Just been browsing brew threads and seeing a few people talk about “Guard” and how they liked it. What is the spell and why was it so fun that you want Blizzard to make it return?
2 charges 50% DR for like 15 sec on 15sec cd
Had to manage it well but if you did was strong
Seems kind of OP, ngl. It’s just a guardian druid’s big CD but on a 15 sec cd 
not really but that also was the only real defensive monks had back then stagger was 80% in the face and 20% over 10 seconds. Bears got like ironfur they can keep up to reduce damage and other defensives.
They did somewhat bake guard into stagger as you can essentally stagger instead of 20% more like 70-90% then purify 50% of that dot to the shadowrealm when you needed to purify
I may be thinking of something different but I remember it being a MASSIVE bubble that you put on yourself and the strength of this bubble was directly related to your Resolve (An increase to the damage, healing, and absorbtion based on damage taken in the most recent 10 seconds or so)… So what you would do is you would have cycle where you would have a dodge phase and an absorb phase… While you had Guard up you would build stacks of Elusive Brew, And while Elusive Brew’s buff would cap at roughly 15 or 20 seconds of having over 50% avoidance, by the time the buff was gone, Guard would be back up. And you had this fun little back and forth, but if you held off a few seconds on using either of those, you could spike your resolve to give you a MASSIVE absorbtion bubble that was well over the size of your health pool… So a while a standard monk tank would cycle the absorb and dodge phases, a monk who knew a fight very well would go mitigation-less to cap out the resolve and potentially nullify a boss mechanic, and then being quick to immediately purify the stagger afterwards.
Seems like current monk but with more steps, seems cool tho
If memory serves it was actually less steps. Granted I also specced into Chi Explosion (which was a multi-use chi spender that would) … I dont remember if we had Ironskin… I think the 20% stagger was it… Keg Smash was less but we had another ability called Dizzying Brew that had a HUGE range and was spammable (It was your avengers shield of sorts)… It would apply a debuff that let other abilities (breath of fire) be more effective… I greatly enjoyed WoD monk tanking.
Fast forward a bit I also greatly enjoyed Legion tanking but it got nerfed for the reason I liked it. They put a cap on the length of time Ironskin Brew would stack up to because during chain pulls with the right setup and resource usage you could get Ironskin to stack for a long time (im talking a few minutes) and that would free up all of your potential brew charges (because they shared) to be used to Purify… And because of the brew charge resets it was also to keep another buff rolling that we had called “swift as a coursing river” it was basically a 30% movement speed increase that you kept refreshing with your brews. I -REALLY- hope they bring this back in some form for Dragonflight. It was so fun just to zoom around, drunk as a skunk.
Guard used to be a shield you put on allies around you. It was especially broken during a time in WOD for PVP where your shield had so much to it that most classes couldn’t deal damage to break it before CD was off again. On top of this it wasn’t affected by dampening.
In Legion it became an honour talent, one I abused in combination with Hot Trub for 3k in all brackets (which eventually got GUTTED).
So now we’re left with Avert Harm, which is an EXTREMELY inferior version of Guard, and in combo to that, Hot Trub was massively nerfed due to the PVP combo.
All in all, it was just a really good damage mitigation CD with no real downside. Was pretty broken imho, but also fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4VdarquZf8 13:23. This was s1 of WOD, but it kinda shows off the gameplay from a boomy perspective of using Guard. Like the shield was nutty
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It was like 90% better than most of the other brewmaster abilities because it required using it at the correct moment or wasting it especially in PvP
Meanwhile guardian druids keep den mother which is 100% uptime and covers all allies
Yea I remember back in legion when brewmasters would end bgs as top dps, was pretty cool but I never got to try it . The arena seems kinda silly, but fun. Like an old school disc priest in a way.
I don’t think 15% max hp within 25 yd is that crazy, maybe for like a lock or something that scales their absorb off of hp.
Oh you poor soul.
We were top DPS AND heals.
But 15% health is alot, especially when you combo it with a spec that wants to stand there and do damage (lock)
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Was gonna say this, but I couldn’t remember if they were also top healing.
Yea this is pretty much the only thing I thought of it being good to pair with. The thing about guardian is that it kinda just chases things down so if you are with a lock you probably aren’t in range of the lock for them to get the hp affect. I guess it’s nice if you stack on them though.
What about warriors, dks, rogues, enhances. Everything likes the health, some just abuse it more than others
Well those classes don’t benefit as much from max hp as a lock does, I would say. I mean sure everything benefits, but I was talking about cheesing the most you can. If you run guardian you probably just run a zug zug comp.
Why wouldn’t they benefit from it? If a DK can survive a stun go from an RMP because of the 15% health, that means he gets to leave the stuns and come back out to continue mongoing. The same goes for all those I listed. The more uptime you have, and less running you need to do, makes your spec extremely scary. There’s a reason frost dk/guardian was meta for a while. The DK could not be killed in a stun so he just got to mongo pump for longer, uncontested.
Uptime is very important to determining if something abuses a stat or not
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True, you can survive. My mindset was more of getting the 15% hp for the big dark pacts, or health stones. I agree that something like dk/guardian is more compatible, like I said they probably just run zug zug comps that can try to just burst the entire team down.
You also have to look at it as 15% damage reduction with healing and the ease of knowing you have someone peeling for you the entire game that will not be focused
Guard was basically CB with fewer steps, complete with some damage reduction on top of it. A good chunk of what made it so strong was Vengeance/Resolve; you could literally have an absorb for 1m damage or more. In a world without that kind of scaling, Guard wouldn’t be anywhere near as overpowered or game changing as some people remember.
Dizzying haze was just ranged taunt and applied a slow effect with no diminishing returns. Did not do any damage or anything. Really the play with that was you just tossed it on mobs and constantly kited they would be forever slowed. Way too strong in m+ though they added that feverent strikes b.s. so would make the spell mostly irrelevant, but seems they backtracked on those strikes as of late.