So there are many posts now where guardian players point out whats wrong with the class, providing the feedback blizzard wanted and promptly ignored.
So what CAN we do with the skeleton of a class we have left? Be creative, think outside the box.
Examples:
Ravenous frenzy and Incarnation with Legacy of the Sleeper seems like a fairly strong combo, especially for pvp and M+. Sleeper stops you from being CC and losing the Ravenous frenzy.
Feral affinity taken with master shapeshifter and maybe apex predator’s craving to get off a big single target burst gank in WPVP?
Grabbing Luffa infused embrace and balance affinity then farming old instances in cat form with your move speed increase and HUGE thrash radius?
Oath of the elder druid increases Ysera’s gift healing to 5.25%. 5 guardian druids in a dungeon could heal whichever is tanking at the moment for 26.25% of their average health every 4 seconds. That’s a lot of healing, and would it be affected by the 20% increase of using frenzied regen?
Post your wierd ideas and theories. If were supposed to be the outlier, rare, and underpowered tank this expac lets find some wierd exploi… I mean “working as intended” options and break the game.
The devs seem out of new ideas for Guardian and Feral, they also don’t seem to like the many great player ideas for both specs, so they may as well re-merge the two. Combine the part time effort they spend on both specs, and we may end up with something worth playing.
At a minimum. I am glib about this, but I truly sympathize with the current devs. They have too many specs to balance and the druid covenants are proof positive that their brainstorming sessions are frustrating experiences.
I think they made a 2-spec class (DH) as an experiment and it has proven wildly successful. If that works for them and lets them put out more quality at the cost of quantity, I am OK with that, even if some of the specs I love have to scavenged for the greater good.
A lot of classes have two good specs and a redhead stepchild spec, so it might not be a bad idea to split up the best parts of these subpar third specs and merge them into the other two good specs. With Druids, you would end up with a feral/guardian spec, and a balance/resto spec. If moving the classes to two specs would result in deeper specs, I’m all for it, but I worry that we’d just end up with two shallow specs.
I really think it would help the current balance nightmare. You could swap gear, talents, and conduits/essences/whatever to go from raid to keystone to pvp mode, just like so many specs do already.
Tell me, as a mage, which of your specs would you merge?
They don’t need new ideas, though, they just need to stop tossing out the old ideas.
I think every Guardian would be perfectly satisfied with just adding back some of the “greatest hits” from previous expansions.
Give us Rage of the Sleeper Baseline.
Give us Bloody Paws.
Give us Pawsitive Outlook.
Give us Fae Silence.
Give us the off-healing stuff from MoP, like Dream of Cenarius.
There. Done. That’s all it would take. And it would have been so easy during this “great unpruning” but they decided to prune us further instead.
While I love the new arcane, I’d make arcane spells part of the base mage toolkit for both fire and frost. The devs could tweak them to provide a beneficial effect to fire and frost so that you would weave them into the existing fire and frost rotation.
I don’t disagree with your ideas, however I’d also remove wildcharge as a talent, make the charge baseline, have it generate rage so IF could be applied immediately post charge, and replace wildcharge with an AOE shout (snaring roar?) that snares targets. I’d settle for talented infected wounds, but better guardians than I have stressed a need for any snare to be optional.
That being said, lots of posters have put up similar good ideas that fix bear mechanically and for w/e reason, the devs aren’t interested in implementing them.
The mistake they made was unpruning the CLASS (Druid) by focusing on Heart of the Wild and Cyclone, which are fantastic for Resto but completely useless for Guardian (and, largely, for Feral as well).
Had they skipped these two, and focused on spec-specific things instead to unprune, then we would be in much better shape.
However, they made a top-level decision to “focus on the class, not the spec” (whatever the hell that means) and so we got screwed. And they didn’t even stick with that across the board, just look at how amazing Blood has turned out for Shadowlands.
It’s not a “for whatever reason” thing. They’re just doing a bad job. Period.
