I quit my guardian druid at the start of 8.3. I’ve tried all the other tanks, except monk, at 120 (currently playing a blood DK). None of the tanks are much more difficult to play, but they all have different mechanics. I really like playing as a bear, the other tanks are all just that much better at either doing damage or taking hits.
Come on blizz we need buffs. I quit for months in 8.3 because I just ran out of patience. When I log in and see my bear druid show up, I just can’t bare to log into it.
I had keystone master (15+) last season and I could get it again in pugs on the druid. But nobody, in a decent raiding guild, wants to have a bear tank. So I quit it. It is just too far behind.
I’m planning to get the keystone (15+) achieve on my blood DK this season. But these other tanking classes just aren’t as fun as bear druid.
Please fix this so that people will take my druid to raids. Unless you make blood dks much more appealing IDK if I will even buy shadowlands at this point. I want to raid on druid.
I am literally begging you! Do you want to see me cry? I WILL CRY AND PUT ON YOUTUBE!!! FIX BEAR PLEASE/
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I can tell you this. Don’t hold your breath for BFA. You just gotta hope they make alterations for shadowlands but they gonna stay weak for the rest of this xpac sadly.
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I suspect not until 10.0 when it’s possible that there could be a major overhaul of the spec.
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What are you on about “they gonna stay weak” lmao, bear tanks are fine. Besides prot warrior being obscenely overtuned, all of the other tanks are pretty close in power.
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I guess “fine” is defined by what you’re trying to accomplish. If your goals are never higher than like M20s, sure anything is fine.
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There’s a bear tank timing 29s and doing 30s but okay.
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Okay but that argument is like saying “there’s this one MM hunter that’s top 100 in 3v3” and thinking the spec is good in PvP because of that one person.
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You said “if your goal is sub 20s anything is fine” meanwhile there’s a bear tank doing 29s and 30s. The only major difference is the damage output that bear has, which just isn’t as much as warrior, not having a button that gives them insane aoe damage on a sub 1 minute cooldown and not having spell reflect stops them from being the best but there’s tons of people doing high keys on not only bear, but all the tank specs.
Saying “bear is weak” is just wrong.
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Again, this goes to what you’re trying to accomplish. The average brewmaster/prot warr can perform vastly superior to the average bear. Now, does that mean that guardian is 100% incapable to perform well at a high level? No, of course not.
But the extra effort/gearing required of it are much higher than that of a brew/prot warrior.
Feasibility does not = strength.
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The problem is this isn’t a real problem for the majority of the playerbase doing end game content.
I totally get the point that bears aren’t competing at the top level. I am completely behind the argument that Blizz has done very little for bears and appears to do little in Shadowlands. Bear is getting snubbed.
But the problem is for mythic+ up to 20 they are fine, which is the majority of mythic+. And they can actually do high mythics but require more support. For raiding up to mythic they are fine and really only struggle with the lass boss in Ny’alotha as far as I have read, which again is the majority of raiding content. But again they can do it, just with more support required.
So basically, bears aren’t getting any attention and haven’t been for quite some time. But they are just fine for the vast majority of end game content. Bears aren’t a desired tank for anything. But they aren’t incapable. Someone has to be on the bottom and it looks like bears will be on the bottom of the tanking pole for another expansion.
It sucks, but I doubt it’s significant enough to get Blizz to decide they need to change it. Fundamentally bears work, they just aren’t as good when things get difficult.
This is exactly it, and why I hate when people go link like the one person making it work, with flawless gear, in a flawless group.
You can’t just say “see this one guardian is making it work despite the fact that he’s group stacking just so to make it work.”
Which goes back to my feasibility does not=strong point.
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I don’t think the consensus is that bear is weak at all, but we are lacking in abilities that USED to be baseline but were taken away in Legion; holes that haven’t been filled.
We’re the only tank without a baseline stun, some form of movement-reduction ability, and meaniful abilities that are interacted by our rotation i.e. a Warrior’s shield slam getting a 30% damage increase while shield block is up, or how their rotation can make shield slam free.
Another example is Deathknights or Paladins; where they can cast DnD or Consecration and their damaging abilities are passively enhanced by those spells.
Guardian druids have mangle and gore; the only exciting part about our passives. Even the passive Lightning Reflexes is suboptimal at best since Dodge has been phased out as a niche of tanking in general.
We’re just bland, boring. If each tank was a type of ice cream we would literally be Vanilla. Simple, yet it’s versatile.
I’ve seen a lot of people say they love Bear because of its simplicity. If Blizzard’s intention is to have Guardians as it is right now, then I hate to put down my character of 10 years.
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I agree with everything you said except this, and i keep seeing this phrase come up in posts lately. DKs also have to talent into asphyxiate to get a stun.
They changed that in Legion
[Patch 7.0.3] (2016-07-19): Now a baseline ability for Blood and talent for Unholy. No longer acts as a silence against targets immune to stuns.
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If bears aren’t getting fixes because they’re “fine”, why is brewmaster getting huge buffs in shadowlands even though they’re the top tank in the game?
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What concerns me is why change Pulverize but not Lunar beam…
Granted changing it from 9% to 20% is pretty significant. No theorycrafter but trying to weight the benefits of 20 secs of 9% DR with no CD vs 10 secs of 20% with a 30 sec CD.
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It’s not even that, though. New Pulverize is a debuff applied to 1 target. It’s vastly inferior to old Pulverize in AoE fights (like M+) and against environmental effects (which is where Pulverize excelled). And it’s a wash on single-target, except if there’s a fight where the boss does 1 hard hitting ability in a 30 to 35 second window, repeatedly.
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Eh true, I looked over damage received from target. Basically Varimathras style encounter.
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Right, it’s all a big conspiracy to screw you over, I’m sure.
Your statement that brewmaster monks are getting huge buffs seems to assume that there will be no number tuning pass ever and that Blizz just wants Monks to be the #1 tank by a large margin. Which is naive/ignorant at best, trolling at worst.
Shadowlands development made some changes to all classes and specs, some more than others. Bears are not receiving any major changes that I can see. The balance is completely out of whack because there has been no tuning.
Bear representation and performance proves they are capable. It shows they are not preferred or desired. It does not show that they cannot do content.
The lack of significant changes to bears suggests that Blizz is fine with bears functionality. They may or may not buff bears when tuning.
It is perfectly reasonable to be irritated that bears were the least desired tank for all of BFA, and that there has been no apparent work to change that. It is entirely unreasonable to think that Blizz wants everyone to only play 1 tank spec and is going to make it the best tank forever.
The fact that Monks are getting changes suggests that Blizz is not making changes based on representation or performance during BFA.
It could be that one of the people working on this plays a monk and is inherently biased. It could be that they decided that they didn’t like how monks played and wanted to change a thing or two. It could be just an oversight. It could be that the people working on bears are at a severe disagreement as to what to change and decided not to really change anything.
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I have no idea on this.
Maybe the metrics they are looking at include a bunch of very low performing bears running Lunar Beam, and not enough running Pulverize. Still doesn’t make sense.
I would argue whoever is working on it doesn’t play bear much.