Guardian Alpha Patchnotes

[Kitmajere]

Is DoC working on beta for you guys?

[Arielle]

Is DoC working on beta for you guys?

Nope. Still broken.

[Dreyen]

So, Bear Hug replacement perk is pretty nice. FF has doubled damage and no CD, making it an excellent pulling tool now.

That is exactly what i wished faerie fire to become.. thank god!

[exochaft]

That is exactly what i wished faerie fire to become.. thank god!

Kind of sad it has to be a leveling perk, although with all my druids pretty much 90 it won't affect me during the leveling process.

However, I haven't broken down the damage of individual abilities to see if there may be a bug with some abilities, but are other bears having some threat issue? Mostly in the AoE department during dungeon testing, but even using a mastery-heavy gear setup with massive AP gains can cause some issues. Was definitely doing better on a Brewmaster in terms of threat and damage output, but... yeah, still got the survival bugs going.

[Deleted]

Wondering if 9 seconds for Fae Silence is intended with the new perk. Could almost lock down those void guys in burial grounds by myself.

[Gemini Soul]

Kind of sad it has to be a leveling perk, although with all my druids pretty much 90 it won't affect me during the leveling process.

However, I haven't broken down the damage of individual abilities to see if there may be a bug with some abilities, but are other bears having some threat issue? Mostly in the AoE department during dungeon testing, but even using a mastery-heavy gear setup with massive AP gains can cause some issues. Was definitely doing better on a Brewmaster in terms of threat and damage output, but... yeah, still got the survival bugs going.

Part of the problem is because Thrash has a DoT component so it doesn't have as much single hit threat as other AoE

[Callsignecho]

Kind of sad it has to be a leveling perk, although with all my druids pretty much 90 it won't affect me during the leveling process.

However, I haven't broken down the damage of individual abilities to see if there may be a bug with some abilities, but are other bears having some threat issue? Mostly in the AoE department during dungeon testing, but even using a mastery-heavy gear setup with massive AP gains can cause some issues. Was definitely doing better on a Brewmaster in terms of threat and damage output, but... yeah, still got the survival bugs going.

I don't have any problem with keeping AoE threat with Thrash. If anything, the threat I generate from Thrash is too high compared to the dps ouput.

[exochaft]

I don't have any problem with keeping AoE threat with Thrash. If anything, the threat I generate from Thrash is too high compared to the dps ouput.

Part of the problem is because Thrash has a DoT component so it doesn't have as much single hit threat as other AoE

This has been one of those issues that's been sitting on the back burner to see how things turn out, and that's going to be tank damage/threat.

My concern has less to do with the abilities themselves and more with actual gearing and stat allocation (alright, losing Swipe with Thrash having no CD did concern me if it was more balanced around the long-term bleed damage instead of impact damage, but that's another post). While adding extra secondary stats is interesting, tuning/balancing extra stats becomes harder. About the only sure-fire way to balance the stats is to make them less meaningful in general, but then said stats start to lose their fun factor, so to speak. Even shifting gear sets of the same ilvl focusing on different stats already shows quite a bit of variance, but even with adjustments down the road to stat power there may be too many extra variables to feasible avoid a "wrong" way to gear, even if you're just at the mercy of drops.

Before the responses come, I still think Guardians will be fine, this is more of a general view that affects everyone but is fairly noticeable for bears with the current beta build.

[Kitmajere]

I still strongly feel that bears should have pulverize baseline to spice up our rotation (we'd probably need nerfs in other mitigation departments, but that's fine) as well as another aoe ability to add to snap threat+make aoe more interesting. Even a longish cd aoe move (in the 15-30 sec range) would be awesome -- think bear-storm (i.e. bear bladestorm). I want to be a fuzzy ball of whirling death, and I think snap aoe threat is both something we could really use and adding such an ability would make aoe less boring. Yes, I know Blizzard is generally taking away things from specs, but that doesn't mean that they *can't* add something else, especially for a spec with as few rotational abilities as guardian has.

[Teye]

Currently planning to swap from Prot Warrior to Bear. The number one thing holding me back is that Prot can use Ravager, Bladestorm and Dragon's Roar along with Glyphed Thunderclap for insane AoE threat and damage. Bears can... Spam Thrash. That's my major stopping point at the moment, so hopefully Blizzard addresses it.

[Dreyen]

Currently planning to swap from Prot Warrior to Bear. The number one thing holding me back is that Prot can use Ravager, Bladestorm and Dragon's Roar along with Glyphed Thunderclap for insane AoE threat and damage. Bears can... Spam Thrash. That's my major stopping point at the moment, so hopefully Blizzard addresses it.

Thrash is good enough thou. The dot is really strong and you can aoe every single GCD unlike warriors.

[Callsignecho]

Currently planning to swap from Prot Warrior to Bear. The number one thing holding me back is that Prot can use Ravager, Bladestorm and Dragon's Roar along with Glyphed Thunderclap for insane AoE threat and damage. Bears can... Spam Thrash. That's my major stopping point at the moment, so hopefully Blizzard addresses it.

Thrash is quite strong and you can spam it every GCD if you need to AoE.

[Gemini Soul]

Thrash is nice, my problem with it and what Teye is talking about i think is more of its snap aggro effect. With thrash having most of its damage baked into the 16 sec DoT and the perk boosting ONLY that DoT.

Thrash is our only AoE attack, because of this it needs some kind of love in the form of its initial hit to help keep us inline with all the other tanks AoE aggro skills. Like when hitting 3 or more targets the initial hit as a 50% increase crit or MS chance. Some kind of love so that it wont affect its use in a single target situation.

[szandos]

Double the initial damage and put a 3 sec cd on Thrash (reduced by haste). Would give it more oomph and would have the side effect of making the AoE rotation slightly less mind numbing. And would also be possible to keep Pulverize up in AoE situations.

Or give back swipe. Spamming one button on AoE is a bit boring...

[Dreyen]

or make it so thrash does more damage on initial impact if it is not present on the mob, would add a little layer of skill to the ability so that people need to time their thrash as fast as possible when it ends.

[Teye]

Some sort of Bear-Storm makes the most sense, honestly. Its what the spec is missing. That, or something similar to Shockwave so we can lead with that AoE Stun+damage, and have 3 GCDs to build threat instead of 1.

[Raugnaut]

Some sort of Bear-Storm makes the most sense, honestly. Its what the spec is missing. That, or something similar to Shockwave so we can lead with that AoE Stun+damage, and have 3 GCDs to build threat instead of 1.

Thorns (Cata style, castable in bear form), or castable Hurricane in bear form (scaling with AP of course) makes the most sense to me.

[Pazx]

so, im thinking of going to bear tank in WoD and i havent really done much with one since dragon soul, can someone inform me of what it's like and how rage gain and spending is?

[Arielle]

Thorns

I kill a baby kitten every time someone mentions Thorns for Guardians.

"Lets make an AoE ability that actually has only 55.5555% effectiveness with one of our T100 talents and actually gets worse as our gear improves!"

No.

I do think that some of the DoT damage could be transferred to the impact of Thrash though.

[Raugnaut]

I kill a baby kitten every time someone mentions Thorns for Guardians.

"Lets make an AoE ability that actually has only 55.5555% effectiveness with one of our T100 talents and actually gets worse as our gear improves!"

No.

I do think that some of the DoT damage could be transferred to the impact of Thrash though.

Thorns Aura, 1 min CD 10 second duration, deals x nature damage to all targets enganging in melee combat within 15 yards?