Hello there Druid forum! This post will contain a rather lengthy explanation of my current mindset about actually wanting to level the class, so I'll leave a tl;dr at the bottom.
In my quest to obtain 11 90's and all their relevant challenge mode sets before WoD (currently going towards my 5th now! and already ready for the 6th set), I appear to have hit a brick wall.
Said "brick wall" for me is the druid class - so before I get into my question I'm going to give you a bit of background to aid in any answers to this thread.
As a player I'm suited entirely towards DPSing and tanking, while I have very good healing ability (certainly enough to heal raids when focused and enough for challenge modes - already healed as resto shaman and currently healing a set as disc) I get extremely bored whilst I can't make big numbers. I'm specifically orientated towards a role where I can always feel active and engaged, and for me, healing is not that (aside from maybe Discipline and Fistweaving, but my Monk is BrM, so hey.)
Except there's a catch, the catch being is I literally cannot stand any spec that is not almost entirely GCD capped or outright GCD capped (let's say about 10% downtime is my limit, or thereabouts). This creates a lot of problems for me, I cannot play Enhancement Shaman, Assa Rogue, Feral Druid and many other specs where I'm completely limited to what I can press and when. The other thing I cannot stand is when specs aren't fluid or clunky, clunky mechanics to me are things such are completely manual multidotting (e.g VT+SWP, Moonfire+Sunfire), high ramp-up mechanics, long casts, class priority systems fuelled by cooldowns, lack of on demand AoE, bad target switching and so forth.
So as you can see, my personal tastes for play basically completely cut me off from playing Feral, Balance and Restoration, thus almost nullifying my ability to play the class, and I don't particularly enjoy the way Guardian physically looks (and that's important for me). But I do want that set, and will probably force myself to just suck it up and play Restoration in CMs if nothing else is going to work for me eventually.
My question is, is Guardian, by my definition a "fluid" spec. Or put simply, does Guardian have little downtime between available globals and how clunky is it to play? Does it have good on demand AoE? Can you go offensive in CMs like the other 4 tanks are capable of (I play extremely offensively on the 3 tanks I've done CMs on, and will play that way on Paladin also.) I'm aware of the state of their mitigation, so I don't need briefing on that, just want to know if they can drop it to go offensive in that environment.
Thanks for any questions that can be answered, yours - Minxy .
tl;dr is Guardian GCD capped and is it clunky?