[Guardian] 7.2.5 Legion Guardian Guide by Pumps

[Dreyen]

Web of pain is shadow damage so ive been using marc of ursol to mitigate it.

[Bearygood]

Keep in mind that DH generate a lot of healing aggro. Guardian FR generates 0 threat, which can be a frustrating aggro problem when two classes have similar DPS but one has additional threat on their heals.

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Web of pain (AFAIK) can't be mitigated on the receiving end. Heroic can be two-tanked. Mythic can be as well, but strongly recommend going 3 tank, it massively simplifies the fight and hugely reduces tank spike damage.

I see, the wording is a bit confusing so i wanted to ask. Is Web of pain only damage inflicted by the tank being attacked by the boss or from the tank not taking the boss as well?

[Valkon]

I see, the wording is a bit confusing so i wanted to ask. Is Web of pain only damage inflicted by the tank being attacked by the boss or from the tank not taking the boss as well?

Dreyen claims it's mitigatable w/magic reduction (ie MoU) - so that may help (I haven't confirmed, but he could be right).

Web of Pain transfers all damage to the person that you're linked to - doesn't have anything to do with the boss's damage (unless the linked tank is taking boss damage). This applies to the non-tanks in the raid that are linked as well - any source of damage one takes will reflect to the other.

[Raklar]

I have been finding Brambles to be a very competitive feeling talent in M+ runs. There is obviously a fair bit of error and subjectivity here since my grp composition hasn't been stable and every run has its differences. I generally alternate RotS+LB and Barkskin for large grps, obviously using RotS+LB on the really tough pulls and Barkskin on the lesser ones.

Brambles is providing ~10% of my dmg and ~8% of my healing taken. Obviously IF uptime is reduced slightly and stacking IFs becomes far less common. But the absorbs and increased dmg seem significant enough to compete with BF and BloodF.

SimC seems to agree for both TMI T19M multitarget and, surprisingly, single target. I take this with a large grain of salt and I still don't think it could compete in Mythic EN, but it seems far closer than I expected, especially if your grp is light on DPS.

Anyone have similar impressions? Anyone try using Brambles in Mythic EN?

[Deleted]

I use brambles quite a bit in M and M+ dungeons, I don't see why it wouldn't work. Depends on the affixes and the specific dungeon whether it is good or not. The numbers you are providing seem rather high though. When I tested it, it was closer to 5% of damage, and I didn't care about mitigation, because I only look at brambles as a dps talent.

For EN, I don't see a fight were Brambles has its niche, because usually the hits you take are a lot bigger and a lot less frequent then in trash packs in a dungeon, reducing the damage and mitigation value massively. Maybe it could be good when you are tanking spider adds on Elerethe, but you can't really make sure, that you will be doing that....

[Seditian]

I use brambles quite a bit in M and M+ dungeons, I don't see why it wouldn't work. Depends on the affixes and the specific dungeon whether it is good or not. The numbers you are providing seem rather high though. When I tested it, it was closer to 5% of damage, and I didn't care about mitigation, because I only look at brambles as a dps talent.

For EN, I don't see a fight were Brambles has its niche, because usually the hits you take are a lot bigger and a lot less frequent then in trash packs in a dungeon, reducing the damage and mitigation value massively. Maybe it could be good when you are tanking spider adds on Elerethe, but you can't really make sure, that you will be doing that....

You can make sure, no? I mean in the first spider phase anyway. In the second it tends to be a bit more chaotic and we just let the tank who's closest to the spiders pick them up. But yeah, I've only used Brambles in EN on 1 boss fight and switched away immediately.

[Dreyen]

I just use brambles every fight, boss damage isnt very threatening to me so far honestly, including urosc and 2 tanking elerethe. I'm thinking of going harder on dps trinkets/relics. I'd love to have 3x jagged claws relics like pumps... would also be great for m+ skittish.

That said, would it be worth dropping a few weapon ilevels for jagged claw relics?

[Deleted]

@Seditian on Elerethe (M) we had trouble with the web of pain knocking people back, so we decided to let the two linked tanks take the spiderlings and the non linked one take the boss. On Heroic and normal, there is no problem with that mechanic, but there should also be no enrage timer you can realistically hit.
@Dreyen: If you two tank Elerethe, where do you put the spiderlings on the first platform? Does your link get red doing that? I see you took a shit ton of damage from web of pain, while taking very little melee damage, so I guess you are taking all the spiderlings?

On the topic of Brambles again, in Dreyens Elerethe kill from Oct. 05, Brambles did 3.88% of his damage (2.62 M in total) and 1.55% of his healing. This is actually pretty substantial damage wise, while I would neglect the mitigation. On Nythendra, probably due to the dot mechanic, both damage and mitigation are even higher. Will have to test that tonight. Seems quite substantial.

[Pumpsm8]

I just use brambles every fight, boss damage isnt very threatening to me so far honestly, including urosc and 2 tanking elerethe. I'm thinking of going harder on dps trinkets/relics. I'd love to have 3x jagged claws relics like pumps... would also be great for m+ skittish.

That said, would it be worth dropping a few weapon ilevels for jagged claw relics?

Yeah i do drop quite a few ilvls to use 3x Thrash relics, using 850 860 865 over 3 870+ relics in my bags, really depends on the traits. I did switch to 3 high FR relics to tank the 4 dragons on Mythic Cenarius and switched back after prog, glad i kept spare Thrash relics around.

[Deleted]

I still wonder if guardian druids will be able to reach 30% mastery in mythic nighthold. What do you think? I am talking about 930 ilvl.

We will be beasts with something like 30% master and 15-20% versa if we can have most of our items with mastery/vers.

I still don't know why people say that versatility is better than mastery for pure survivability and progress raiding. Take a look at this.

20 000 mastery = 28% max health
20 000 versatility = 25% dmg reduction.

lets take 1 000 000 hp as a default value.

mastery case : 1 280 000 - a boss hits for 500k = I am left with 780 000 hp.
a boss hits for 2nd time= I am left with 280 000 hp.

versa case : 1 000 000 hp- a boss hits for 500k = I take 375 000 dmg = I have 625 000 hp.
a boss hits for 2nd fime = I am left 250 000 hp.

Ok now. Lets take into account the fact that with the mastery case I get a whooping 28% more healing. It means it will be much much easier to bring me back up when 3-4 healers are healing me in a raid. I seriously don't get it how can versa be better in survivabiltiy scenarious.

[Nevcairiel]

I still don't know why people say that versatility is better than mastery for pure survivability and progress raiding. Take a look at this.

20 000 mastery = 28% max health
20 000 versatility = 25% dmg reduction.

lets take 1 000 000 hp as a default value.

mastery case : 1 280 000 - a boss hits for 500k = I am left with 780 000 hp.
a boss hits for 2nd time= I am left with 280 000 hp.

versa case : 1 000 000 hp- a boss hits for 500k = I take 375 000 dmg = I have 625 000 hp.
a boss hits for 2nd fime = I am left 250 000 hp.

Ok now. Lets take into account the fact that with the mastery case I get a whooping 28% more healing. It means it will be much much easier to bring me back up when 3-4 healers are healing me in a raid. I seriously don't get it how can versa be better in survivabiltiy scenarious.

Thats because you are drawing the wrong conclusions from your math.

Consider your case above. With mastery you can take 1 280 000 damage before you die. With versatility you can take 1 333 333 damage before you die (because x 0.75 = 1 000 000). The difference isn't extreme, but its there.

Lets consider required healing, in an example of taking 750 000 damage.
Mastery puts you at 530 000 Health, that is 750 000 missing, which requires 585 937 healing (+ 28%) to top you back up.
With versatility, this puts you at 437 500 health, requiring 562 500 healing to top you back up.

So in both scenarios versatility is slightly better. And the difference gets bigger the more stats you have.

[Deleted]

Well the difference is small indeed.Thanks for clarifiying. Anyway this discussion might be pointless as we quite well know that we end up having both stats. I do think it's reasonable to say that all druid tanks will have lots of both. We will end up having 20-30% mastery / 20%-30% versa end-game raiding. We won't see anyone having just one of those as lots of leather gear has both stats on it. In either case bears seem to be the sturdiest tanks by far for now.

When I tank ursoc heroic i see DKs,DHs and now even warriors struggling to live through when having rend flesh + the other debuff. I easily go through that and find no problem surviving.

Take a look at that:

Druids have 55% bonus stamina from bear + lets say 20% hp from mastery. (which will grow more in future)


Paladins have 30% bonus stamina. >>> We have 45% more hp than pallies.
Monks have 0% bonus stamina. >>> we have 75% more hp than monks.
DHs have 45% bonus stamina. >>> 30% more hp than DHs
Warriors have 30% stamina and 25% hp (indomitable)= 55% >>>> 20% more hp than warriors. (if they have indomitable if not we have 45% more)

On top of our higher health pool you add thick hide (10% reduction) and our higher armor (even withour IF) and we end up being at least 30%-35% sturdier than others in default case.

[GT4]

Well the difference is small indeed.Thanks for clarifiying. Anyway this discussion might be pointless as we quite well know that we end up having both stats. I do think it's reasonable to say that all druid tanks will have lots of both. We will end up having 20-30% mastery / 20%-30% versa end-game raiding. We won't see anyone having just one of those as lots of leather gear has both stats on it. In either case bears seem to be the sturdiest tanks by far for now.

When I tank ursoc heroic i see DKs,DHs and now even warriors struggling to live through when having rend flesh + the other debuff. I easily go through that and find no problem surviving.

Take a look at that:

Druids have 55% bonus stamina from bear + lets say 20% hp from mastery. (which will grow more in future)


Paladins have 30% bonus stamina. >>> We have 45% more hp than pallies.
Monks have 0% bonus stamina. >>> we have 75% more hp than monks.
DHs have 45% bonus stamina. >>> 30% more hp than DHs
Warriors have 30% stamina and 25% hp (indomitable)= 55% >>>> 20% more hp than warriors. (if they have indomitable if not we have 45% more)

On top of our higher health pool you add thick hide (10% reduction) and our higher armor (even withour IF) and we end up being at least 30%-35% sturdier than others in default case.

I don't quite understand why all you do is compare HP to the low HP/high mitigation tanks (you're even ignoring DKs which can have more HP than low to medium mastery bears). What matters is your effective HP. Not only that, you're also assuming the druid has stacked mastery whereas ignoring the other tanks' mastery altogether for the same reason (ignoring mitigation).

Taking your example (high bleed damage), that's actually a situation where most other tanks would have an advantage over bears because ironfur does nothing whereas other tanks can time their active mitigation to prevent a lot (easily half without using CDs) of the damage.

Overall, bears are really good at tanking big hits and/or steady direct damage but anything that ignores armor is a weakness and self-sustainability is also significantly below other tanks for situations where you're taking relatively low damage.

Edit: By the way, I find it worrisome that you talk about "default case" when speaking about the tank being basically AFK and using none of their abilities.

[Deleted]

I don't quite understand why all you do is compare HP to the low HP/high mitigation tanks (you're even ignoring DKs which can have more HP than low to medium mastery bears). What matters is your effective HP.

DKs cannot have more health than a bear tank regardless of mastery. (unless using active mitigation like boneshield).

The reason I compare bears EHP to other tanks EHP is because I'm trying to say that because of their highest hp/armor/reduction bears suffer least unpredictable damage taken. On top of that their active mitigation is 100% uptime too which strengthens that even more.

Druids are definitely the strongest tanks now for raiding and progression. Mythics is another story.

[Deleted]

Your stat weights will vary wildly depending on your current gear level and secondary stats available to you. However, at 872 ilevel with Grotesque Statuette and Darkmoon Deck: Immortality, I've been following the weights SimC spit out at me for TMI and I'm happy with the result:

Armor: 12.47
Stam: 1.69
Vers: 0.74
Mastery: 0.70
Leech: 0.51
Haste: 0.47
Crit: 0.28
Agility: 0.19

Bear in mind this is skewed a bit due SimC being unreliable, as well as most of my gear being picked for ilevel so the stat choices aren't ideal. I'm currently sitting at 7824 Mastery, 4300 Crit, 4045 Haste, 3617 Vers and would obviously prefer Vers if it was an option. Still, the higher ilevel for armor and stamina usually wins. As you get more gear with Vers on it, the value of Mastery will drop in comparison.

thank you very much actually, this forced me to look deeper into this and learn this whole simcraft+pawn addon combo, what I see now is that weights change with every upgrade, I have slightly different numbers ofc. This could be added to original post I think, I took me some time to research how to get a correct stat weights now. It could help other guardians as well :O

[Deleted]

First, Rend Flesh isn't bleed damage. It is somewhat weird, but it is physical damage. If it was bleed we would probably be close to unable to do this fight on heroic, let alone mythic. Bleed damage is in fact our only mechanical weakness in current gear. We have very good mitigation against persistent magical damage in Mark of Ursol, we have among the best CD's against large damage bursts in Survival instinct, our artifact weapon and barkskin. And against physical damage, both sustained and burst we can just stack more Iron Fur.

What are our problems then? We don't scale with our mainstat in any defensive way. We get minimal amounts of dodge, but the only defensive ability or talent we have that scales with attack power is Brambles, which honestly is more of an offensive talent anyway. This would mean that we scale a lot weaker with gear than we should, but is compensated by our tremendous armor scaling. The only slots were we notice the effect in the end is trinkets, were we would prefer secondary over primary stats.

Our self healing is designed around countering big bursts of damage and on a decently long cd, which means that if we can't be externally healed for a while we will tick down, since we can't sustain ourselves. This seems to be more of a dungeon problem though.

Another advantage we have, especially when paired with a tank that needs to take damage to build resources, is that we do actually more single target damage while offtanking using catweave.

We might get in trouble if the armor values go so high, that the effectiveness of our mitigation starts to go down, but then we will just shuffle talents around and take earthwarden or survival of the fittest instead of guardian of elune.

I really feel that we are one of the really solid tanks, just because we have no apparent weaknesses and can deal with pretty much any scenario that can be dealt with.

@djambalaz I don't really share your love for giant health pools. Stamina flasks and trinkets are were mana goes to die. But since bears in most logs that I have seen tend to take less external healing and do competitive damage, I am really happy with the spot we are in right now as well.

[Nevcairiel]

@djambalaz I don't really share your love for giant health pools. Stamina flasks and trinkets are were mana goes to die. But since bears in most logs that I have seen tend to take less external healing and do competitive damage, I am really happy with the spot we are in right now as well.

I take stamina flasks because as you describe yourself Agility does jack shit for us. Offensively, sure, but defensively.. meh.

[Lawless77]

Yeah i do drop quite a few ilvls to use 3x Thrash relics, using 850 860 865 over 3 870+ relics in my bags, really depends on the traits. I did switch to 3 high FR relics to tank the 4 dragons on Mythic Cenarius and switched back after prog, glad i kept spare Thrash relics around.

Pumps, when you say switch are you have to swap out and back? Or do the relics get destroyed ? Sorry for the silly question, I just haven't had a whole lot of relics to choose from.

[Nevcairiel]

Pumps, when you say switch are you have to swap out and back? Or do the relics get destroyed ? Sorry for the silly question, I just haven't had a whole lot of relics to choose from.

Like gems, they get destroyed when you replace them.

[Pumpsm8]

Pumps, when you say switch are you have to swap out and back? Or do the relics get destroyed ? Sorry for the silly question, I just haven't had a whole lot of relics to choose from.

Yeah they do get destroyed but i have spammed a ton of M+ dungeons and have quite a few spare thrash relics even if the ilvls are 5-10 lower.
Downside is my bank is filled like this https://puu.sh/rzI8w/fc1fdeb58e.png, with multiple relics depending the situation.