a lot more interesting, procc effects would feel good - like they meant something… as @Caféaulait said, if these sorts of changes were implemented for SL, I too would be playing come SL. I’d buy the expansion immediately. That said, I do have a few questions for you concerning these suggested changes.
We still have three outstanding problems:
- Lack of a slow
- Magic damage mitigation
- Spell casting
How would you address these problems? I mean, the suggested changes above are already stupendous, but I’d still like to see something done about these three problems some time this century. Would you keep things the same, have them addressed via a new system(s), as talents, or… ? I really would like to hear what you think on these matters.
Thanks for your time,
Barespanks
3 Likes
Lack of Slow --> Covered by Swipe. It does have a setup time due to shared cooldown with Thrash, but it’s there.
No direct mitigation, however, I slapped 20% Avoidance to “Primal Instincts” is effectively a Barkskin on most forms of raid damage (which you also take).
Need to be more specific here. Do you mean things like hybrid spells, CC, etc? List some examples.
I don’t think there will be a time where you can truly make use of your entire spellkit as a tank. So, I went for something that provides a strong incentive to feed into your mitigation/survivability. The idea was that you can offer a bit more to the group as a cleanse.
2 Likes
That’s just terrible. That’s not what I meant by, “Their niche”, “Their ‘Specialty’.” I meant what do Guardian Druids do, as a tank, that makes them unique? What do they do - in game - particularly well? Where do they excel? What is their strength? Where do they really shine? What are they known for? The simplicity of their rotation has very little - if anything - to do with Guardian Druid identity.
2 Likes
I’m awake now and I talked with another poster about the list;
We’re markedly different in our survivability in content with curses and poisons vs without?
The restriction on reducing our healing cooldown seems a little too harsh. While dungeons might be fine, most boss encounters don’t utilize poisons and curses that often; which is also expending a GCD for a healers’ responsibility, first.
If Frenzied Regeneration was tied to how much rage is spent i.e. for every 30 rage spent; reduce the CD of FR by “2” sec ( 2 seconds seems fair the CD is 25 s)
If you replace Barkskin; something would have to replace Brambles which is one of our best aoe threat increases.
Moonfire also reducing dmg taken by 1% - 4% ( Scintillating Moonlight) would in a small way benefit magic damage reduction. BUT this is probably something for a conduit isntead.
2 Likes
hello, first I am not a native English speaker so maybe there are some grammatical errors in what I am going to talk about.
I don’t think the guardian needs a lot of drastic changes, we need more utility skills and interactions between the skills.
utilities:
we need some slow or stun baseline
we need the rage of the sleeper back
we need to be the tank with the most hp
we need some form of use of affinities (my suggestion would be a passive one that for the next 12 seconds after leaving the bear form you would still continue with the armor, life and rage of a bear, so you would have time to use your affinity and go back to bear shape without losing anything)
interactions:
make guadian of elune baseline
make pulverize baseline
we need some way to reduce the frenzied regeneration cd, it could be due to the amount of rage we spend (for example every 50 rage spent reduces one second of the cd)
make azerite trait Guardian’s Wrath baseline
I also don’t think that the classes should be for training, I think that every class should be more difficult or easier depending on the chosen talents, and the more difficult it is to use the talent, the more rewarding it should be
I hope I have been clear, thanks for your attention 
3 Likes
also lunar beam is garbage and need to be replaced or reworked
2 Likes
Ah… it seems that you had most of the bases covered already. Apologies. I misread.
I’d still much rather we had, say, a talent that allowed Ironfur to provide some small % magic damage mitigation per stack. I mean, that wouldn’t be too difficult to implement, would it? We already have Survival Instincts and/or, in this case, Primal Instincts, to deal with big hits… but nothing to deal with a constant stream of incoming magic damage.
On the matter of spell casting, I was referring to the Druid spells we get access to - like Cyclone, for example, which require us to drop form; or those provided by Affinities - that will rarely, if ever, see any use. It is a sore point for many Guardian Druids because it feels like a part of our toolkit is more “For show.” We have a toolkit… we just can’t really use it. Like I said before, I’d be down if we had, say, an option on Gore procc to cast a single spell in-form, sort of like what Ferals do already - they have a choice of actions on procc, whereas Guardian Druids have none. That might not get too out-of-hand? I think being able to cast all Druid spells in-form all the time is probably too strong, and would require Guardian Druids to lose out in another area… what do you think?
Just mulling things over.
Thanks for your time,
Barespanks
1 Like
As simple as this is; it’s absolutely critical.
I always get a thrill out of taking a look at all the new animations that specs get each expansion and one class that almost always stands out are Paladins. They are literally a beacon of light when they pop their wings or use other iconic abilities. The animation alone gives the player this feeling that they’ve used some super awesome ability and they’re about to kick doors down.
Guardian has none of this. The best moment in Guardian’s history to me was the inclusion of the Mage Tower skin and its variants. Outside that, nothing.
Onto your suggestions:
Offensives
Perhaps it is just how you’ve outlined the offensive toolkit but exactly what is the filler spell that Guardian will use while Mangle and Thrash/Swipe are both on cooldown and did not previously dodge an attack so Maul isn’t available?
To be clear, I don’t want to see Guardian turned into something akin to a BDK where you’re having to sit and do nothing while you wait on your abilities to recharge with no filler global to use. Moonfire should not be that filler.
Defensives
I’ve been an avid supporter that the affinity row itself needs to go and I don’t think trying to bake more things into it forcing players into one or the other is the right path. It’s essentially locking multiple druid spells behind a talent choice that has proven time and time again to be a bad design from the get go IMHO.
Furthermore, with the balance affinity suggestion, would it automatically apply moonfire to all targets taunted or would the player have to have already applied moonfire pre-emptively before using the roar? If the latter, that’s quite a number of useless globals spent. If you want to interrupt all targets, that’s precisely what Incapacitating Roar and Typhoon can achieve with a single global.
With the Wild Charge change, I assume you’re simply trading out the mobility aspect that lasts 4 seconds for the incapacitating effect for 3 seconds but the movement aspect of charging to the target enemy remains. I’m just not sure how important that becomes when Skull Bash + Charge solve the same problem with a single global too.
Passives
I know a number of Guardian druids who enjoyed the LatC legendary from Legion but what made that Legendary so good was when you paired it with the cloak and the amount of passive healing you received as a result.
I think LatC plus the Legion legendary cloak perk baked into a single passive would be nice; it would certainly be something filled the space of Impassive Visage from BFA’s azerite trait system for us.
With MoU, I guess that ultimately depends on how much content has poisons that have to be cleansed. If there aren’t sufficient content that has this, then I don’t know how much I’d feel about this. You’d likely find yourself in groups that primarily stun/interrupt the poison cast anyway and therefore the druid would not get a chance to make use of this ability in the first place or the other end of the spectrum being there aren’t enough free globals to cast it in the first place. All this comes back to content design itself and whether such a passive has a place at all.
I actually think your suggestion for Gore is kinda neat. It adds a bit of Berserk synergy, could be a good way for Guardian’s to be able to have more control over their threat tables earlier on in pulls without having to resort to using their dps cooldown.
For Primal Rage, I think I’d rather see the rage gained based on critical strikes rather than based on dodging an attack; but thats just my opinion.
Conclusion
I definitely agree that it would be super fun if our abilities had synergy and being able to feed into other abilities based on procs or sequences can add some additional layers of game play without having to over complicate the spec by adding a bunch of unnecessary button smashes.
3 Likes
At work but love the ideas Cyouskin. Hell all of us Bears have given more thought to this than any of Blizz.
But I didnt drop in to bash them - I quickly dropped in with a holy heck - they actually looked at SPriests , maybe there’s hope for us yet! - Granted being at work I havnt read it yet it just popped up on Wowhead notifications on the desktop. But it’s given me hope.
PS : Blizz - Please dont kill that hope. I need that with work right now.
2 Likes
6% Magic DR per Ironfur stack seems reasonable through Guardian of Elune. Or Moonfire causes the target to deal 8% less magic damage to you (Galactic Guardian).
Yeah, that’s pretty tough. Ideas like Challenging Roar, which tie into Affinity might be the better way to handle this issue. When it comes to Roots, I personally feel that you should be doing those actions pre-pull. Cyclone is a different beast entirely.
I don’t think it’d be unreasonable to use the “Blood Paws” proc (Maul empowers Mangle) to have a chance to further empower your next Mangle:
Feral Affinity -> Mangle has a chance to cast Thrash.
Balance Affinity -> Mangle casts Sunfire to the target.
Restoration -> Mangle restores 4% of your maximum health and deals 6% of your maximum health as damage to the target (Enraged Maul basically).
3 Likes
You should have about 2-3 GCDs to use defensive abilities. Your “high APM” moment is while Primal Instincts is active. On average, you should have 20% downtime (1 GCD rest after 4 GCDs used, 5 total GCDs.) A lot of it causes down to resets and defensive options, and coupled with Haste scaling.
My reasoning is specifically so that you can feel that these abilities exist within bear form. Otherwise, you just never get to see it.
2 Likes
Understood, and thanks for the clarification.
I just want to add caution here because I don’t think going down a path that will lead to empty globals is good for any spec. Guardian has been a spec that you have had something to use each global whether its filler swipe, active mitigation, a defensive, or self healing.
FWIW, empty globals have always been one of the most reported dislikes about certain tanks specs in the game and I’d hate to see that come to Guardian in any flavor. I think despite the intent and meaningfulness of the changes you’ve outlined, the sheer fact of having empty globals will be a major turn off.
I get Gore procs and the akin will help here with this to some degree, but you’re still opening the door up to a situation where due to bad rolls, you get a string of 4 globals, 1 empty global just because.
Maybe its not as bad as I imagine ofc, but having tanked on my BDK with these gaps in globals due to “rest periods”; as a tank it sucks and there is no other polite way to put it.
I think that itself outlines the inherent problem with affinities.
With your suggested changes for affinities, would those continue to be the only way to provide access to Typhoon and Vortex too? If so, then we’ve compounded these talents even more.
Balance Affinity
- Need to caster-weave during off-tanking scenario
- Need a knockback?
- Need an AoE taunt and AoE silence
Feral Affinity
- Need to cat-weave during off-tanking scenario
- Need an AoE taunt with a mini hero for 8 seconds.
Resto Affinity
- Need to healer-weave during off-tanking scenario.
- Need a flee AoE grip?
- Need an AoE taunt and group healing cooldown.
I feel like this is just trading what we have for something even more complex and over-engineered all for the sake of trying to make certain affinities more viable than they’ve been in the past while at the same time applying a completely unnecessary divide between Typhoon and Vortex.
Now lets say Typhoon and Vortex weren’t on this list (which IMHO they shouldn’t) and instead the affinities were augmented solely with your suggestions, then I could be totally on board.
I could see reason why for a given dungeon that is heavy magic why you might take balance if the damage is mostly on the tank, resto if the group takes occasional burst damage (or even bursting affix); otherwise feral perhaps on skittish weeks.
I’m not trying to nit-pick here, I just want to understand the basis really. What I don’t want to see happen is we get stuff added for the sake of adding things to try and make the Guardian community feel better but what we’re getting doesn’t really fundamentally solve the glaring problems we already have.
3 Likes
That’s fair. I agree waiting doesn’t feel great, but I disagree waiting is inherently bad. I guess I see it as “if the slow period is short, and you do get a moment with high APM, then it’s okay.”
One small thing that I think could help out raiding tanks is to make the switch to catform actually do damage. Part of the problem with the affinities is the global cooldown incurred when switching forms. So if they could add a damage effect when switching to cat, and one when switching back to bear that would be nice.