[Guardian] 7.2.5 Legion Guardian Guide by Pumps

[roi]

7.2.5 question: With maul getting buffed substantially, could blood frenzy be a dps increase over brambles in 1-2 targets situations (technically only at 5+ swipe deals more damage, but 3-4 might already be worth using swipe because of GG procs)? Brambles scaling isn't that great after all.

For two targets, you'd get one free maul every ~24 seconds with blood frenzy. Maul is 500% physical damage, but +20% crit from 4/4 mauler, so I guess you could think of it as 600% physical damage. Swipe is 146% physical damage x2, so 292% physical damage. Brambles deals 24% attack power passively on each incoming hit, which is around 10k damage currently. My tooltip value for current maul (100% physical damage) is 65k. If my shitty math is correct, brambles would have to deal 200k damage in 24 seconds to come even from the passive alone. 20 hits from two targets in 24 seconds sounds reasonable...okay, brambles still wins for sure when using barkskin.

[Deleted]

Maul is 500% physical damage, but +20% crit from 4/4 mauler, so I guess you could think of it as 600% physical damage

That is correct if and only if you have 0% crit, which as far as I know is impossible. If we assume you have 20% crit on your gear the increase is 583.3% (140%/120%). Also I would (on 2 targets) consider Bristling Fur, because that can give quite a lot of rage. Blood Frenzy is probably just worth if you have several targets were only damage to one of them is relevant.

Since a lot of other things can play into that, I would sim it though.

[roi]

Well, thrash bleed rate is not affected by haste, so that's easy to calculate, however swing timer differs for each enemy, can't simply sim that (or well, you could, but that won't be correct in many ingame situations). As you said, will depend on the situation. In any case, the difference should be tiny. Not sure about bristling fur though, with maul being on global cooldown, you'd likely overcap rage.

[Deleted]

You can sim blood frenzy versus no talent and then add the average damage of brambles over one raid night. This is obviously more error prone, but since brambles in itself doesn't really interact with anything it should probably be fine.

The reason why I think you can't simply calculate it the way you did is, that you have different chances of getting GG procs for swipe and maul and there can be phases in your rotation were you use very few swipes, because you have good procs from gore and GG, so that you don't want to use maul and overcap rage there. These are factors that you could try to quantify correctly, but the amount of calculations necessary for that is quite substantial, and I wouldn't try it by hand.

The situation with Bristling is, that it allows you to keep using maul when you need AM by flooding you with rage while actively tanking, so that you can have both IF and Maul if you need both, while you just Maul while you aren't active.

That last thought for me brings the question to mind, whether the damage increase to maul makes catweaving unprofitable or if it just changes around the rotation for that. Let's hope it is the latter.

[oAllElseFailo]

So did I miss something where Incarnation is the go to talent now for most bosses? Just looking at the top 10 on each fight and aside from botanist and star, everyones running incarnation which someone told me on here is something you don't pick for ST fights such as Krosus.

[Deleted]

Depends on kill times somewhat. Also with more and more of our damage being moved into thrash, Incarn is getting better.

[Emancptr]

The other thing to realize is that almost every boss in Nighthold has adds to cleave on. Incarnation pulls ahead of GG once there's a 2nd target to hit.

You also have to realize that most top 10 parses (especially now on farm) allow their guardian to do all of the add damage/padding which makes Incarnation even stronger (longer time cleaving adds with incarn/thrash). Pumps specifically has turned padding into an art form

Specifically on Krosus, it's not a single target fight when you intentionally let adds spawn in melee. If you look at damage breakdown for the top 10 parses most will have 10-15% of their total damage done to adds. I'm on mobile right now so I can't look at warcraftlogs, but if you looked at just boss damage rankings for Krosus I would bet that the top 10 parses are not actually top 10 for boss damage (still in the top ~30 though).

[oAllElseFailo]

The other thing to realize is that almost every boss in Nighthold has adds to cleave on. Incarnation pulls ahead of GG once there's a 2nd target to hit.

You also have to realize that most top 10 parses (especially now on farm) allow their guardian to do all of the add damage/padding which makes Incarnation even stronger (longer time cleaving adds with incarn/thrash). Pumps specifically has turned padding into an art form

So if we're talking just padding here..

What I'm kind of confused about is say Krosus, where you may get a couple adds or none, depending how the RNG/soaking is near the boss, why go incarn?

Where as botanist where you're starting out with 3 "bosses", only 2 people are picking incarn on that top 10 list.

[Emancptr]

I edited my post on Krosus information, scroll up to read that explanation. You don't go incarnation on botanist because rankings eliminate any damage done to a mob that heals. So damage done to boss 2 and 3 while killing boss 1 is negated. And the adds on botanist are not significant enough to make incarnation worthwhile.

Edit* And just an example of what i'm talking about on Krosus since i'm at a computer and can look at logs. This is the 2nd Place Guardian Druid Log. If you mouseover Troxs' damage you will see that his breakdown is 37% Burning Embers (adds) and 62% Krosus (boss). That's more than 2x the damage done to adds that I suggested earlier.

If you go to the rankings tab and look at Troxs' boss damage. It is rank 252 for boss damage (not even an Orange Parse for boss damage).

Most top 10 parses this late into a tier are just pushing high numbers for the sake of high numbers (and doing bosses intentionally incorrectly) with coordination from the rest of their guild to allow 1-2 players to parse well each week. In a situation like that Incarnation is almost always better.

[oAllElseFailo]

Ah okay, so they're intentionally letting adds through just for the sake of padding.

And I didn't know ranking eliminate damage done to mobs that heal. TIL something new. Thanks for the info man.

[Emancptr]

Ah okay, so they're intentionally letting adds through just for the sake of padding.

And I didn't know ranking eliminate damage done to mobs that heal. TIL something new. Thanks for the info man.

Edited my post above to show you just how much a lot of the top parses are padding on Krosus and similar bosses.

And the Botanist explanation was a little bit simplified. Essentially the creator of warcraft logs identifies certain units to ignore (based on fight) when evaluating damage done. On the Botanist fight warcraftlogs breaks the fight down into 3 separate "encounters." Each "encounter" ends when a boss dies and only the damage done to the boss that died (and adds) is included from each "encounter."

[oAllElseFailo]

I see. Well that makes more sense now. We're only 8/10m but i don't think we're at that point to intentionally let things go for the sake of parsing so I guess I won't follow these builds exactly. Thanks for clearing it all up for me.

[blackwolfrider]

First of all, thanks a billion for this post, even though I'm just now getting to read it. My next question and this comes from being a numbers nerd, is, what is a good percentage to shoot for, for the stats?

For example:

This is my bear's stats with 882 iLevel.

Crit = 32%
Has = 11%
Mas = 9%
Ver= 15%
Avo = 11%
Dod = 22%

Now, I read where Mastery should be high, but yet they say to use Agility for one and Vers for everything else? So I'm a bit confused .

[Nevcairiel]

Gearing as a bear is pretty simple, and there really arent any percentages you should hit, but just get the best gear you can.

For defense:

- ilvl wins on armor pieces (ie. around 10 ilvl difference, take it, no matter the stats, armor wins)
- Simple priority otherwise: Vers > Mastery >> Haste > Crit > Agi

For offense:

Bear DPS: Agi > Haste > Crit >= Vers > Mast
Catweaving: Agi > Crit >= Vers > Haste > Mast

[v1perz53]

Man finally got Kruul down at 901 ilvl with neither Luffa or Ekowraith, felt really good to finally get this crap done. As expected, I just needed to keep trying until I got a P2 attempt where some RNG nonsense didn't fuck me over, like Velen only spawning the healing circles in the middle of the green bad stuff, or overlapping them fully or some nonsense. P1 remained super annoying, I can't even imagine how much easier it would be if I had Luffa or Ekowraith and could just sit outside the circle DPSing him...

[Rioo]

That's impressive man! The RNG in that challenge is incredible.

[Soulwell]

Gearing as a bear is pretty simple, and there really arent any percentages you should hit, but just get the best gear you can.

For defense:

- ilvl wins on armor pieces (ie. around 10 ilvl difference, take it, no matter the stats, armor wins)
- Simple priority otherwise: Vers > Mastery >> Haste > Crit > Agi

For offense:

Bear DPS: Agi > Haste > Crit >= Vers > Mast
Catweaving: Agi > Crit >= Vers > Haste > Mast

Considering no stat is bad for us anything that is an agi upgrade is a dps increase. So wouldn't be 10 ilvl it would be 5.

[Nevcairiel]

Considering no stat is bad for us anything that is an agi upgrade is a dps increase. So wouldn't be 10 ilvl it would be 5.

That rule applies to defense mainly, for the armor, where agi is the worst stat, and good defensive stats (ie. a vers/mastery item) would probably be better then a 5 ilvl update.

[roi]

PvP changes:

Pawsitive Outlook can no longer cause Thrash to trigger more than one additional Thrash in PvP situations.

Sharpened Claws increases Thrash and Swipe damage by 25%, down from 50%.

Frenzied Regeneration now heals for 25% of damage taken in the last 5 seconds, down from 50%.

PvP Template Agility reduced by 5%.

PvP Template Stamina reduced by 5%.

sad

[foibooze]

Not as sad... Moonkin here who's been playing guardian pvp for the last months (only casually) cuz as a moonkin you've got great burst and decent aoepressure but die instantly(or do no dmg when trying to survive 2 extra seconds).
As guardian I've been able to dive straight into 5-6players, popping cd's and living for well over a minute watching them scatter in all directions to not get killed by me solo.