[Guardian] Legion Discussion

[Dreyen]

And so far on live feral does significantly more damage than boomkin affinity... though that might change as tuning is nowhere near final I believe.

[Braindwen]

Feral is probably the most useful, helps you move around faster to aggro stuff.

You have taunt and moonfire to pull at range, we tanked all this time from Vanilla till now with out an extra 5yards range with out any problem so its not really needed.

So which is it? Do we want to have an easier time picking stuff up or not? Moonkin is clearly superior in this regard, there is no question about it.

Stampeding roar becomes 45yds, (and disorienting roar becomes 30). The +5 from balance affinity is added before the x2 or x3 from guttural roars.

Finally, I would argue that WC is less necessary with balance affinity, since an 18yd skull bash is a fairly acceptable substitute. Not quite comparable to a 25yd WC, but close. Furthermore, if you do pick WC as balance, the extra 5 yards on it helps make up for the loss of 15% MS as well.

Really, both balance and feral affinity only make things easier, neither actually makes us "stronger" (in that we should be able to do encounters without the 15%MS and without the 5yd extra range). Trying to claim that the benefits of balance are a crutch that we shouldn't need, while feral's MS is objectively useful, is pretty contradictory.

on a totally unrelated note - its nice to see you back again you were always a favorite bear of mine.

<3. Can't promise I'll stick around, but I had to hop on and test the new stuff. Having a blast with the changes too, mostly just exploding AoE packs in heroics though , lunar beam+brambles+barkskin is pretty silly.

And so far on live feral does significantly more damage than boomkin affinity... though that might change as tuning is nowhere near final I believe.

Well when I say bearcat I mean hopping into cat, doing 3-4 attacks to burn through energy, then getting back to tanking. Just looking at things as they are now, both pure cat and pure moonkin should be behind pure bear once we get artifacts, but unless we get some heavy-handed nerfs to cat bleeds or buffs to bear, I see bearcat being a reasonable trick for fights where we need to push DPS.

Plus if you want to have a guardian DPS spec, bearcatting has the most awkward, impractical rotation you could wish for.

[Gemini Soul]

So which is it? Do we want to have an easier time picking stuff up or not? Moonkin is clearly superior in this regard, there is no question about it.

By moving faster with Feral you can chain pull faster and move around the world faster. +5yards is nothing when you have to move forward anyways to aggro the stuff so your better off just moving forward faster.

Finally, I would argue that WC is less necessary with balance affinity, since an 18yd skull bash is a fairly acceptable substitute. Not quite comparable to a 25yd WC, but close. Furthermore, if you do pick WC as balance, the extra 5 yards on it helps make up for the loss of 15% MS as well.

That is the worst reasoning to not pick WC, because you can use Skull Bash...that is your interrupt and using it as your main and only charge ability is stupid when you can spec into one

Trying to claim that the benefits of balance are a crutch that we shouldn't need, while feral's MS is objectively useful, is pretty contradictory.

They are a crutch because we went all this time with out it already, we have MF and taunt to pick up adds + wild charge to get around. Moving faster lets us postion mobs faster, move outa bad faster etc.

Your claiming the benefits of balance are objectively useful, while feral's MS isn't something we need is pretty contradictory also, so kettle meet pot!

[Braindwen]

By moving faster with Feral you can chain pull faster and move around the world faster. +5yards is nothing when you have to move forward anyways to aggro the stuff so your better off just moving forward faster.

How quickly you can chain-pull is not really a justification for picking a talent in a raid setting. 5-man? sure... but balance lets you keep on spamming AoEs while stuff trails behind you, plus you can WC 5yds faster to a pack. Try out a 30yd charge and get back to me on how awesome it is.

That is the worst reasoning to not pick WC, because you can use Skull Bash...that is your interrupt and using it as your main and only charge ability is stupid when you can spec into one

Skull bash charges to the target, and an interrupt is not always needed. In fact, it's rather rarely needed from a specific person in a raid environment, since every non-healer brings one. Regardless, this has been used as an argument against WC in the past (ironically, in favor of Feline Swiftness), and it's never been more valid than now with the increased range.

And if we want to go way back, in cata one of the talents we gave up so that we could bearcat reduced our interrupt CD from 1min to 10s. Plenty of people ran around with a 1min interrupt CD, and it didn't end the world. This was in 10 man raids, too, where fewer people could pick up the slack.

They are a crutch because we went all this time with out it already, we have MF and taunt to pick up adds + wild charge to get around.

Don't know where you've been for the past few expansions, but picking up groups of adds, especially at range, has been a weakness of the class for a long time now, one that's received many complaints (I'm sure you can just look at early pages of this thread to find some). While balance affinity doesn't directly address this like, say, a bear Death and Decay might, it certainly helps us pick up clusters of adds. Run around like an idiot spamming swipe (and barkskin brambles), and enjoy as everything even remotely near you starts chasing after you.

Your claiming the benefits of balance are objectively useful, while feral's MS isn't something we need is pretty contradictory also, so kettle meet pot!

Really, both balance and feral affinity only make things easier, neither actually makes us "stronger" (in that we should be able to do encounters without the 15%MS and without the 5yd extra range).

Balance will be better for picking up threat; You'd have to run nearly 40yds for the 15% MS to make up for needing to be 5yds closer to attack.
On the flip side, Feral will give more wiggle room for moving out of bad stuff, which balance will obviously do nothing about.

Seems like I claimed both of them only make things easier, and specified what each is better at. I don't think feral affinity is useless, I think bad arguments against balance affinity are bad.

Before I keep quoting stuff all day, my main point here is that the argument "balance affinity is useless because you'll be in the boss's face anyway, and you should be able to pick up and hit anything you need to without the extra range" is a weak argument, exactly the same way that "feral affinity is useless because you'll be in the boss's face anyway, and you should be able to avoid any mechanic you need to without the extra movespeed" is a weak argument. Sure you should play perfectly and pick resto affinity every time, but balance and feral affinity have their strengths and definitely make mechanics easier to manage. So, my earlier recommendation still stands:

Balance if you want or need help picking up adds
Feral if you want or need help avoiding mechanics (or Bearcat)
Resto if you're confident you won't want or need either.

[Gemini Soul]

Don't know where you've been for the past few expansions, but picking up groups of adds, especially at range, has been a weakness of the class for a long time now

Actually I've been bear tanking since TBC and I've never had a problem with pulling stuff from range with charge/taunt/FF back then, so its not a weakness they had and if it was for others then that is on them. And its obvious you've been away from bear for a while because of your sig, so i know where you haven been, and that is not tanking on a bear.

/end

[Nevcairiel]

1.5% per 5 seconds yeah over a fight it will add up, but depending on a fight it can be between 30%-60% over healing, then you look at incoming heals yeah that 1.5% was effective healing but when that incoming heal lands and you also account for your mastery on the incoming heals, there is going to be over healing done making that 1.5% heal not matter. You are a tank, you are going to be getting healed no matter what and if that 1.5% is the difference between life and death then either its tank or healer error at that point. Healers are going to be keeping you topped off when your tanking, that 1.5% tick is not going to keep them from casting a heal on you.

Have you actually tanked on 110 in the beta? Because that sure doesn't sound like it.

The days of either dead or at 100% life are over, its common to be at ~80% life a lot of the time.
And any self-healing will save the healers mana, which is once again super important. There is a lot more room between 1.5% healing saving yourself from immediate death and then instantly overhealing.

I'm not saying its the best affinity, but its certainly not as entirely worthless as you make it out to be.

[Hobbs]

Absolutely loving bear so far. Almost no complaints with the spec at all. Moonfire in bear form is cool. New animations are nice. I like most of the talent options. Rework around health, armor, and regen feels great. New mastery is awesome. Blizz really nailed this spec. I'm even getting used to and liking having an aoe spell as our filler. Feels very bearish.

I have one question. What is frenzied regen like at 110? Is it strong and we'll want to be spending rage on it frequently/keeping a charge on cd? Or is it more situational, like only in magic heavy fights or after major spike damage?

[Darus]

Balance affinity = 5mans/raid trash/heavy add fights
Feral affinity = Most raid encounters
Resto affinity = Static boss fight

[Dreyen]

nothing about a 1.5% heal every 5s adds up, it sounds really worthless tbh.

[Gemini Soul]

Have you actually tanked on 110 in the beta? Because that sure doesn't sound like it.

The days of either dead or at 100% life are over, its common to be at ~80% life a lot of the time.
And any self-healing will save the healers mana, which is once again super important. There is a lot more room between 1.5% healing saving yourself from immediate death and then instantly overhealing.

I'm not saying its the best affinity, but its certainly not as entirely worthless as you make it out to be.

Yes i've tanked Mythic+ and i've ran it with Feral Affinity, had no problem staying alive. 1.5% per 5 sec is nothing compared to our health pool and our options. I've tested it out many times and like i said it was between 30%-60% over healing at the end of the dungeon.

Yeah meaningful self healing will save healer mana, like hitting a FR after a big damage intake IE:Glaive Combo on Manno. But 1.5% every 5 seconds is not meaningful, its a fraction of that incoming heal. That 1.5% tick or heck 2 ticks of 1.5% in 10 seconds is not going to keep a healer from casting one on you and that tick is crap compared to the heal thats incoming.

Yes healer mana is important, but being how bears are tuned/designed we are the IDEAL tank for healers to use their cheaper/longer cast spell on and not their expensive/fast spell on. At 5Mil HP's it would tick for 75K every 5 seconds, that is literally a drop in a bucket and nothing compared to what a healer or we can put out with FR while tanking.

Absolutely loving bear so far. Almost no complaints with the spec at all. Moonfire in bear form is cool. New animations are nice. I like most of the talent options. Rework around health, armor, and regen feels great. New mastery is awesome. Blizz really nailed this spec. I'm even getting used to and liking having an aoe spell as our filler. Feels very bearish.

I have one question. What is frenzied regen like at 110? Is it strong and we'll want to be spending rage on it frequently/keeping a charge on cd? Or is it more situational, like only in magic heavy fights or after major spike damage?

It's better at 110 more so with the Artifact perk and also with GoE talent, its a reaction based heal spell like taking a big hit from a boss one of their CD's. It scales on damage taken, and it does 6 ticks spread out over 3 seconds which is even better than the old version. For example, the old version would heal for say 600K in a single hit now you didn't need that much and lets say 200K of that was over healing. With the new version with the same 600K heal, it would do 6 ticks of 100K each over 3 seconds now while its ticking you take a hit again for 200K damage after 3 ticks of the 6 have gone so now the last 3 tick thru and heal you back up again and this time because that 600K heal was spread out over 3 seconds it no longer had 400K EH and 200K OH it was 600K EH (used 600K heal because it was easy to explain mathematically). Depending on what I'm tanking i usually keep 1 ready and 1 on CD, but for certain mechanics i will save them and use when needed.

nothing about a 1.5% heal every 5s adds up, it sounds really worthless tbh.

It really is worthless, the older versions where it healed for more faster was more useful but 1.5%every 5 seconds not really. If it was 3% every 5 seconds along with the Legendary chest then it would be more useful.

The only time i find it useful is when I'm solo tanking w/o a healer, i was running 5man heroics earlier with Resto Affin and 4 dps on live.

[CenariusTheForestLord]

And so far on live feral does significantly more damage than boomkin affinity... though that might change as tuning is nowhere near final I believe.

Feral nor Boomkin actually do more dps than bear for me. At least not considerably.
I'm dummying over 2 minutes on feral for 42k dps, moonkin 40k dps and guardian 41.

- - - Updated - - -

Actually I've been bear tanking since TBC and I've never had a problem with pulling stuff from range with charge/taunt/FF back then, so its not a weakness they had and if it was for others then that is on them. And its obvious you've been away from bear for a while because of your sig, so i know where you haven been, and that is not tanking on a bear.

/end

Balance is more useful for non stacked add packs (XhulHorac, Mannoroth, Iron Reaver, Kormrok)

Hitting all the bombs in melee on Iron reaver is a big deal with so much AOE in our toolkit. Not having as many grips as before makes balance a dps increase a lot of times.

[Useful]

I finally put a foot in mythic dungeons on beta. Resto affinity is nice. When u are not taking direct damage from a boss (which happens often, like he is channeling something aoe heavy etc.) u can pop 3 quick heals on urself and make a healers life much easier. also if u tanking a single but heavy mob u can cast 2-3 heals during bash window. Also its good for world content, same scenarios apply.

[CenariusTheForestLord]

I finally put a foot in mythic dungeons on beta. Resto affinity is nice. When u are not taking direct damage from a boss (which happens often, like he is channeling something aoe heavy etc.) u can pop 3 quick heals on urself and make a healers life much easier. also if u tanking a single but heavy mob u can cast 2-3 heals during bash window. Also its good for world content, same scenarios apply.

Yes, Resto has by far the most useful active applications in progression content. We're talking usefulness now though. Where tank damage taken is low and tank survivability no longer matters. There is 0 reason for me to increase my survivability in Mythic HFC at the moment, so i'm not picking Resto. We're debating which one has the most practical benefit if we ignore survival. (Or at least I am)

[dexx]

And so far on live feral does significantly more damage than boomkin affinity.

For levelling, would "bearcat" be viable? I gave it a try, throwing a series of feral bleeds into the rotation didnt noticably increase dps over the usual mangle, swipe, thrash.

[CenariusTheForestLord]

For levelling, would "bearcat" be viable? I gave it a try, throwing a series of feral bleeds into the rotation didnt noticably increase dps over the usual mangle, swipe, thrash.

Atm none of the affinities reliably increase your dps. Might be good for single target rares. Rake into rip into bear.

[Braindwen]

Feral nor Boomkin actually do more dps than bear for me. At least not considerably.
I'm dummying over 2 minutes on feral for 42k dps, moonkin 40k dps and guardian 41.

For me (706) it's:

Bear (ignoring GG, spamming maul): 27k
Cat: 30k
Moonkin: 27k (can't proc the agi heirloom, else it'd be around 30k as well).
Bearcat: 37k (log)

Moonkin will fall behind post-artifacts, but that's fine, it's still got the advantage of being ranged if that ever actually comes up. Pure cat will fall behind but it's a bad way to play anyway. Bearcat will stay comfortably ahead of bear barring some pretty major changes on top of the artifacts, and as long as bearcat>bear dps, that means using opportunities to go cat->burn energy->bear will yield more damage than just staying bear. Not by that much (the log above spams shapeshift so much it's basically a DPS spec, hell WCL thinks I'm feral), but more than 0.

And yeah, none of this applies to leveling. Pick which one you like and enjoy being bear.

[fanghorn83]

So I have been messing around on Beta a lot and on my Guardian Druid main that I am planning on tanking with in Legion...
I am having major issues with 2 abilities specifically that maybe someone out there can help me clarify since I am not much of a numbers genius

First Issue: Brambles talent.
So a passive that absorbs 1700 damage from each attack. On a health pool of 1.2 million hp with the tank training dummy doing about 92k a hit. Seems like a joke? Am I missing something huge about this talent? Almost seems like an insult really.

Second Issue: Frenzied Regen (FR)
This has many issues that hopefully can still be fixed. And once again, maybe I don't get how it is meant to work but once again, on a health pool of 1.2 million the return if I use one of the two charges is a 10k tick for 5 seconds give or take. Thats insanely tiny. Maybe if you could spam it at the cost of rage but 2 charges? And yes the heal gets bigger based on the damage you take but honestly, I haven't been able to get this thing to tick more than 32k but even that's a joke really.. And in order to try get it to tick for that much I need to purposely use no Damage Reduction abilities which is completely counter intuitive. We are supposed to reduce damage with Ironfur etc. but at the same time we get an ability based on damage taken. So it seems totally broken. Pretty much all of my gear has mastery and my mastery is sitting at 40% roughly.... are we looking at much higher mastery numbers in Legion?

Please can someone point out if I am missing something because I love guardian but it honestly feels very broken.

A last mention if by some miracle Blizz Developers read this (Lol) is that Charge should be baseline. We have little to no mobility compared to Warriors, Demon Hunters and Monks. Why are we forced to decide between Guttering Roar and Charge? Because ultimately we will always have to take Roar so why not just give us charge as a standard ability?

[Nevcairiel]

Frenzied Regen (FR)
This has many issues that hopefully can still be fixed. And once again, maybe I don't get how it is meant to work but once again, on a health pool of 1.2 million the return if I use one of the two charges is a 10k tick for 5 seconds give or take. Thats insanely tiny. Maybe if you could spam it at the cost of rage but 2 charges? And yes the heal gets bigger based on the damage you take but honestly, I haven't been able to get this thing to tick more than 32k but even that's a joke really.. And in order to try get it to tick for that much I need to purposely use no Damage Reduction abilities which is completely counter intuitive.

Frenzied Regen is fine, it provides healing when we need it most - after taking a big hit. Combined with the artifact traits and the 4P bonus, its a massively strong heal, assuming you also get hit appropriately.

It just requires changing the mindset from WoD tanking where FR provides a baseline heal for any situations. In Legion, its a strong situational heal which may not do much in trash fights and whatnot, but a boss with a hard hitting ability? Extremely potent healing to counter the damage. You can't really test this on a training dummy, unless you get a healer to assist you, and evne then the dummys probably don't have a raid-boss level hit.

Baseline healing has been reduced for all classes to give that job back to the healers.

Why are we forced to decide between Guttering Roar and Charge? Because ultimately we will always have to take Roar so why not just give us charge as a standard ability?

What brings you to that conclusion? Roars is hardly a mandatory talent. In fact, I don't know when I would really take it.

[Sonnillon]

What do you feel would accompany MS guardian as DPS OS best - balance or feral? And yes, I know you can have all 4 specs and switch as you like, however as I am more of the lazy person then looking for the best option to which the stat priority says roughly the same to make it not so hard to gear the OS and I could use mainly my MS gear.

According to IV haste - crit - mastery - versatility is the prio for both resto and balance. While feral has crit - versatility - mastery - haste. As guardians prio seems to be mastery - haste - versatility -crit. Then most close to guardian's stat prio I would personally say balance, specially that you could go resto as well if needed, but how "simple" is balance to learn on the go? I haven't tried feral out as well on the pre-patch... So will have to learn anyway.

[fanghorn83]

Frenzied Regen is fine, it provides healing when we need it most - after taking a big hit. Combined with the artifact traits and the 4P bonus, its a massively strong heal, assuming you also get hit appropriately.

It just requires changing the mindset from WoD tanking where FR provides a baseline heal for any situations. In Legion, its a strong situational heal which may not do much in trash fights and whatnot, but a boss with a hard hitting ability? Extremely potent healing to counter the damage. You can't really test this on a training dummy, unless you get a healer to assist you, and evne then the dummys probably don't have a raid-boss level hit.

Baseline healing has been reduced for all classes to give that job back to the healers.

What brings you to that conclusion? Roars is hardly a mandatory talent. In fact, I don't know when I would really take it.

Regarding Roar:
Well the raid utility of being able to do raid wide movement increase (Synergy with Artifact) every minute is so OP. I can't see why anyone wouldn't take it. Especially since only bears can do it now afaik? I could be wrong but I am under the impression that other druids can't do it.

and regarding FR:
Okay, Well that makes sense then. I think I was doing a bunch of mythics and when taking a bunch of trash in a dungeon it felt like my FR just wasn't doing much but I get what you are saying and that makes sense now. Still more than 2 charges would be really nice... I loved being able to choose how to spend rage either going for healing or damage reduction.. but ye.. Don't get me wrong though, it's still great but I felt like my warrior tanking partner suffers way less in regards to damage than what I do and I am constantly popping Ironfur, barkskin, etc. My brother (Resto shaman) had a go at healing both of us at a similar ilvl and he felt that the warrior was easier to keep up than the druid.

Regarding Brambles:
What's your take on that? Is it right that it is absorbing pretty much nothing? Is it purely for more dps output instead of a damage reduction utility? Absorbing 1700 damage off a boss ability doing 1000 000 damage is basically pointless.