Guardian Alpha Patchnotes

[Callsignecho]

Technically, the way to do that would be to have thrash simply tick faster, but gain no extra ticks. E.g. ticking 8 times over 16s at 0% haste, ticking 8 times over 12.8s at 25% haste, and the like. That would preserve our rotation (outside of CDs such as berserk), and cause 1% haste to just make it go 1% faster. I really doubt that's going to happen, it's just a theoretical idea on how to go about that.

Having thrash scale like many other DoTs would cause it to double-dip from haste (admittedly...many of those other DoTs do too...), in that it does more damage and "casts" faster. 1% haste would be 1% more damage, plus a little extra from extra filler moves.

Mostly, this only matters for AoE, where thrash's DoT will probably be a large portion of our DPS for something that has 0 current interaction with haste.

I wouldn't be surprised at all at this point if Thrash's bleed is affected by haste. It seems that it may be coming, or at least tried, in beta to see how it works out. I think Blizzard's design intent for haste and Guardian tanks is for us to get to the point where we have a comfortable rage generation per X period of time, enough to cover every rage consuming ability we need to or want to use in that time frame, and then move on to other stats for other reasons, whether they be defensive or offensive.

[Aseyhe]

this is changing however. The idea i get from blizzard is that they want haste to be 100% effective for everyone. Increasing cast speed by 25% means a 25% dps increase for most casters, breakpoints aside. This is why classes that didnt get a 100% increase from haste, such as warriors and beartanks and whoever else, got the sanctity of battle treatment.

It's actually not their intention that everyone scale well with haste; see this tweet.

[exochaft]

It's actually not their intention that everyone scale well with haste; see this tweet.

The tweet was more about how melee and casters benefit from haste differently versus everyone scaling well with haste. With the new stats system and the desire to bring secondary stats closer together for each class/spec, Blizz should make everyone scale well with haste along with other secondary stats.

That being said, the tweet has been the main driver for melee DoT's not being affected by haste: haste yields other benefits and doesn't need to affect DoT's. However, I think they'd be willing to waive that restriction if there's no other way to bring haste in line with crit/mastery. In the case of Guardians, haste is currently slated to reduce the GCD and CD of Mangle, increase rage generation via auto-attacks, and increase T&C procs via auto-attacks. Adding a haste component to Guardian DoT's would be giving a ton of benefits to stacking haste... but it could be necessary if crit/mastery are just that good in comparison. Obviously there are other ways around it, hastening Guardian bleeds is just one route they could take.

While I have mentioned my concern about Thrash in the past (this conversation would affect it), one aspect of Guardian tanking that I want to see addressed is AoE snap threat. It's one of the cons of our AoE threat being balanced around a long DoT, and with the removal of Swipe could amplify this problem (although being able to devote every GCD to AoE threat counters it... but I don't want Guardian AoE balanced around using every GCD with Thrash while other tanks only have to use one GCD occasionally). Hastening the Thrash bleed would be one method of pushing more of the damage earlier, however I doubt we'd have any amount of haste that would make that much of a difference until late in WoD. This is partially why I'm interested to see what they do with Thrash.

[Aseyhe]

Well, the reasoning given in that tweet is not really something to pay attention to, since taken at face value, it's nonsense. Fundamentally, casters don't benefit from haste differently from melee. Getting more resources is exactly equivalent to getting more casting time: in either case, you get to cast more abilities in a given period of time. I only linked it as a demonstration that "haste to be 100% effective for everyone" is not their goal.

But ignoring that particular piece of reasoning, it's not unusual at all to have abilities that don't scale with haste. For casters, it's often their rotational cooldown attacks like mind blast or starsurge (at least the fraction of them that aren't reset by a periodic damage proc). For certain melee, it's their bleeds. This is actually a sensible approach because haste has a 40% better rating conversion than crit. If haste affected everything (as crit typically does), it would virtually always be superior to crit.

Should guardians be in the unusual position of having perfect haste scaling? Perhaps it would be useful to look at how the other tanks will scale with haste in terms of their resource generation. For monks, it's Keg Smash that doesn't scale, since it has a fixed cooldown. For warriors, it will be Revenge, which has a fixed cooldown that resets on dodge/parry only. For paladins, it's Avenger's Shield, whose resource generation is triggered solely by dodge/parry. (I don't know as much about death knights as I'd like to, but I think it is and will remain their GCD that ends up being the main limiter.)

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To be fair, guardians will also get rage from dodges, which will be another resource generation element that doesn't scale with haste.

[Kitmajere]

While I have mentioned my concern about Thrash in the past (this conversation would affect it), one aspect of Guardian tanking that I want to see addressed is AoE snap threat. It's one of the cons of our AoE threat being balanced around a long DoT, and with the removal of Swipe could amplify this problem (although being able to devote every GCD to AoE threat counters it... but I don't want Guardian AoE balanced around using every GCD with Thrash while other tanks only have to use one GCD occasionally). Hastening the Thrash bleed would be one method of pushing more of the damage earlier, however I doubt we'd have any amount of haste that would make that much of a difference until late in WoD. This is partially why I'm interested to see what they do with Thrash.

Agreed. Our aoe tanking in particular could use a new spell, or just *something* other than thrash spam. Spamming a bleed seems really odd in and of itself, and our snap aoe threat is already balls. Honestly our single target could use a new spell too but maybe pulverize is the consolation there.

I'm not sure what would resolve this though... I was trying to think of a spell we could borrow from the other druids specs but their aoe is weird too -- shrooms? bear-hurricane? both would be clunky or annoying to use. I do enjoy the image of being a whirling bear-tornado of death though :-p.

I guess I just think BrM aoe tanking is well designed in that is has a nice snap threat move (keg smash), a filler spell (SCK), and the need to do some single target spells to keep your active mitigation going (BoK). Thrash can fill the SCK or keg smash "role" (although it certainly needs some rework to function as a snap aoe threat move), but instead Blizz has it doing both roles, neither of which really fit with a bleed...

[adynn]

So what do you guys think of Ursa Major? The tooltip seemed a little ambiguous as to what exactly is going on; is it just the duration that gets added or will the 5% stam buff stack on itself whenever we multistrike? Considering it lasts 15s I would have thought it'd have to stack with itself to make multistrike scale well for us (it'd require a very small amount of multistrike to get close to 100% uptime on the buff). I have to imagine we'd have some kind of 'counter' where each stack would fall off precisely at 15s after application and we'd get ~3-4 up at a time in decent gear.

If the stacking thing is correct it seems like we'll gain a ton of EH from it, the only thing that worries me is that it's a bit RNG.

[Dreyen]

It stacks depending on how much time is remaining on the previous buff.

Basically, you proc it once, you get 5% more hp.

you get another proc after 10sec, so 5 seconds out of the 15s is remaining, so divide 5% hp by 3 ( 15sec / 5sec = 3) and you get 1.67% hp added on top of the 5%. So you end up with 6.67% hp bonus.

The more multistrike you get, the more hp you will have. It's rng so its a bit of a bonus, but itll be pretty easy to have high levels of multistrike. I remember a blizz tweet that says it takes as much rating to get 1% multistrike as it takes to get 0.3% crit.

I think it's a fine bonus and it'll be reliable enough, as long as you have a basic amount of multistrike. I can see bears getting a little bit of multistrike just to get a basic 5% permanent health bonus, and then it'll scale exponentially with haste. Just another reason to have haste as a main stat tbh!

[exochaft]

I think it's a fine bonus and it'll be reliable enough, as long as you have a basic amount of multistrike. I can see bears getting a little bit of multistrike just to get a basic 5% permanent health bonus, and then it'll scale exponentially with haste. Just another reason to have haste as a main stat tbh!

Haste is almost looking too good at this point... or rather crit is looking less useful in comparison to haste (and mastery). While I'm happy that non-crit secondary stats are getting more love, this appears like the pendulum is swinging in the far opposite direction on paper. Maybe crit will need to do something other than increase RPS and damage? Maybe Guardians would get a Riposte-like change, making crit into passive dodge? Highly unlikely, but I can't say I really agree with the Riposte converting crit rating into avoidance... that's just an indirect way to stack parry/dodge rating, but that's another post!

While the wording didn't really indicate a change in the recent alpha announcement, I was wondering if it was time for T&C absorbs to last until expended versus disappearing due to any amount absorbed. While the announcement concerning Primal Tenacity was meant to dispel concerns about the mastery bubble's effectiveness, it honestly raised my concern about T&C being wasted. Under many situations, Primal Tenacity and T&C would likely interact very well, but there seems to... well, defer to my next paragraph.

The alpha Guardian design seems to make our survivability more and more complex. Complexity is fine, as long as it can be quantified and understood in a reasonable amount of time to allow a person to react to it. Primal Tenacity mastery bubbles by themselves are going to be quite a big variable when it comes to looking at our current situation and making a survival choice. Add in T&C, which will be used after mastery bubble, however with the one-and-done design could be completely wasted or rather important to apply on top of it. While multistrike is not a guaranteed survival tool, it's still a variable that will likely be used on-the-fly when making a tanking decision. As it stands with the current design model with just innate abilities (not including talents or trinkets/procs), we'll likely need an add-on to make quick decisions concerning if we'll live or not.

That being said, I could be completely wrong as I don't know for sure what Blizz's intent is for all these changes to Guardians. It could be the complete opposite, where all these EH-boosting abilities are just icing on the cake and will never feasibly need to be quantified... highly unlikely, but who knows at this point if our passive EH will be so high that it's all about TTL instead. Perhaps I'm just used to the tanking model being almost always about EH when it comes to gear choices, since TTL hasn't mattered in a long time.

[Dreyen]

Crit could definitely use another purpose.. we have two stats that increase our rage generation, though i guess the more haste you get the better crit will get..

As far as the direction of guardian goes, i think we won't get back the armor we lost from changing masteries... meaning we'll take a bit more damage. We also don't get any damage reduction from our active mitigation. Our enormous health pool, mixed with what i just mentionned, and new healer philosphy of making people harder to heal... blizzard wants us to use SD and T&C to lower our damage, but mostly heal it back A LOT, which would explain our newfound better rage generation.

TBH, im all for that, i always thought healing myself back was one of the most satifying things about our active mitigation, as SD and T&C don't feel nearly as good to press.

[Callsignecho]

http://i.imgur.com/0N6IlnH.jpg

Posted by Valarius in the thread. http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...3#post26561543

Screenshot from someone in the alpha from a Guardian perspective. Most notable is the Resolve buff in the upper right.

[Dreyen]

Nice, i really like how it displays.. its better than an arbritrary number.

[Deleted]

I absolutely love the Guardian, and vengeance changes. I'm getting pretty bored with being a dps that's hard to kill. I'd rather just be a tank.

[exochaft]

As far as the direction of guardian goes, i think we won't get back the armor we lost from changing masteries... meaning we'll take a bit more damage. We also don't get any damage reduction from our active mitigation. Our enormous health pool, mixed with what i just mentionned, and new healer philosphy of making people harder to heal... blizzard wants us to use SD and T&C to lower our damage, but mostly heal it back A LOT, which would explain our newfound better rage generation.

It's on of those things I'd love Blizz to come out and say in their new patch notes method of explaining intent, as it's hard to know if something is designed well if you don't know what the goals are of the design. Might be said more directly when alpha turns to beta, as something that broad concerning the end-goal of Guardians could still be rather fluid.

Same goes for individual abilities, specifically FR. I was rather happy with how FR turned out in MoP, and I'd be happy with a similar continuation into WoD. However, the healing model is changing, and FR could potentially change along those lines. While we could turn to the new rage generation model, I feel it's more to address the lack of control and poor generation with sub-optimal gear we've suffered in the past versus allowing FR to be used more frequently out of necessity... in comparison, rage tanks have generally felt like fire mages in terms of gear scaling with content over the course of an expansion, and guaranteeing a suitable baseline rage generation does wonders for such things.

I'd be happy if we remained fairly similar to our MoP model, as long as we don't regress to a point where we can't feel comfortably in control while tanking... that's the whole point of active mitigation!

Btw, here's hoping that T&C makes it to the combat log, as that Resolve pic gives me hope! Kind of a crazy extrapolation, but information and method of display provided by the Resolve buff from that pic shows Blizz trying to make pertinent information easily quantified and understood. T&C has typically been one of those things that Guardians (and potentially their co-tanks) could appreciate, but it's been rather hidden in the background and not easy to understand its benefits. On a similar note, I'm curious how high Resolve will go.

[Raugnaut]

On a similar note, I'm curious how high Resolve will go.

Since it only affects healing, and not damage, it does not need a cap.

[morislayer]

Agreed. Our aoe tanking in particular could use a new spell, or just *something* other than thrash spam. Spamming a bleed seems really odd in and of itself, and our snap aoe threat is already balls. Honestly our single target could use a new spell too but maybe pulverize is the consolation there.

I'm not sure what would resolve this though... I was trying to think of a spell we could borrow from the other druids specs but their aoe is weird too -- shrooms? bear-hurricane? both would be clunky or annoying to use. I do enjoy the image of being a whirling bear-tornado of death though :-p.

I guess I just think BrM aoe tanking is well designed in that is has a nice snap threat move (keg smash), a filler spell (SCK), and the need to do some single target spells to keep your active mitigation going (BoK). Thrash can fill the SCK or keg smash "role" (although it certainly needs some rework to function as a snap aoe threat move), but instead Blizz has it doing both roles, neither of which really fit with a bleed...

Bear-nado

Seriously though I stopped tanking when Feral went to spamming one button through an entire dungeon. Its a pity they are reverting to this playstyle. Even Swipe / Thrash was abysmal. Bear's need an aoe ground pound or smash type ability (basically thunder clap). Or bring back roar and have it do nature damage. Make pulverize an AoE mangle like paladins crusader / hammer choice, just something....

No shrooms please, I already hate the moonkin and resto versions and I'm quite looking forward to 6.0 where I will get to be a bear again and dink around with the new changes in old raids.

[Dreyen]

TBh make mangle hit every target affected by thrash : D

[exochaft]

Since it only affects healing, and not damage, it does not need a cap.

It could still need one, depending upon the healing model will affect tanks. It's along the lines of if Blizz wants us to be able to boom-heal ourselves to full with FR in WoD or not. While our damage output won't matter with respect to Resolve, we could still abusive it for defensive purposes. Blizz may not care currently, but the option is out there for now.

TBh make mangle hit every target affected by thrash : D

Stop giving me these wonderful dreams! Reminds me of the city annihilator with flight form from back in the day.

[Kitmajere]

Definitely need a bear-nado. Or bear-iccaine that follows us. Or BEARSTORMMMMM.

[Callsignecho]

I'm actually OK with the removal of Bear Hug.

[Etamalgren]

I'm actually OK with the removal of Bear Hug.

I'm not. I liked being able to burst a mob down in the time it took to wear off. I used it more for the damage component than the stun anyway.
...What's going to happen to the 91-100 bear hug bonus?