Just wanted to wish everyone good luck; guess feedback on the regular forums is meaningless and people who can’t post on beta don’t matter.
Logged in for the first time to play my character in over 4 weeks, did 4 bosses in M Nya’lotha and it’s just not fun anymore. The corruption, the borrowed power. My class just isn’t appealing.
I’m happy my guild offered to run me through the 7 other bosses for points but I just wasn’t happy knowing that this is what the future of WoW is. Sorry i feel depressed now.
Well, be that as it may, I’m not going to give up trying. We have to make noise in the places that we can. That’s really all we’ve got.
You’ve been doing a fine job - along with many other notable figures in our community. I say we refuse to give up, we fight the good fight, and we see what happens. If SL is trash for Guardian Druids, we can always take a nice long WoW vacation and invest our money elsewhere - that’s a message written in a language that Acti-Blizz will certainly understand. At any rate, that is my plan.
Edit:
Don’t let Trolls - speaking both literally and figuratively - get you down!
I’d like to see more kit synergy. Give us a reason to apply Moonfire other than just damage. Give us a situation to press Maul over Ironfur.
Lunar Beam could apply Moonfire to targets in range. Maul could give a powerful offensive buff that encourages its use. Let us get more out of an affinity as a bear, maybe letting us cast Sunfire, Rake/Rip, or Rejuv as a bear.
I get the impression that there’s some kind of challenge going at Blizzard. How long can they go without implementing core class changes that customers have been asking for since Legion?
Adding “fixes” on legendary effects is the exact same thing the Legion team did.
Please understand, @Cyouskin, that my questions and criticisms - for what they’re worth - are all meant in good faith. I really am quite excited to see a bit of constructive conversation in this thread.
Before moving forward to another rather pressing issue, I’d like to take a moment and point out some points raised by @Naros… points that I simply must agree with.
First and foremost, something I didn’t really notice or think about originally, but in your suggestions Swipe is being put on CD? Swipe is our iconic filler. Like @Naros had questioned, what is our filler then? Moonfire? Auto attack? I’m not a big fan of losing out on our iconic AOE filler; likewise, I have to wonder if this would cause threat issues - depending on the length of the CD. Granted, Swipe spamming is “Boring” and uneventful, but it still serves a real purpose all the same: it helps us to maintain threat on multiple mobs, and fills our rotation out so we’ve always got buttons to press - even if it’s the same button, over and over. I’d take that, any day, over sitting idle, watching Auto attack and waiting on CDs.
The second thing that I’d like to reiterate is the comments concerning the usefulness of the Mark of Ursol passive. I’m going to approach this from a PVP perspective as opposed to a PVE perspective. All of what @Naros said obviously still stands, but we get a similar problem in PVP: when we really need FR to come off CD, we’re not likely going to be cleansing anyone - even if we could. That’s a GCD right there that could spell the difference between life and death when you’re getting hammered on by 4-5 people. It’s kind of like how Ferals had DPS tied into casting roots and Regrowth. It doesn’t feel very good. Being forced to cleanse to drop FRs CD feels the same. It’s like we’re being forced to try and use an ability that we don’t really get use all that often for one reason or another.
One other problem is the identity issue: Guardian Druids are still… not really anything, even with these suggested changes by @Cyouskin. I see @Cyouskin added a couple of dodge-based and dodge-affecting abilities to the toolkit here… so, are we going to be pushing to be dodge tanks? What I mean to say is, we need to be going “All-in”, we need to be moving in some tangible direction, if that’s the case - whatever the case may be: dodge tank, hp tank, etc. That’d give us an identity. We would be “The” dodge tank, or “The” hp tank, etc. Most of these things wouldn’t be too hard to achieve either. All Blizzard would have to do, really, is tweak baseline stats - and quite possibly, in the case of an hp tank option, tweaking the mastery passive to be just a bit more effective.
That said, on the matter of dodge-tanking, I’d like to take a moment and reiterate my PVP concerns: crit, which is used for dodge, is considered to be the worst PVP stat due to the reduced effectiveness of crit in PVP. If we get pushed into the direction of dodge-tanking, then Guardian Druids are going to suffer for it in PVP. Honestly, I still think that hp tank is probably the better direction, something useful in both PVE and PVP environments - not least of all because it would be fairly easy to implement. Make us the chonky meat shields we were back in Legion.
Another possibility, come to think of it, would be, say, to make us better at AOE tanking. That’s another possible direction, another possible identity for Guardian Druids: “The” AOE tank. Buff up those AOE attacks, bake in a slow and/or other effects - proccs or whatnot, I don’t know, and we could excel at that.
At any rate, I’m just throwing things out here and letting the more knowledgeable bears make the decisions.
Basically, eventually Blizzard has to make up their minds about the direction of Guardian Druids. What do you have to say about that, @Cyouskin? How about you, @Naros? Anyone? What would you like to see? I’m really, genuinely curious to pick your brains about this… I mean, I’m just a casual player who enjoys a bit of Bear PVP - or, rather, a lot of Bear PVP… I just don’t know as much about the class/spec as you all do. I don’t have as much experience with it. It’s harder for me to make appropriate suggestions for changes. At best, I can help point out problems.
So to expand on this, I’m fearful that any type of rest gap in our rotation boils down to the following:
Slow and much lower APM play style, think BDK.
Threat concerns
The BFA expansion is a superb example of where even having a filler spell to spam did not always help generate adequate threat. Some will say that is a dps role problem and they shouldn’t use their high damage moves at the onset of a pull; and while I can agree with that – that degenerate play style is seen as “fine” for other tanks who can build threat much faster and more aptly than Guardian. That really shouldn’t be the case.
It’s one thing to be a player who doesn’t use your abilities fast enough or in the right fashion to build threat, that’s a player issue. But when you’re using the spec appropriately and still experiencing the issue, that’s a design issue IMHO.
So Cyouskin, if we have no real filler like we do now and end up with these small gaps in our rotation potentially, then what plans do the devs have to address the damage & threat output? We go through this debacle expansion after expansion where we aren’t balanced aptly and this is always an ongoing issue and very rarely so for other tanks.
So you brought up a couple of things
Dodge tank
The Monk tank already fits this niche with Stagger/Shuffle and I don’t think for the health of the game, we should have different tank classes that share a similar design or philosophy. Doing so begs the question - why are they different classes in the first place.
High Health tank
The whole premise with Guardian being a high health tank in the first place stemmed from the fact that we were a damage-sponge tank turned dodge-based tank; and in the event that we took a massive hit to the face because we didn’t dodge it; we needed the health in order to provide an adequate buffer so that healers could react before taking additional non-dodged attacks that would otherwise kill us.
With Guardian being the high armor tank at the moment, our health pools do not need to be like they once were. If you think about why Guardian had the highest health in expansions past, its then much easier to now understand why BDK and VDH fit this design presently.
AoE tank
With target caps in SL, I’m not sure how much value an “AoE” means. In any given pull, all tank classes should be able to hold threat and if they can’t its either a product of pulling too much, poor play, or class tuning.
Even if that is put aside for second, any AOE high damage tank will most likely end up being the default pick for content where that matters, namely Mythic+. What you end up doing is shifting what people complained about with Warrior dominating Mythic+ due to their insane damage throughput and now it’s Guardian druids.
While that might be great for us, we’re shifting an already existing problem. Then what comes of Guardian in the next expansion when this gets moved to the next FotM tank spec?
I don’t have any real answers or ideas to give at the moment.
I do think what is important is for Blizzard’s designers to acknowledge this is an ongoing problem and have a transparent discussion with the Guardian community on ideas and ways this can be triaged.
I personally have no issue being the “beginner” tank spec if that is the route that Blizzard wants to take but that shouldn’t mean that the spec is slow and boring, has no synergy, lacks visuals, and most importantly lacks tools to be equally effective at the same difficulty of content as the next tank spec.
As someone said earlier in this thread I believe, its all in the “how” you excel. Outside that, so long as all tanks excel, then we’ve struck gold!
I hate the notion that any spec is the “beginner” spec, if anything it’s a lazy cop out. All specs should be relatively easy to get into, with an obvious enough floor/ceiling on play to differentiate good/bad players, and give incentive to get better. On the same topic, good play should be rewarding in terms of performance.
What if we took the name “Guardian” to another level and consider a “Momma Bear” concept ( Caféaulait’s picture as the inspiration)?
I’m still a little unsure where I want to take this, so I’m just spitballing it right as I think it.
Two concepts immediately spring to mind, then a third as I was typing.
When targeting something that is targeting a party/raid member, damage is increased against this target. If the party/raid member has the Healer role, this damage bonus is doubled. If the party/raid member has the Tank role, this damage bonus is halved.
An aura/presence in which party/raid members within 5-10 yards receive 5-10% less damage from area affecting attacks. This may be too powerful to be anything but a talent.
I’m going to say this again, more Roars which will affect and protect, such as reducing enemy damage while providing some form of protection to the group. This could be something that the sound department could have some fun contributing to as well.
I think a combination of beefy health/armor tank, with damage redirect type abilities (Think the PvP talent denmother) would both return a lot of the “feel” that guardian used to have, provide solid utility, especially in 5 mans, and give them an interesting niche.
Of course, the problem you’d run into, is how easily something like that could actually backfire and make them the “bad tank”. In a coordinated group, that sort of utility would be incredible, in a pug, the rogue standing in puddles to maximize their damage might kill you.
A roar theme for their utility would definitely be a nice angle.
Intimidating roar baseline to give them a nice aoe interrupt.
Challenging roar baseline to give them the snap aoe threat that is kind of important in some situations.
Protective roar, share your next mitigation cooldown with the group. Something like a 30 second cooldown that is off the GCD. The possibilities would be interesting, share a frenzied regen to recover from a critical situation. Share a barkskin for a general “reduce the group’s damage”. You’d probably need to exclude SI to keep it from being TOO outrageous.
roar, aoe slow that maybe can’t be kept up permanently, but something like a 30 second cooldown with a 15 second duration would go a long way toward giving Guardian a reliable way to kite.
The best part? That’s a lot of new and interesting ways for guardian to use it’s rage. Choices that can be weighed, and decided. The base rotation would still be kind of boring, but you’d at least have the game of trying to decide if you want to burn your rage to roll higher ironfur (which should really have a small magic damage reduction component), OR if you want to only roll one ironfur, but share it with the group.
I like this concept. It could even be on a longer cooldown if all the specific protections that go off in a window of time are granted around.
Talents could even affect this as well, especially in the Affinity Department. Protective Roar would provide your current Ironfur or Barkskin affect baseline, then add Frenzied Regeneration if you have Restoration Affinity, increased Haste and Resource Regen if you have Feral Affinity (Cats were the fastest attackers back in the day), and increased Mastery and have Galactic Guardian if you have Balance Affinity. This is just a first start at looking at it, and have Affinity do something besides just add things we’d have to shift to use.
I’ve been considering this too. I think a simple “fix” would be to separate Swipe and Thrash (in my example). From there, Thrash buffs your next Swipe by 60%; and Swipe would be tuned a bit lower. I’d prefer you want to press Swipe last in terms of damage priority…unless buffed, then it’s cool to be top.
This is also feeds in to the “combo” playstyle.
TBH, I’m not sold on my own idea. It was an easy grab, but might not practical use. The goal was to encourage use of non-Guardian and non-Feral abilities.
This sounds like it’s too forced. I don’t have a solution that makes sense (casting in bear form is not something I think fits my idea of Bears.
My idea of Guardian is a rampaging beast. If I were to do a complete rework, you’d get a far better interpretation of that theme. (In my examples, I’m trying to stay within community feedback.)
In these examples, Bears are beefy tanks, and they use Dodge as a way to “relax” the incoming damage. It’s more hybrid, but leaning towards damage sponge.
Basically, that 3sec isn’t meant to define the gameplay, but rather an ode to a different time. Bears should be beefy. An extra 20% HP overall might be more than enough to achieve that feeling.
Total rework. Guardian, to me, should be a rampaging beast that embodies the rage and spirit Ursoc and Ursol.
I can make a new post with my rework, but it’s not something I think everyone would enjoy.
Guardian Rework Idea:
Any damage values are simplified to make the relationships easier to understand.
Offensive Spells:
Mangle
Generates 15 Rage.
Deals 100 Damage.
Cooldown: 6 sec.
Ferocious Charge
Generates 10 Rage.
Lunge at the target, granting Ironfur.
If you are within 5 yards of the target, you will lunge through them.
Range: 10 yards.
Deals 140 Damage.
Cooldown: 15 sec.
Thrash
Generates 10 Rage
Deals 20 Damage instantly. (AOE)
Deals 90 Damage over 9 sec. to each target hit.
Cooldown: 6 sec.
Proc: Your next Swipe deals 60% more damage.
Swipe
Deals 40 Damage. (AOE)
Maul
Costs 40 Rage.
Deals 90 Damage.
Moonfire
Generates 5 Rage.
Deals 10 damage instantly.
Deals 160 damage over 16 seconds.
Each active Moonfire increases your healing received by 3%.
Defensive Spells:
Frenzied Regenation:
Recover 15% of your maximum health over 3 seconds.
Charges: 2
Recharge: 45 sec. per charge.
Cooldown: 3 sec.
GCD: Off
Ironfur:
Costs 40 Rage.
Increases your armor by 20% for 8 seconds.
Cooldown: GCD
GCD: Off
Cooldown/Utility:
Relentless Assault
Ferocious Charge continously attacks the target, dealing 20% more damage for each successive hit. If your target dies, you automatically pick a nearby target.
Grants Ironfur on initial cast and stuns all targets hit for 4 sec.
Channeled: 3 seconds. Cast every 0.75sec.
Cooldown: 2 min.
Avatar of the Wild Gods
Brace yourself, granting Ironfur and increasing your avoidance by 75%. All friendly players behind you gain 25% Avoidance.
Channel: 6 seconds.
Cooldown: 6min.
Art idea: Spell effect is your character model, transparent, with a spectral wind flowing to either side of you. (Denotes the area of effect.)
Rage of the Sleeper
Reduce all damage taken by 25%.
Deals 15 damage to all nearby enemies each time you take damage.
Duration: 10 sec.
Internal Cooldown: 0.5sec.
Cooldown: 90 sec.
Barkskin
Reduce all damage taken by 20% for 12 sec.
Cooldown: 60 sec.
Passive Effects:
Rampaging (Trigger)
Your Mangle, Maul, Thrash, Moonfire, and Ferocious Charge critical strikes send you into a Rampage.
Rampaging (Buff)
Duration: 6 seconds.
Buff type: Enrage
Increase your damage done by 15%.
Increase your movement speed by 20%.
Relentless Assault recovers 50% faster.
Insatiable
Suffering loss of control applies Rampage.
Reduce the duration of loss of control effects by 50%.
Grievous Wounds
Mangle and Maul deal an additional 4% of your maximum health as damage to the target.
Gore
Mangle and Maul gain 30% increased Critical Strike chance against Bleeding targets.
Swipe has a 25% chance to reset the cooldown of Thrash.
Maul has a 25% chance to reset the cooldown of Mangle.
Vicious Paws:
Thrash, Swipe, and Maul have a 33% chance to make your next Mangle hit up to 3 targets.
Talents:
Brambles
Rampage grants a shield for 5% of your maximum health which absorbs 25% of incoming Physical damage, reflecting it back to the attacker.
Blood Frenzy
Mangle and Maul gain 50% Critical Hit Damage on Bleeding targets.
Bloodrage
Generates 10 Rage every 1 second for 6 seconds.
Cooldown: 60 sec.
Passive: While Rampaging, recover 0.5% of your maximum health every 1 second.
Soul of the Forest:
Mangle generates 5 additional Rage.
Mangle deals 25% more damage.
Galatic Guardian:
Moonfire causes the target to deal 8% less magic damage to you.
Moonfire strikes a second nearby target.
Incarnation: Guardian of Ursoc
Passive.
Increase your maximum health by 15%.
Gain immunity to crowd control effects while channeling Relentless Assault.
Ferocious Charge has a 25% to not incur its cooldown.
Earthwarden
Mangle generates 1 application per target hit, up to 3 stacks.
Absorbs the next auto-attack made against you, up to 30% of your Agility.
Survival of the Fittest
Reduce the cooldown of Rage of the Sleeper and Barksin by 33%.
Guardian of Elune
Applying Moonfire to an enemy recover 3% of your missing health.
Each time Moonfire deals damage-over-time, you have a chance to rage 5 Rage.
Rend and Tear
Thrash increases the damage of 3 Swipes.
Each stack of Thrash rerduces the target’s damage to you by 2%.
Challenging Roar
Replaces Lunar Beam
Force all nearby enemies to target you for 8 seconds.
You deal 20% more damage to taunted enemies.
You take 20% less damage from taunted enemies.
Activates Rampaging.
Cooldown: 90 sec.
Pulverize
Replace Maul
Deals 90 Damage.
Consumes all applications of Thrash to deal 60 additional damage per application consumed.
Consuming 2 stacks of Thrash is a guaranteed Critical Strike and applies Ironfur.
I like the direction of the rework that you proposed. After my first pass of reading those changes it would seem to make the playstyle of the Bear a more aggressive tank.
I think that is the best description of dodge as it relates to Bears that I have ever read.
On lunch but with a quick read through I am absolutely in love with this idea. I mean after all when you make a bear mad - well better run and hide. I love the offensive and defensive and the synergy.
Most of these are good ideas, and I’d prefer to see more Roars in there, but I guess that’s just where my feelings are at in regards to Guardian. It’s not like not having Roars would stop me playing it, since I literally have not stopped playing it now.
But for this one, I would make some changes. One thing that Brambles, Thorns, and Ursoc’s Claw’s version of Rage of the Sleeper provide is a reactionary concept that I believe should be included here.
Instead of just basing it on the max health of the Guardian, have it based on the LOST health of the Guardian, i.e. max health - current health, and maybe increase the number a smidge. This would make a Guardian on the brink of death be hitting like a truck (a nasty option for PvP as well as raids/dungeons).
This could set up a concept that Guardian’s are the “counter-attack” tank, instead of just the “meat” tank.
Some great ideas in there and I applaud your commitment. Interesting and imaginative stuff. Nice job. I really like the Moonfire buffing healing received. That’s new and creative. Grievous Wounds made me thing of going the opposite way; damage is increased based on missing health, i.e. we hit harder when injured. And the various Thrash Swipe interactions are great. And I like the Mama Bear protector role of your Avatar ability.
I’d still like to see a ranged silence or some means of drawing in stubborn casters.
I’d still like to get our Intimidating Roar back that DOESN’T BREAK ON DAMAGE.
I’d still like to see more Rage consuming options with different costs besides IF and LaulMaul.
And I think your Pulverize is way too strong. We’ll just Thrash > Mangle > Swipe > Thrash > Pulverize and basically have a constant IF rolling plus any extra IFs we can sneak in if we’re swimming in Rage.
But a really nice presentation. I love it. Great job Cy.
This sounds very reminiscent to the azerite trait interaction, Wild Fleshrending. I do agree that having some type of synergy or interaction between abilities is a great way to drive small but powerful decision making during tanking.
In your rework ideas, you mention that certain abilities can trigger Ironfur while other cases may require that we activate it manually. This sounds more like a hybrid build between Shuffle and Ironskin Brew for Monks.
I’m not sure where Dodge ultimately would fit here; other than maybe to have Guardian favor Critical Strike based gear like they did during MoP than they have traditionally done sense that era.
Regarding your rework ideas, I have a few comments inline:
What caught my eye here is the “lunge through them”. Can you elaborate on this? Would this essentially be Wild Charge with perks combined with some rework of the Highmountain Tauren racial, Bull Rush? Would we continue to have Wild Charge as an additional option for movement between the 10-25 yard range?
I definitely like the idea of incorporating the Wild Fleshrending azerite trait as part of the baseline ability but I’d like to expand on that more.
I would implement this proc to actually be a 6s buff. This buff would stack up to a maximum of 3. Incorporate the Pawsitive Outlook artifact trait that would trigger multi-thrash procs and you would get a stack of this swipe buff for the initial thrash and up to 2 more when multi-thrash proc occurred.
The rotation would then vary based on the Pawsitive Outlook proc where the default is Thrash+Swipe and the other is Thrash+Swipe x3.
The idea is merely to give some variance and synergy in procs & playstyle.
You baked this into Rend & Tear and I’d like to see it be more dynamic than something static personally.
What I do not know if those who don’t have Beta access know yet is the fact that Swipe has been capped at 5 targets. It’s been mentioned multiple times that Bear threat is already one of the lowest on beta as-is and its much easier for other tanks to manage threat.
What is going to be done to combat this concern? For tanks who have no caps on their AoE, this significantly puts tanks that have target caps at a significant disadvantage where a pull does have more than 5 mobs. I’m not specifically about the scenario where you’re trying to pull massive like MDI, but more the idea that some pulls may have more than 5 mobs, some that might spawn in as mobs split (think slimes in Mechagon Junkyard) or pulls that have slightly more than 5 mobs (think teeming weeks).
Thrash not being capped sounds like the answer, but the fact Thrash has a 6s cooldown and its damage traditionally is poop outside of Incarn. This is why lots of Guardian druids run VoP major right now because with the high up-time, it helps us maintain threat.
I like the idea here that Maul, while a powerful hitting spell; isn’t our top damage ability anymore like it traditionally has been.
I think that has been part of the ongoing problem with our toolkit because we haven’t really been able to always use this ability across content and therefore our damage potential suffers because the toolkit feels tuned around the idea we would actually be using this when we can’t.
Does the healing received bonus apply to all healing received, including our own healing from Frenzied Regeneration?
The health recovered seems low and the re-charge time feels too long.
I suspect what you’re trying to accomplish here is that on smaller pulls, we won’t need so much self healing and the Moonfire bonus helps to offset that; however I wonder how this would balance out on Tyrannical dungeon bosses.
I could see this 15% being fine for raids where you have multiple healers but in smaller group play, I wonder if this is going to hurt more than you might expect in certain affix or dungeon scenarios.
I do like the suggestion that its off the GCD and there is a safeguard in place to prevent the player from overwriting an existing FR buff with another.
I like all these, they definitely add some spice and niche to Guardians that are unlike that of the other tanks.
The only concern is that they aren’t so OP that groups completely favor Guardian for their group utility so much so that other aspects of our toolkit must suffer or that we end up being like other tank specs in the past where no one else can compete at all.
I"m all for making Guardian better, but the last thing I want to do is push that line so much so that we have every other tanks begging for bear nerfs.
I like the idea that this rampaging is an enrage, thus can be dispelled in PvP. This allows this ability to not be too powerful in that setting. Since this buff is triggered by a critical strike, this goes back to my earlier point; Guardian would likely favor crit gear to keep this buff up as much as possible.
For fairness, I would probably say this might end up being something that needs a special PvP note because a 50% reduction in loss of control seems quite excessive for that mode of play.
Can you explain the interaction here with Gore and Swipe/Maul? You didn’t mention any type of cooldown for these earlier, so I’m not sure I understand.
I think this interaction needs to remain with Thrash rather than Mangle. Unless you get a Vicious Paws proc, you would only ever be able to maintain a single stack of Earthwarden outside of Berserk; therefore this would probably cause this talent to be worthless.
All in all, great ideas. I do like the idea that our toolkit auto-applies Ironfur so we end up more in the path of a Monk with Shuffle; where the normal rotation itself feeds into our mitigation rather than it being a button we need to process every 7-10 seconds depending on the situation.
Just a short, quick thought here: as an avid PVPer, I think I’d have to agree with you, Naros - 50% is way too much in PVP; however, it could have reduced effectiveness in PVP - say, 20%… similar to the Orc racial for stuns, or maybe even 25%? I think that’d be fair. Anything less than 20% would be pretty sad, seeing as 20% or 25% would shave off like 1-2 secs., depending on the CC in question.
I’ll respond more fully a little later on. I’m loving the exchanges though, you two.
@Cyouskin: trust me… people want to hear your ideas, even if you think they might not like them. Actually, this is exactly the sort of thing we need: constructive ideas and not merely complaints.
Ferocious Charge will have 2 functions, based on the range to the target.
If you are within 5 yards, you do a Bull Rush
If you are outside 5 yards, yo do a mini charge, similar to skull bash.
Wild Charge will exist as a talent (I left out a couple rows because I felt they were okay for now.)
I am of the opinion that tank AOE show be uncapped. Thrash and Swipe should have no target cap.
Yes. All healing received.
Trying to not overwhelm the toolkit with too much passive healing, and felt you’ll have more active mitigation instead of self-healing.
Trying to keep it in line with AMZ. Bears will still have Stampeding Roar, but that only goes so far.
25% might be the better answer.
Thrash has a cooldown, and Mangle has a cooldown. Basically, your AOE filler resets your AOE cooldown, and your ST filler can reset your ST cooldown. Maul isn’t spammable, and that’s by design.
I really did consider this, but I didn’t feel it would be received well if we had to play with ~50% HP to feel effective.
I was thinking you’d get 0-8% bonus damage based on missing health, where you reach maximum benefit around 35% HP. I think that may work better than a linear benefit.
Definitely leaning more towards Crit. I moved away from active Dodge abilities and opted for more mitigation. There’s a few of sources of Ironfur passively because I want you to feel like you can stay aggressive. Ironfur can be used separately as a way to help mitigate incoming damage with more enemies around.
For everyone, keep up the support for Guardian Druids. Wish we had a stronger presence in the Beta forums but love you all