[Guardian] 7.2.5 Legion Guardian Guide by Pumps

[Dreyen]

Thats a rather simplistic view of the world, with healers that could also do dps or you who could be be pulling faster or more.

You getting more survival is extremely negligible for healer dps as most of their healing goes to raid healing.


Also I finally beat arcway+15... only to realize i can't use the arcane bear form until nighthold comes out... lame. I was thinking of not using it for NH too because it'll blend too much in the arcane/purple look of the instance

[GT4]

I think I never hit max HP after the third Flurry ever again, until that wretched thing dies. Therefore I conclude that max HP is no use on this anyway. When do you need to take a third stack? In what situation is that helpful? I play the fight with Survival of the Fittest, which means I have almost everything up again for the horror anyway.

Between soft CDs and frenzied regeneration, I can almost get myself back up to 100% after flurry (tested during a wipe). Aside from that, more max HP gives healers leeway not to focus on you for a while. It also lets you save cooldowns in case something goes wrong (e.g. to tank a 3rd/4th horror stack if the tank dies during second P1 on eye) and lets you use frenzied regeneration more effectively in some situations. Obviously it also increases the effects of restoration affinity/legendary boots in case you use either or both.

Then you have fights where damage is irrelevant anyway (e.g. drake tank on cenarius) and there's plenty situations where it's worth using strong defensive trinkets (assuming you have some) at least for the first kill.

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You getting more survival is extremely negligible for healer dps as most of their healing goes to raid healing.

A tank using DPS trinkets is also "extremely negligible" for raid DPS given how low a tank's effective DPS contribution is and how low the DPS benefit of those trinkets is. If your defensive trinkets just allow your restoration druid to keep up moonfire, you're basically even in DPS with using DPS trinkets already.

[ForTehNguyen]

I have a 850 Talisman of the Cragshaper, 855 Infernal Alchemist Stone, 850 Chrono Shard, 840 Coagulated Nightwell Residue, and 885 Phantasmal Echo, which 2 should I be using? First instinct is the Talisman and Echo, but I'm not sure.

according to ask mr robot, cragshaper and nightwell residue are BiS. The shield uses have saved me so many times. The nightwell residue even at base 840 gives near a 1 million damage shield at 10 stack.

Darkmoong Deck: Immortality + Nightwell. In case you're too cheap/poor for DMF: not entirely sure but most likely Crag > echo. For DPS: Chrono > Alchemist > crag > others.

they nerfed the armor being multiplied with ironfur on trinkets like this, its not that great anymore

[Dreyen]

A tank using DPS trinkets is also "extremely negligible" for raid DPS given how low a tank's effective DPS contribution is and how low the DPS benefit of those trinkets is. If your defensive trinkets just allow your restoration druid to keep up moonfire, you're basically even in DPS with using DPS trinkets already.

I can guarantee me using dps trinkets has not altered the dps of my healers in the slightest. AFAIK every top tank goes full dps with sufficient gear, are you saying they are all wrong? Sufficient gear also does not mean not during progression either. An exemple: I haven't felt like I needed survival trinkets on ursoc as my health never went under comfortable levels so i went double dps trinket. Fun fact: our kill was about 0.5seconds away from a roar during berserk that wouldve wiped the raid instantly so it probaly prevented a wipe.

Fact is anyways most healers won't bother with dps unless there is a huge downtime in healing, such as the heart of il'gynoth or during a cooldown rotation while healing is lax.

[Deleted]

I can guarantee me using dps trinkets has not altered the dps of my healers in the slightest. AFAIK every top tank goes full dps with sufficient gear, are you saying they are all wrong? Sufficient gear also does not mean not during progression either. An exemple: I haven't felt like I needed survival trinkets on ursoc as my health never went under comfortable levels so i went double dps trinket. Fun fact: our kill was about 0.5seconds away from a roar during berserk that wouldve wiped the raid instantly so it probaly prevented a wipe.

Fact is anyways most healers won't bother with dps unless there is a huge downtime in healing, such as the heart of il'gynoth or during a cooldown rotation while healing is lax.

Agreed, and also most healer dps comes from the pull with lust and pots where raid damage is still negligible so it really doesn't matter what trinkets your tanks have at that point.

[Deleted]

So, I just got the Prydaz legendary. Feelsbadman. It seems "okay" in a dungeon environment though, where you can receive the shield inbetween large packs?

Should I feel bad about getting this ?

[Glurp]

Anyone have some stat weights for using with Pawn to evaluate whether or not an item is an upgrade?

[Deleted]

Anyone have some stat weights for using with Pawn to evaluate whether or not an item is an upgrade?

Pawn doesn't really apply well to tanks, use versa > mastery as a prio for survivability, ignore ilvl on jewelry.

[Deleted]

On heroic I'll easily go 7 stacks on Horror without dropping below 50%/external CD's. It actually makes it much easier because our DK tank can do his first 2 stacks and then I'll tank it until it dies. This frees up the DK tank to do more Death Grip shenanigans, which will only get more important on mythic. On mythic I'll obviously not be able to go to 7 stacks, but 3-4 will not be a problem whatsoever.

You don't really want to mass grip on mythic, because the blobs dying give a raidwide stacking dot, so you usually want to kill them off one or two at a time outside of very specific points in the fight were you use all the healing CD's and those (at least when we did them) were long before the horror spawned. Maybe someone else uses a tactic were this would be helpful, but I can't see how right now.

The damage ramp up is pretty brutal so I don't really see how you can get enough stam to go to 7 stacks. I have seen logs of a Guardian druid named Seditia, but he never went above 4 stacks, and the hits were pretty hard then already. If those are not your logs, I apologize and would really like to see yours.

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A tank using DPS trinkets is also "extremely negligible" for raid DPS given how low a tank's effective DPS contribution is and how low the DPS benefit of those trinkets is. If your defensive trinkets just allow your restoration druid to keep up moonfire, you're basically even in DPS with using DPS trinkets already.

I strongly disagree with that statement, just because a tank does on average half the damage of a dps doesn't mean, that his contribution is irrelevant. Two tanks in the end often do as much damage as a dps and therefore two tanks not optimizing their dps is as much as one dps not doing so.
I don't argue against the fact that more stamina is better than less, (even though I did for prot warriors on the beta before they fixed rage from damage taken). I just want to say that after a certain point anything else helps you more and that point is reached very early in the gearing process. The next breakpoint for making stamina interesting to me would be enough health to ignore tank mechanics and I don't see how we could get there within this tier.

[GT4]

I can guarantee me using dps trinkets has not altered the dps of my healers in the slightest. AFAIK every top tank goes full dps with sufficient gear, are you saying they are all wrong?

That's absolutely false for progress raids from what I've seen in the tanks' armory right after world first kills (and in some of the videos you even see the darkmoon card immortality buff). Farm raids are a completely different topic and having the highest chances of killing the boss is no longer relevant there.

Sufficient gear also does not mean not during progression either. An exemple: I haven't felt like I needed survival trinkets on ursoc as my health never went under comfortable levels so i went double dps trinket. Fun fact: our kill was about 0.5seconds away from a roar during berserk that wouldve wiped the raid instantly so it probaly prevented a wipe.

A roar during berserk doesn't wipe the raid instantly if the raid is intelligent enough to stay away with all but one tank. Aside from that, there are fights where going DPS trinkets is absolutely pointless (e.g. drake tank on cenarius). Lastly, your feelings are no valid argument.

Fact is anyways most healers won't bother with dps unless there is a huge downtime in healing, such as the heart of il'gynoth or during a cooldown rotation while healing is lax.

Maybe get healers that also optimize their play instead of optimizing around mediocrity then?

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I strongly disagree with that statement, just because a tank does on average half the damage of a dps doesn't mean, that his contribution is irrelevant. Two tanks in the end often do as much damage as a dps and therefore two tanks not optimizing their dps is as much as one dps not doing so.
I don't argue against the fact that more stamina is better than less, (even though I did for prot warriors on the beta before they fixed rage from damage taken). I just want to say that after a certain point anything else helps you more and that point is reached very early in the gearing process. The next breakpoint for making stamina interesting to me would be enough health to ignore tank mechanics and I don't see how we could get there within this tier.

Here's a tip: Stop thinking in black and white when trying to optimize anything. You'll never find an optimal solution when only looking at the extremes.

You don't need to use two DPS trinkets to properly pot, catweave, etc. so you'll have to actually compare the benefits of both trinkets in question instead of going by ignorant blanket guidelines as you're suggesting. If one trinket reduces the chances of you (or anybody else by giving healers more leeway) dying by only 1% that can easily be more useful in a progress raid than one that increases raid DPS by 0.25% (5% of your ~5% contribution for a pretty good one).

[Seditian]

You don't really want to mass grip on mythic, because the blobs dying give a raidwide stacking dot, so you usually want to kill them off one or two at a time outside of very specific points in the fight were you use all the healing CD's and those (at least when we did them) were long before the horror spawned. Maybe someone else uses a tactic were this would be helpful, but I can't see how right now.

The damage ramp up is pretty brutal so I don't really see how you can get enough stam to go to 7 stacks. I have seen logs of a Guardian druid named Seditia, but he never went above 4 stacks, and the hits were pretty hard then already. If those are not your logs, I apologize and would really like to see yours.

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I strongly disagree with that statement, just because a tank does on average half the damage of a dps doesn't mean, that his contribution is irrelevant. Two tanks in the end often do as much damage as a dps and therefore two tanks not optimizing their dps is as much as one dps not doing so.
I don't argue against the fact that more stamina is better than less, (even though I did for prot warriors on the beta before they fixed rage from damage taken). I just want to say that after a certain point anything else helps you more and that point is reached very early in the gearing process. The next breakpoint for making stamina interesting to me would be enough health to ignore tank mechanics and I don't see how we could get there within this tier.

Hmm https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...ability=210984 I'm not entirely sure how to get the proper amount of stacks to show up on warcraftlogs. My DK off-tank may very well have taunted off me without me noticing. Hah, I'll see how high I can get this reset though. 7 stacks would mean the Eye of Fate would only do 10m magic damage on the 7th application. Reduce that without cooldowns by 6% and 30% to 6.58m, a single survival instincts would already make that only a 2.6m hit, barely 50% of my health.

I'm aware we won't be able to Mass Death Grip anymore, but that only makes our (I admit, it's not optimal) only DK even more important with his single-target grips to be freed up as much as possible.

E: Completely forgot, that's me yeah, Seditia.

[Dreyen]

That's absolutely false for progress raids from what I've seen in the tanks' armory right after world first kills (and in some of the videos you even see the darkmoon card immortality buff). Farm raids are a completely different topic and having the highest chances of killing the boss is no longer relevant there.

Say what you will, ive been very involved in discussion with actual top tanks on the tank discord and pretty much everyone agrees you need to squeeze as much damage as you can... and this list includes a bunch of top 10 tanks.

Maybe get healers that also optimize their play instead of optimizing around mediocrity then?

If you truly think me switching a dps trinket to a survival trinket will guarantee each of my healers cast 1 more spell i think youre deluded. No matter healer skill.. DPS trinkets are not exactly 0 survival increases either. Nor would that single spell from each necessairly outdo the dps the trinket could give me..

[GT4]

Say what you will, ive been very involved in discussion with actual top tanks on the tank discord and pretty much everyone agrees you need to squeeze as much damage as you can... and this list includes a bunch of top 10 tanks.

Those discord channels are honestly a disgrace to theorycrafting and all the bullshit that spawns from them is a joke at best. I honestly don't care if you're just misrepresenting people's opinions (most likely) or people over there actually believe that you "need to squeeze as much damage as you can [for every encounter]" (that's what you're arguing when arguing against my point of choosing the proper trinkets for each encounter) but that's absolutely not a position you can take seriously. There's at least one (and actually the hardest) encounter this tier where getting DPS is basically completely pointless (drake tank on cenarius) and there are multiple encounters that don't have any meaningful enrage mechanics (nythendra and dragons under all circumstances). Leaving all of that aside, going through some actual top guilds' logs (e.g. serenity), tanks are still using actual tank trinkets (statuette, darkmoon card, goblet, etc.) for most fights even though the raid has been on farm for weeks now. Don't even try to argue that they've been using DPS trinkets for all first kills because they 100% haven't and that's trivial to prove (e.g. darkmoon card buff in kill videos).

If you truly think me switching a dps trinket to a survival trinket will guarantee each of my healers cast 1 more spell i think youre deluded. No matter healer skill.. DPS trinkets are not exactly 0 survival increases either. Nor would that single spell from each necessairly outdo the dps the trinket could give me..

You're arguing against straw men again. Talking about specifics such as "guarantee each of my healers cast 1 more spell" is pointless in such a complex and highly variable scenario as a raid encounter. Having the tanks require less attention has a multitude of effects ranging from healers having to use less inefficient heals, allowing healers to focus on healing the raid (including outhealing potential fails), allowing healers to save mana, allowing them to DPS, etc. It's impossible to exactly quantify the benefits in general because they'll vary between encounters, raid setups, etc. Arguing that there are no benefits, however, as you've been trying here is nothing short of ignorant and honestly quite fitting of the joke that theorycrafting has become in this game. Having a simple, context-free answer such as "always focus on DPS" might be the most convenient to you but it will never yield the optimal results in all cases.

Regarding "DPS trinkets are not exactly 0 survival increases either.": That's not the point of discussion here. DPS trinkets can have defensive benefits (mainly through secondary stats since agility is pretty terrible defensively) but tank trinkets generally also have offensive benefits (agility on goblet/darkmoon card, mastery on other strong defensive trinkets) so you'll want to get one that offers the most for the encounter in question.

Anyway, I'm done here. Feel free to keep circlejerking the most simple approach instead of putting in the effort to optimize for each encounter.

[Team]

Did they change our artifact trait after 34 (or whatever the # is)? Tooltip says 10% armor increase but I swear before it had something about a stamina increase? Maybe I got confused but wow 10% armor increase each time we buy that trait? If so, holy crap.

edit: I was correct it seems http://www.wowhead.com/guides/legion...guardian-druid still shows the +10% health increase and in the live game it says 10% armor increase for Ursoc's Bond

[Nevcairiel]

Did they change our artifact trait after 34 (or whatever the # is)? Tooltip says 10% armor increase but I swear before it had something about a stamina increase? Maybe I got confused but wow 10% armor increase each time we buy that trait? If so, holy crap.

It used to be health and 7.1 changed it to armor. But no, its not 10% for every trait, its 10% for the first and 1% for subsequent levels, topping out at 29%. (10% + 19 x 1%)

All of these bonus levels are front-loaded, so the first one is really strong and subsequent ones are just minimal bonuses.

[Hellshout]

Hello.
I have a question regarding the stats. I do mythic dungeons as tank. Never tanked a raid boss, maybe in ToV.
Stats: 4244 Haste, 2748 Crit, 4652 Vers, 6102 Mast. Also 845 ilvl
Anyway, I mostly followed the Vers>Mast>>>Haste>Crit prio(so does Pawn), but there are some items that confuse me.
For example a ring:
825 ilvl, 867 stam, 1051 vers, 621 mast seems to be better than
855 ilvl, 1147 stam, 1283 haste, 588 mast + 150 vers from socket. Is it? ( I can do the math and see what I'm losing/getting, but Haste has some defensive benefits also, hence my question)

Another Guardian druid suggested that Mast + Haste > Vers until 860+.

Anyway, for Mythic dungeon tanking, do you suggest Mast + Haste > Vers or just go with the regular priority?
Regards.

[Nevcairiel]

Armor is quite important for us (and stamina as well to some degree), so often higher ilvl, especially if its 30 ilvl better, will be better no matter the stats - and if at least mastery or versatility is on there, its already pretty good (note: jewelry is different, since it has no armor or primary stats)

[Dreyen]

Hello.
I have a question regarding the stats. I do mythic dungeons as tank. Never tanked a raid boss, maybe in ToV.
Stats: 4244 Haste, 2748 Crit, 4652 Vers, 6102 Mast. Also 845 ilvl
Anyway, I mostly followed the Vers>Mast>>>Haste>Crit prio(so does Pawn), but there are some items that confuse me.
For example:
825 ilvl, 867 stam, 1051 vers, 621 mast seems to be better than
855 ilvl, 1147 stam, 1283 haste, 588 mast + 150 vers from socket. Is it? ( I can do the math and see what I'm losing/getting, but Haste has some defensive benefits also, hence my question)

Another Guardian druid suggested that Mast + Haste > Vers until 860+.

Anyway, for Mythic dungeon tanking, do you suggest Mast + Haste > Vers or just go with the regular priority?
Regards.

Take the 855. Haste isn't useless and you're also gaining a huge chunk of agi and stam and armor. It'd be worth it even on a neck.

[Hellshout]

Armor is quite important for us (and stamina as well to some degree), so often higher ilvl, especially if its 30 ilvl better, will be better no matter the stats - and if at least mastery or versatility is on there, its already pretty good (note: jewelry is different, since it has no armor or primary stats)

Sorry, I forgot to mention the example I gave is a ring. My bad.

[Team]

It used to be health and 7.1 changed it to armor. But no, its not 10% for every trait, its 10% for the first and 1% for subsequent levels, topping out at 29%. (10% + 19 x 1%)

All of these bonus levels are front-loaded, so the first one is really strong and subsequent ones are just minimal bonuses.

Cheers! This has me hyped up even though I won't reach that for a long time but it's still good to look forward to small things like this