Guardian severely lacking in self-heal and damage output (questing)?

[Termak]

Eat Fighter Chow to get permanent 1000% regen out of combat, and if you are a troll, you get permanent 1.1% / tick (or something) maxhp regen while in combat. If you are part of the lesser races, you will just heal up in like 5sec after you kill the stuff.

And yes, at max level druids are toptier tanks.

[Bralek]

No non-healing specs should have self-heal in the first place.

and no healing specs should have dps in the first place

[Deleted]

I recently started leveling some alts, first i got my Vengeance DH and Protection Paladin from 100 to 110 while questing in tank specs.
I would mount up and pull about 10 (or more) mobs and swiftly AOE them down while tanking/self-healing without any issue or using big cooldowns.

I started my Guardian druid (106 now) and i am severely disappointed in both the damage output and the self-healing of the Bear spec while Questing.
In equal/better gear it takes me triple the time to kill mobs and if i pull more than 5 i am seriously in danger of dying.
I tried all the talents and read up on several guides just to make sure i am not screwing it up, but everything seems to be in order.

Frenzied Regeneration, even when used in ideal situations and with boosting talents, is a really pathetic heal compared to what Protection/Vengeance has.
Casting Regrowth while getting beaten up by a group of mobs is not a reliable option and the Restoration Affinity is nowhere near strong enough to keep me alive.

I am not saying that Guardians are a weak/bad spec, because as far as i know they are awesome in Raids.
But i am truly confused about the apparent hideous lack of damage output and self-healing.
Is that really the current "flavor" of our Bear tank spec, where our damage output and self-healing is 1/5 compared to Paladin/DH tanks?

use lunar beam. explore your options before making conclusion .. this whole post is based on only half the toolkit of a guardian-druid

[Sencha]

Troll fail.

Why?

It was the case in vanilla and it was 10 times better than what we have now.

[Nevcairiel]

It was the case in vanilla and it was 10 times better than what we have now.

In vanilla you also only had warrior tanks and nothing else, and those could get to silly stat values that would make them practically unhittable (or more specifically, the worst hit they would get was a blocked hit).

So no, vanilla was not any better.

[Nihilan]

An enormous amount of damage output and self healing is tied up with your Rage of the Sleepers leech trait. That should be priority number one for AP. Once you have it you can just go balls out with your pulls and massacre everything. Once every 90 seconds.

I too feared that my Bears dmg output was going to be very poor at max level, but by the time you get up to 840+ (which is easy) you will be doing very competitive damage when out and about for WQs and whatnot.

[Sar-]

why?

It was the case in vanilla and it was 10 times better than what we have now.

Troll FAIL #2

[aziras]

An enormous amount of damage output and self healing is tied up with your Rage of the Sleepers leech trait. That should be priority number one for AP. Once you have it you can just go balls out with your pulls and massacre everything. Once every 90 seconds.

Yea, before you get that trait you have to play a little carefully. Once you get that, you get to pull everything every 1½ minute and come out with more health than you started with.

Until then, you need to learn to shift out with swiftmend and rejuv and pop back into bear. And do it to top up, do not wait until you are low. Especially when between large pulls, get a habit of topping up while looting.

Druids are unfairly good at questing. In any spec. I did a mix of bear and bird for my levelling, just to mix it up. Boomy works wonders for a lot of quests, especially if you need to quest in a busy area as boomy tags mobs really well.
Lately I have been questing as resto with boomy affinity, simply because I am working on the 200 WQ hidden appearance.

Edit: I halfway suspect that they gimped FR just because they wanted a legendary that buffed it.

[Wildpantz]

Single target boss damage is ok trash dps is insane n

[Raugnaut]

I recently started leveling some alts, first i got my Vengeance DH and Protection Paladin from 100 to 110 while questing in tank specs.
I would mount up and pull about 10 (or more) mobs and swiftly AOE them down while tanking/self-healing without any issue or using big cooldowns.

I started my Guardian druid (106 now) and i am severely disappointed in both the damage output and the self-healing of the Bear spec while Questing.
In equal/better gear it takes me triple the time to kill mobs and if i pull more than 5 i am seriously in danger of dying.
I tried all the talents and read up on several guides just to make sure i am not screwing it up, but everything seems to be in order.

Frenzied Regeneration, even when used in ideal situations and with boosting talents, is a really pathetic heal compared to what Protection/Vengeance has.
Casting Regrowth while getting beaten up by a group of mobs is not a reliable option and the Restoration Affinity is nowhere near strong enough to keep me alive.

I am not saying that Guardians are a weak/bad spec, because as far as i know they are awesome in Raids.
But i am truly confused about the apparent hideous lack of damage output and self-healing.
Is that really the current "flavor" of our Bear tank spec, where our damage output and self-healing is 1/5 compared to Paladin/DH tanks?

Do you have Brambles? If not, pick it up for soloing - 1 rage per thrash tick won't help for a soloing bear, as you need the mitigation now, not later, and you don't take enough damage for Fur to be worth while - Brambles goes a long way to both solo damage and mitigation.

Restoration Affinity/Typhoon - Toss a Swiftmend after a Typhoon, go back into form.

But yea, Guardians are very, very dependent on taking massive spikes of damage now, and are very weak at healing steady amounts of periodic damage. If we were to take 50% of our health in a single hit, we would heal 100% of our health in 4 seconds. But otherwise, we got 1.5% of our health every 5 seconds, ~9% of our health every 24 seconds... and thats it. Try to get ANY source of leech you can, that goes a long way for Guardian.

[Stuffed]

Do you have Brambles? If not, pick it up for soloing - 1 rage per thrash tick won't help for a soloing bear, as you need the mitigation now, not later, and you don't take enough damage for Fur to be worth while - Brambles goes a long way to both solo damage and mitigation.

Restoration Affinity/Typhoon - Toss a Swiftmend after a Typhoon, go back into form.

But yea, Guardians are very, very dependent on taking massive spikes of damage now, and are very weak at healing steady amounts of periodic damage. If we were to take 50% of our health in a single hit, we would heal 100% of our health in 4 seconds. But otherwise, we got 1.5% of our health every 5 seconds, ~9% of our health every 24 seconds... and thats it. Try to get ANY source of leech you can, that goes a long way for Guardian.

Having the Skysec's Hold boots solves quite ALOT of the issues you highlighted here. Yes I have been lucky to get it. But this legendary is a game changer in that it plugs this gap in our Druid survival. Without the boots, according to my Frenzied Regen Addon, just clicking FR without any dmg taken heals me for 7% of my total HP. With the boots without taking any dmg, it heals for 22% (I am at around 12% versa). Hence, it fills a self-sustaining middle ground between Ysera's Gift ticks and a charged up FR post a big boss hit. It makes FR powerful all the time even without taking big hits.

The bear community seems to lean towards the Luffa bracers + Elize's legs as the bis legendaries. But I feel the best 2 are the Luffa's and Skysecs.

[aziras]

The bear community seems to lean towards the Luffa bracers + Elize's legs as the bis legendaries. But I feel the best 2 are the Luffa's and Skysecs.

Doesn't help much with legendaries for quest levelling... But I agree. You get a gap in endgame content where luffa+skysec's will be more practical than Luffa+Elize's, mainly if you do not have a healer. If you push solo content it is a no-brainer, if you are doing progress and tank healing is more of an issue than dps then it also makes sense. But in most cases dps is preferred over a better HoT on the tank. Especially because progression tend to come along with big boss hits.

As I wrote in the other post, I believe they might have intentionally nerfed FR to create a space for a legendary effect for the boots. The legendary items have some indication of being similar in power to talents. Had the skysec's boots' effect been a talent bears would have done a lot better soloing through the levels. As it is now, they are sort of dying a slow death by a thousands hits until they get the sleeper buff trait (which happens pretty late in levelling).

Talents, traits and legendaries all competing for the same effects seems like a mess to balance. Add all classes and all specs to the mix and the matrix is just HUGE. And then some of it gated behind RNG makes it more tricky as well.
As soon as everyone has all the traits, maxlevel for all the talents, and one of each legendary it will be more balanced. You get to have all the traits, pick one talent from each tier and two of the legendary effects. But then it will also expose the weakness of the artifact trait system. Choices are fun and interesting (for some, I admit) but once you can assume that everyone has them all they make little sense. In a few months the only variation in artifacts will be which bonus minor traits you get from your relics. And as long as they are destroyed when replacing, it will never really be possible to customize with those.

Add in class tier set bonuses and you get a 4th dimension of class tweaking. It is starting to look a lot like Diablo 3, but without the ability to trade gear with others, or the abundance of items making sure you might not have perfect-rolled versions of each item, but you can usually get your hands on an item to try a build pretty easily.

[Stuffed]

Doesn't help much with legendaries for quest levelling... But I agree. You get a gap in endgame content where luffa+skysec's will be more practical than Luffa+Elize's, mainly if you do not have a healer. If you push solo content it is a no-brainer, if you are doing progress and tank healing is more of an issue than dps then it also makes sense. But in most cases dps is preferred over a better HoT on the tank. Especially because progression tend to come along with big boss hits.

Fair point, I don't raid and mainly just focus on M+ so these boots have been constant life savers with only 1 healer. That and it feels darn good to have so much more control of our HP top ups. But I can see how having many healers in raids would negate the advantages of the boots.

My other issue with the legs tho is that it more or less shoehorns you into taking Rend and Tear, which granted is the best talent in that row for now. It will be v interesting to see what plans Blizz has for talent adjustments coming in 7.1.5. The bracers and the boots doesn't really force a choice to operate at max potential.

[Raugnaut]

Having the Skysec's Hold boots solves quite ALOT of the issues you highlighted here. Yes I have been lucky to get it. But this legendary is a game changer in that it plugs this gap in our Druid survival. Without the boots, according to my Frenzied Regen Addon, just clicking FR without any dmg taken heals me for 7% of my total HP. With the boots without taking any dmg, it heals for 22% (I am at around 12% versa). Hence, it fills a self-sustaining middle ground between Ysera's Gift ticks and a charged up FR post a big boss hit. It makes FR powerful all the time even without taking big hits.

The bear community seems to lean towards the Luffa bracers + Elize's legs as the bis legendaries. But I feel the best 2 are the Luffa's and Skysecs.

If you are in raiding content, Frenzied Regen is generally used to eliminates the healers need to heal you back up after burst spikes - As mentioned earlier, Guardians can pretty much eliminate one large burst spike if it occurs bout once every 48 seconds, and can nearly eliminate all burst every 24 seconds (Just baseline numbers with artifact, talent, and baseline mastery causes you to heal up close to 80% of a burst spike. With enough points in the Frenized regen trait, and enough mastery, a single FR will heal you for 100% of the spike, if not a bit more.