Guardian Alpha Patchnotes

[Arielle]

Ahanss is correct - I am explicitly ignoring talents for RPS purposes. I'm assuming that FoN will actually be usable this expansion (it's not yet) - which means our Rage generation should be decent without SotF. I mean I could re-calculate using SotF, but that blatantly assumes that neither FoN nor Incarnation will get fixed. I'd rather have them get fixed than ignore them.

[Karnudge]

*raises hand*

Silly question.

Our threat generating cooldowns were arbitrary and stupid, and I'm glad they're gone. But I've felt that the issue with Guardians in MoP was our AM. We're a terror to heal. We can either enhance our passive mitigation (which still makes us spiky to heal) or we can reactively heal ourselves...which cause our healers, who were already casting a heal when we were about to get hit, to waste their heal on an already healed tank.

Is it just me, because from what I've been reading only half the issues with Guardians have been fixed, unless we're going to be humping our lvl 100 talents.

[alanium]

But I've felt that the issue with Guardians in MoP was our AM. We're a terror to heal.

If you feel this way about MoP guardian tanking, I think you might be doing it wrong. Or the ones you group with are. Or the healers you have that feel that way. Some others might agree with you though.

[Karnudge]

If you feel this way about MoP guardian tanking, I think you might be doing it wrong. Or the ones you group with are. Or the healers you have that feel that way. Some others might agree with you though.

Well it's not like I'm talking about winging it and trying to passively tank everything, I'm talking about whilst using our active mitigation. We can increase our dodge, which still is RNG based so even with that bit of AM up, we can still get bad RNG and take lots of icky damage. It's not like a critical block which is RNG to block more damage, it's either all the damage or none of it.

And for FR, I'm not a huge fan of spending my rage on damage I've already taken unless it's an "OH SHIT" moment, I would prefer something else that my healers can't already do. But I'm open to feed back, perhaps I'm too critical.

[Dreyen]

Right now for MoP, the way you need to see our AM is the other way around. For exemple, paladins have a chance to block passively and an AM that reduces damage. Bears reduce damage passively more tahn any tank in the game, and they activate their chance to dodge with savage defense, it's like reverse AM, it still works. Of course we reduce damage passively less than a paladin reduces actively with shield of the righteous.. but 45% dodge is also vastly superior to their block. If that's not enough, well tooth&claw is like a mini block for bears.

We also have the highest hp which gives us breathing room to heal ourselves, something other tanks don't have. Our self-healing complements our "spikes" very well. BTW, bears are the least spiky tank out of all tanks, taking 3-4 hits back to back with no dodges is still better on a bear than a paladin taking 3-4 unblocked hits, because we have much more hp and damage reduction.

In WoD, we just get even MORE hp, like way more, and the best cooldowns in the game.

[Bearshield]

I'm not sure I understand what you're asking, Karnudge. If you don't like active mitigation you're pretty much screwed. Our passive mitigation is the worst of all the tanks after this recent wave of nerfs so yes, you are going to have to stay on your toes with SD and FR.

[Karnudge]

Right now for MoP, the way you need to see our AM is the other way around. For exemple, paladins have a chance to block passively and an AM that reduces damage. Bears reduce damage passively more tahn any tank in the game, and they activate their chance to dodge with savage defense, it's like reverse AM, it still works. Of course we reduce damage passively less than a paladin reduces actively with shield of the righteous.. but 45% dodge is also vastly superior to their block. If that's not enough, well tooth&claw is like a mini block for bears.

We also have the highest hp which gives us breathing room to heal ourselves, something other tanks don't have. Our self-healing complements our "spikes" very well. BTW, bears are the least spiky tank out of all tanks, taking 3-4 hits back to back with no dodges is still better on a bear than a paladin taking 3-4 unblocked hits, because we have much more hp and damage reduction.

In WoD, we just get even MORE hp, like way more, and the best cooldowns in the game.

Paladins have a passive chance to block, dodge, AND parry, and then they get a 100% chance to reduce their incoming damage on their AM. I guess you can look at it like ours is reversed, but that doesn't change the fact that when I hit my AM, I then get to sit and hope it works. It just doesn't sit well with me. I'm not against active mitigation as an idea, I just don't like the way ours played out.

- - - Updated - - -

Unless you're saying that my outlook should be:

Instead of, "Hey daddy can I go play with the other tanks?"

It should be, "Hey, all these other tanks NEEEED their AM...it's everything they are!!! We just have it for insurance"

Like that?

[Raugnaut]

Paladins have a passive chance to block, dodge, AND parry, and then they get a 100% chance to reduce their incoming damage on their AM. I guess you can look at it like ours is reversed, but that doesn't change the fact that when I hit my AM, I then get to sit and hope it works. It just doesn't sit well with me. I'm not against active mitigation as an idea, I just don't like the way ours played out.

I made an earlier post comparing our passive mitigation/mastery compared to paladins/warriors, and came to the conclusion that our new mastery is !@#$ing OP, especially if you stack it compared to paladins/warriors, with our AM being slightly better for melee damage fights compared to paladins/warriors.

Our mastery will absorb even more damage now that we take significantly more melee damage then before. I guess that will raise the value of mastery compared to before?

But yea, our AM is completely different compared to the AM of other tanks. For other tanks in WoD beta, they currently mitigate more auto-attack damage from bosses, but their AM is more for reducing burst from boss abilities. For us, while we do not passively mitigate more auto-attack damage anymore, we do NOT have to worry, at all, about burst from boss abilities. So our AM mitigates auto-attack damage, but doesn't touch boss burst. Other tanks AM mitigates burst damage, but doesn't have as great an effect on auto-attack as ours does.

With that said, I wonder how Monks are on the beta. With 25% baseline parry (5% baseline+20% shuffle), 10-15% baseline dodge, 35% dodge from elusive brew, and stagger, I wonder how their damage intake is compared to other classes?

One thing is for sure though- tank armor, with the exception of Warriors, is really, REALLY low.

[Dreyen]

Yea, i was a bit surprised at the monk dodge brew buff, 5% is incredibly powerful when you get to the higher percentages.

[Callsignecho]

With that said, I wonder how Monks are on the beta. With 25% baseline parry (5% baseline+20% shuffle), 10-15% baseline dodge, 35% dodge from elusive brew, and stagger, I wonder how their damage intake is compared to other classes?

To note, Monks only get 3% base parry + 20% from Shuffle, I have 11.95% base dodge, and Stagger levels are super high and require you to Purify quite often. There is no way to keep Elusive Brew up all the time with the current levels of crit/what we really need to gear towards to survive. The Guard buff was nice to have in the most recent patch, but they still take quite a bit of damage in raids because the dodge + parry percentage isn't enough and our armor is the lowest at 877 in 660 gear = 19.55% DR. It is a smoother damage intake, but nowhere near ideal yet. I do think they are in a better place now than Druids with recent changes.

Yea, i was a bit surprised at the monk dodge brew buff, 5% is incredibly powerful when you get to the higher percentages.

It was originally a perk that got baked in.

[Promdates]

The Guard change was much needed, as it was terribly scaling (re: not at all) before the most recent patch.

[Braindwen]

The Guard change was much needed, as it was terribly scaling (re: not at all) before the most recent patch.

Nonsense, I'd seen 1.5M guards before that change on beta*.

*with 20000% resolve, but who cares about that part?

[Deleted]

Tooth and Claw is supposed to make Maul free, correct? For me it still costs rage even when it lights up, is this intended or possibly a known bug?

Edit: Nevermind, a nerf from the recent patch but tooltip not updated

[Dreyen]

Tooth and Claw is supposed to make Maul free, correct? For me it still costs rage even when it lights up, is this intended or possibly a known bug?

Edit: Nevermind, a nerf from the recent patch but tooltip not updated

It's been changed to cost 20 rage all the time with the recent patch, so a 10rage cost reduction, but no free mauls anymore.

As far as guard goes, quick look at logs shows our monk putting up 500k guards on average on blackfuse and garrosh, 1.5mil on thok, thats pretty good imo, considering it's a 30s cd that should be along the lines of barkskin... to mitigate 500k with barkskin, i'd have to take 2.5mil damage over the 10s, and guard has the advantage of blocking all damage completly rather than a partial reduction..

[exochaft]

Well, coming from the leveling perspective, you don't really notice the rage changes until around 98 if you're going in with good raiding gear from SoO (I pretty much have been using SotF for leveling, so that skews the feel slightly). After that, you start noticing that you occasionally have to make a choice between SD, FR, and T&C... granted it doesn't matter since we're pretty indestructible unless you pull something like 20 mobs that stay at ranged. Once you freshly hit 100, you'll notice the occasional "dead" rage generation if you don't crit or proc free Mangles. While filling empty non-Mangle GCD's with Lacerate was likely to smooth out the rage generation, it pretty much feels exactly like rage generation did at the beginning of MoP.

Don't get me wrong, the previous rage generation was way overboard as it was very easy to use all your abilities and still be capping at 100 rage. However, the reduced rage generation and T&C change makes tanking feel less about the active mitigation and more about the passive mitigation. Feels like it would take massive amounts of crit and haste to get back towards an RPS where we could be reliably certain to have the rage to do whatever we want. Of course, why not just stack mastery/versatility/multistrike at that point and not have to worry about rage so much?

Overall, I'm having some difficulty figuring out what Guardians are supposed to be nowadays with the direction development is headed. Most of the other tanks you can almost concretely describe what type of tank they are, the waters are getting rather muddied with Guardians in my humble opinion. Makes it a bit hard to evaluate abilities/trends beyond whether they mathematically work or not.

[Totaltotemic]

Overall, I'm having some difficulty figuring out what Guardians are supposed to be nowadays with the direction development is headed. Most of the other tanks you can almost concretely describe what type of tank they are, the waters are getting rather muddied with Guardians in my humble opinion. Makes it a bit hard to evaluate abilities/trends beyond whether they mathematically work or not.

I'm going to say something crazy here, and it will sound crazy because in the past Guardians have kind of been the exact opposite, but hear me out.

I think Guardians are capable of being the most consistent tank via Pulverize.

I know, it's crazy, the only tank whose active mitigation is so RNG that there has to be a talent to make it not RNG anymore, but Pulverize kind of does the same thing doesn't it? Because there isn't a cooldown on Lacerate anymore and Pulverize has no cooldown, it's actually not that difficult to keep the damage reduction up 100% of the time, right? So what if you just throw the idea of dodging out the window and Mangle/Lacerate spam while keeping Thrash up and try to keep Pulverize up all the time? Screw Savage Defense, it's RNG, its total damage reduction doesn't scale with any stats, and you have to get all the way up to 60 rage before you can even use it which makes you terribly inconsistent.

What if you just go full bear and take hits to the face for less damage than other tanks and then spend all of your rage healing it back with FR and reducing a lot of those hits with TC and the mastery shield? I don't know how viable that is because I haven't really been running numbers on Guardian yet, but I look at Paladins, Warriors, and DKs and see inconsistency in their active mitigation models, what if you just decided to screw the rules on minimizing total damage taken and went full mitigation instead of avoidance? I know from many years of healing that I'd sure as hell prefer the tank that always takes 5+ hits to die over the one that usually takes 6 or 7 but can randomly get gibbed in 3 hits.

I'm rather new to Guardians specifically (because honestly, who was taking them seriously throughout most of MoP?), but is this something that makes sense?

Edit: It almost seems like that's intended, since the tier bonuses are TC generating 1 rage when used and FR counting as if it used 10 more rage than normal. It seems a bit peculiar that SD which has been the "standard" AM for all of MoP isn't included in there.

[Braindwen]

(because honestly, who was taking them seriously throughout most of MoP?)

I would imagine most of us, since most of us have been playing them for the entire expansion.

We have the health to not get randomly burst down (at least, not unless everyone else is too). If we're not getting randomly burst down, then SD's RNG nature matters much less. Pulverize's damage reduction needs a nerf anyway (it should have been nerfed in place of some other stuff this last build, actually ), and it won't even put us close to the damage reduction some other tanks have (e.g. a warrior tank takes about half as much damage as we do from the same melee swing, pre-block/absorbs), so we really need the TDR that SD provides. In short, FR/T&C spam would be nice if we were getting burst down, but it's going to put a lot more of the burden on our healers, and since we aren't going to get burst down, why do that?

It's a threat that FR will outscale SD. It was actually a very close threat before the nerfs, the armor change pushed SD soundly back into the lead, though our gear scaling being better than it's ever been could close that gap.

[Totaltotemic]

In short, FR/T&C spam would be nice if we were getting burst down, but it's going to put a lot more of the burden on our healers, and since we aren't going to get burst down, why do that?

I'm more looking at this from the sense of having a niche, like the question that was asked of what Guardians can potentially do better than other tanks that makes them special. I don't really mean in a Patchwerk kind of sense, because realistically figuring out who takes the least total damage is pretty easy (the answer is almost always Warriors).

In the event that there is a kind of bursty boss though (not just on the tanks, but like the raid-wide AoE that drops everyone and the healers are a little busy taking care of them and it sure would be great if they could count on not needing to heal you for a little bit), Guardians seem pretty good as the best tank (again outside of Warriors because Shield Barrier is stupidly broken) to tell healers to go take care of everyone else first because of the best 30 second cooldown in the game (short of Paladins and magic-only damage), the ability to dump all resources into self-healing if needed (most other tanks can do some self-healing, but it's often gated by cooldowns), and the most consistent mastery for reducing damage taken outside of BrM's Stagger.

Tanks aren't really getting bursted, but having a solid Time to Kill that doesn't waver (RIP Paladins that dodge/parry during SotR but take every single hit when it's off) can be valuable, maybe enough to offset needing 5-10% more healing during normal operation. The ability to look at a tank's health bar and see it at 30% and know that you still have 2-3 seconds before he needs to be saved has the potential to be more valuable than raw numerical superiority.

[Karnudge]

Perhaps a good way of looking at Pulverize is to address what I was complaining about earlier.

What happens when the RNG from SD fails? You spam lacerate to get enough rage to cast SD, and then consume those lacerates for pulverize just in case SD fails. Its synergy is actually quite nice.

[Raugnaut]

With the removal of the physical damage reduction, nerfing our armor by half, AND the rage gen reduction, I strongly feel that atm, blizz is balancing bears AROUND Pulverize. Which isn't good.