Hello fellow druids, i was watching a youtube video talking about all the tanks in shadowlands. When it came to Guardian Druids i honestly wrote them off immediately because even in legion they seemed a bit boring (although very good), and in bfa they were just bad. However, after hearing this said youtuber talk about them in a positive light it made me want to give them a try again.
The part that really got me excited was this idea of combining the venthr covenent ability ravenous frenzy while taking incarnation AND the legendary legacy of the sleeper…The fantasy/gameplay that you can be a super powered bear and go on an insane rampage really tickles me in all the right places. HOWEVER, when i tried this on live (without the legendary ofcourse) i was severely dissapointed…the numbers, and the fast paced playstyle were they but the animations were not!!! You could barely tell i popped 2 big offensives cds at the same time and was pumping insane dam. I remember in legion the guardian druid artifact ability increased their size as well as made them scary looking. We need that back! Incarnation puts a gold circle at your feet that you can barely see? Also, Ravenous Frenzy’s animation is also a bit underwhelming, it’s hard to see during a fight especially because the red swirly effect focuses near your head (or snout) where the mobs are.
I’m thinking about alting a guardian druid for m+ for fun (because they are super fun right now imo), but there needs to be a better animation for incarn for guardian, i mean boomkin turns into a armored space chicken, feral and guardian already have such cool forms from legion i dont think changing the form is the play, but increasing our size and showing off that sweet bear form is cool and fits well with our fantasy.
Idk i’m just rambling and this is probably not going to get alot of attention/priotiy. Can i get a amen though?
I’d want more quality of life alterations, like being able to cast cyclone in bear form so I could use it reliably in dungeons, maybe another big cool ability button besides berserk/incarn, and something seriously changed with maul, it still feels kind of not good to use over ironfur, a lot of the pvp talents (especially passives) feel like they should just be baked into the spec
I would like to cast spells in form, or keep bear passives and ironfur stacks and rage when i shift out to cast for a few seconds…
Really that’s about it right now. Some things like snare on thrash instead of mangle/maul would be great, but it keeps the DHs close up where i can kill them so I’m doing fine right now.
You turn red, have swirls of blood flying through the air, and are the middle of a big thrash buzzsaw that revs faster and faster. What were you thinking for a better animation?
I think the red/black PVP form or the Red incarnation form from legion hero would look best for this.
You could also add a few toys to the macro like the buzzsaw hands from mechagon, or even one of the form illusion toys that dont fade in combat.
Make it a castsequence so the first time you use it you turn into Gamon, second time Millhouse, Third time Outland Arrakkoa, Fourth time Draenor Arrakkoa, then a WOTLK fire elemental… etc etc.
Yeah, that first few seconds of a pull when swipe decides to not hit the targets your trying to get threat on are absolutely terrible. Were good once we get rolling tho.
Start pulling mobs with Moonfire once you’re in range and headed to the pack, that way you’ve got 2-3 aggro’d and focus on having Thrash hit the remaining ones and double up on the ones with Moonfire ticking away already.
I’d love to see at least some support spells like Regrowth and Roots be castable while in Bear form, and maybe have a passive like “Furious spellcasting” that could consume rage to make them instant-cast. Also, if Guardian could cast Regrowth while in form, they could slot that in for what Frenzied Regen does now and then turn that ability into a more powerful tanking cooldown.
What Guardian really needs is to be able to access more of its utility while in Bear form. It’s always baffled me that devs give a class like druid so much utility and then keep one spec from using the majority of that utility in everything except raids, because using it as a tank literally requires you to not be a tank.
Bear here. I am using legacy of the sleeper on my boots and I am a vampire with the venthyr covenant ability plus I have the blue level conduit that gives you 16.5% haste during incarn (purple from theater gives you 19.5%!)
It is literally bear god mode. In pvp you can take out 2 players (and then they don’t even release right away as they check their logs to see why you won) or you can wipe a whole group when they are fighting your side’s boss.
Getting fairy fire back as a ranged silence would be awesome. Also wild charge and bash baseline would be nice QoL changes. Having the most health again as a tank would be great since we are apparently supposed to be slow walking meat-bags that soak damage? Or if we are supposed to be weaker in mitigation how about decent damage? Im really confused about the bear design choices when I compare it to the other tanks. Its like the intern they assigned bear design to was out sick the week they finalized it.
What really irks me about the whole bear “design” is I played a druid because I loved the mobility. Bears are the least mobile tank by far since most of their mobility kit is outside bear form. Even just fixing that so I can feel more like a rampaging bear would be a nice change.
That change alone would make guardian 90% less clunky to play.
(The other 10% clunkiness comes from suddenly losing large amounts of haste [Bloodlust, Ravenous Frenzy, Berserk with +haste conduit] when thrash or mangle are about to come off CD, which results in thrash or mangle lighting up, but not firing off unless you press it again another half second later.)
Nobody is keeping you from all that utility, you just need to play smart to access it. Vortex and as soon as you’re out of melee range of mobs, wild charge away in travel form. Spam heals / cyclone, roots, whatever utility you want, then back into tanking.
If you’re NightFae you can blink away as bear and do the same.
Personally, i’ve set my character up to be able to gain distance from:
Worgen racial
Stampeding roar
Wild charge
Dash
Nightfae blink
Vortex
Basically whenever I want to offheal or drop necrotic stacks - I can.
During boss intermissions or RP you can pop heals. Help the healer drink faster by topping the group between pulls, etc.
Sure - you can’t just sit in bear and do it all, but I prefer the increased skill required.
I just find spending all of my rage on Ironfur feels stupid.
I don’t think it’s a good design to have your resource spent on defensive abilities for any tank. It just isn’t fun… and ends up feeling like you’re resource starved all the time because it isn’t worth dumping half your rage for anything other than defense.
If all I’m supposed to do is keep ironfur up, why not just increase my armor by that amount and let me spend rage on something more interesting… because if I have to pick between scaring the crap out of my healer and doing a measly 2k damage on maul, I’m not going to pick maul.
The biggest issue for druids imo is that they’re just boring. It doesn’t help that their AOE threat isn’t impressive.
I’d rather not have to worry about ironfur, be natively more durable and then spend my rage on smashing the hell out of things so I don’t lose aggro. Then again I feel that way about all tanks.
Tanking should be fun. We already gotta know the fights better than most roles. Executing the job should just be bliss. I dunno, just my 2 cents.
I say this in good spirits…but if you’re bored as a tank, pull more. Make things interesting for you. That was always one of perks for me was testing my limits.
Usually bigger pulls mean more resources to give you more options in how to play.
Nevok does a pretty good job of giving some examples
WoW’s animations have been weak for a long time. They have added a few new abilites that have really cool associated animations, but they’ve neglected to go back and update old ones. I think they really need to do that in the next expansion instead of trying to update other art assets. Feral and Guardian both don’t feel like ferocious animals. You just swing a paw out in front of you with the exact same animation and the only thing that changes is some sort of red swiping or swirling animation in front of you.
I mean…the scenarios you outline are how the spec plays if you’re tanking 1 mob at a time. Then it’s a choice whether you keep ironfur up (1 stack) or maul, sure.
At any reasonable level of play, guardian has rage coming out their ears. Once you’ve got 3, 4, 5…10 stacks of ironfur…you want to be using some of your rage for dps obviously.
The armor cap is hard to hit right now due to our low armor values. But once geared it’s only like 5 stacks of ironfur. You need to know where your diminishing returns or cap points are, and other rage should be going into dps or frenzied regen. E.g you should know that for pack X more than Y stacks of ironfur isn’t going to make any difference, and spend the rest on dps.
I for one enjoy the uniqueness of being able to layer our mitigation on. Go play monk if you want to play a spec that just has it’s mitigation up 100% of the time.
Don’t ruin bear just because you don’t know how to use that to your advantage. Pull a ton and be an armor capped monster, or get bored and play a diff spec.
However, all of that said - maul is extremely unsatisfying as a rage dump. I would support any change to make that a bit more impactful, or to get an AOE spender. But not at the detriment of being able to stack mitigation.
Take Maul at its current value, and have it do 150% on a single target, or 75% it’s current value, and hit up to 3x targets (that way it’s still doing full damage on 2x and gets a nice boost on AoE situations)
During Legion I explained to my shadow priest boyfriend why he should step away from a guardian who was standing in a pool of orange fire with red flames coming out of his back…
That’s all well and good, but comes off as a bit dumb that that is required when other tanks can make better use of what utility they have without having to lose nearly ALL of their mitigation to do it. Sure it’s doable, but mobs caving your skull in the second you pop out of bear form kind of do keep Guardian players who might not be as quick on controls or so lucky that they’re not dead before getting a cast off from all of the utility kit provided by the spec.
Once you factor in that along with other factors like gear, increased ranged mobs or number of tighter locations where you can’t get distance, and you become less of a tank and more of a liability to the group.
It’ll tell you once you’ve hit max mitigation. At which point you’ll be able to know how close you are based off of the number of IF stacks and be able to adjust from there.
Does it? I’ve definitely hit 85% physical damage mitigation in Torghast and didn’t notice any messages saying that I hit the cap. I only even checked because I was curious what it was. I wasn’t really looking for any notifications regarding the defense cap though.
Either way, maul still barely feels worth using.
I miss WOTLK days where you could glyph to make maul hit additional targets.
