Guardian druids take too much damage?

[Pelleas]

Lots of healers complain, with reason(?) about Druid tanks.
Leveling and NM modes dungeons were a breeze, I find Heroics hard at i620.
Some trash mobs hit me for 15% of my bar under SD and Barkskin... Do you feel the same?

Is the class "broken", not enough Mastery? Too low ilvl?
Please share

[Insane Buttocks]

I was playing last night, and noticed the same thing. My healer friend who is 100 and doing heroics said the same thing. Said it was easier when he was healing DK, Warrior and paladin tanks. He said the really believes that guardian druids are taking the most damage.

Also, I was looking at my resolve in Skyreach yesterday, and on my bear I was getting significantly less resolve compared to my warrior.

Something seems 'off'

[Ozoi]

Druid tanks are in a terrible spot right now IMO. By far the most boring to play, almost no major CD's, Active Mitigation is either RNG or lack luster self healing. I am currently 623 and I still get trucked on in heroics and have had healers complain as well and some even drop the group.

Think I might be leveling my Warrior or switching to feral.

[Deleted]

As a healer i noticed that druids are not in a good spot... maybe its the scale at lower ilvl but still...

[lsmf5]

I was gearing up my druid last night. I found that getting pg silver was harder than it was before 6.0 for me at least by a long shot. I was tanking some normals with a mistweaver and they said I was fairly spiky. In addition I found that if I didn't have pulverise up constantly, I was hit like a train, which is stupid. I honestly don't see why Blizzard thought that making bears a spiky sponge again, but yet not giving them the tools to deal with this was optimal.

[Mcbears]

I think its twofold. I noticed the same thing, but i was running with 2 monk healers and felt like i was getting trucked. But i ran with a priest and paly and seemed fine. Some minor spikes but controlable. Obviously druids scale well with gear also.

[Arielle]

The fact that nobody has any empirical evidence is really frustrating. I haven't had any issues to speak of.

[Rioo]

Resolve is just not working for us. That means FR is shit, it means T&C is shit, and it means that Cenarion Ward is shit. They really have to fix it now.

[exochaft]

The fact that nobody has any empirical evidence is really frustrating. I haven't had any issues to speak of.

In terms of damage taken, I really haven't had much issue either. Self-healing and post-combat is rather annoying out in the world in weaker content, but the harder content is a different story (and ironically easier in my eyes). I've already started challenge modes and working on medals, and I haven't been having issues at all. A lot of the problems I've seen when my guildies complain about tank/healer issues, most of it boils down to item level. You do a CM with ilvl 600 and you're going to get trucked... likewise if your healer is undergeared, they may think the tank is squishy since we're not as self-sustainable as we used to be. There's an appropriate ilvl associated with content, and it's tuned a lot tighter than previous expansions' entry content.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the final Resolve model supposed to build up fast initially and taper off with respect to increasing incoming damage? Feels like the complete opposite on live, as it takes forever to get above 0% Resolve if you're out and about in the world. End result is extended downtime post combat healing up on easy stuff, at least we got to keep Rejuv/HT.

*edit* - Throwing in my quick math here a little late, but it appears the starting point using the Resolve formula I last saw is around 280k damage taken in the last 10 seconds (assumed the damage mod was the ratio of DTP10sec and that fixed number they gave for lvl 100 DPS of 3615.3). This lines up roughly with what I'm seeing while soloing out in the world on the Resolve tooltip, not that I think it's likely the right spot as that can still result in a dead Guardian even with avoidance/absorbs on top of heals given a long enough duration.

[GKLeatherCraft]

I think it might be a case of you're just not used to it, I know on my guardian I felt immortal, lol, I hardly ever died, but with the game being made a bit tighter, things have changed? If it is a real issue then I hope it's fixed soon, stay strong, bear brother!

[Ghier]

Well this is exactly what I did not want to hear. I have been focusing on my druid specifically to tank. Why did they nerf bear form to just 250% armor anyway?

[Nakash]

Again I only have evidence from my own runs.In ilvl 230(downscaled) gear in the Challenge mode Everbloom, on the second boss fight the melee one was swinging at me for 100k top ends and 70k low end. Even with me keeping savage defence up as much as possible and rotating trinket, bark skin and SI I was still on the border of death the whole time. Something is off with druid tanks currently really hoping we see a fix soon.

[Deleted]

NO problems at all. Heroic dungeons speaking. Except one run (only) in UBRS Heroic. Bad played, bad healed.
If we reduce our rotation in brainless spam of Mangle, Trash, Lacex3+ Pulv, is not enough. At this time
The only "real" problem for me now (629 IL) is building rage single target sometime. When 60 rage is reached everything work pretty well.
Aoe, is fine, rage flows very well, spam thrash and stick all mobs. And the damage... OMG. Top. Thrash is very very strong.
Clearly we have to manage barkskin and Survival not only for large predictable damage from bosses. When we have no rage, no pulverize, no Dream proc are a good situations for popping CD.
When Pulverize is up, and now is a priority, we have a "little barkskin" rolling all the time more or less.
in addiction we have to manage properly Tooth n' Claw procs.
Fae Silence, is good. Skull Bash, Fae silence, Mighty Bash, Warstomp (tauren)... help a lot.

and...

Many Bosses and trash mobs have abilities clearly avoidable. Cast (predictable) and stomp, cast and smash on the ground, cast and run in one path...Fire on the ground. Stuff on the ground, We have to move our fat ass.

Enjoy our super fat bear.

Sorry for my english.

[Findus707]

Just dinged 100 (ilvl605) last night and did a normal dungeon, the damage income was high, I had to use Force of nature to avoid dieing, to get time to help heal myself as the healer was struggling.

[Mouzfun]

Yeah, i think something is broken also. Although i did all heroics with random healers miltiple times couple of them said that damage is too high. It might have something to do with my shitty (multistrike crabs + agi with mastery proc) trinkets and lack of armor on rings and necklace.

Not to mention damage seems even higher than it was at the start of cataclysm.

[Deleted]

When you are low on rage, especially at the pull, try to use the 1st stack of Survival Instinct if you have 2. If not use Barkskin + CW.
Use the most rage that u build in savage defense. Use Maul only for TnT procs (and 50+ rage), and only for autoattack coming from the mob/bosses.

When rage flows enough and u can maintain at least 40% SDef uptime, pulverize is up, the history change a bit.

BArmor, Mastery, Versa in our gear is also important.
Use mastery and armor elixirs from MoP. They help a lot.

[Puri]

Well, my anecdotal contribution is all bear tanks had in the dungeons were fine and easy to heal, while everytime I had a paladin tank it was very hard to keep him up.

But, and I think we all can agree here, nobody of us has done enough heroics to have a good sample size, and there are also other issues that play a major role here, for example the difficulty between the different heroic dungeons seems to variate a lot, and right now every single DD in the group matters. So if you have a "bad" player in your group - because he is lacking skill or simply his class balance is also completely off - heroics get harder by putting more stress on the tank and/or healer because the adds live longer and they are running out of CDs.

I expect some minor hotfixes to class balance in the next two weeks, and then after the raids open a larger "hotfix" patch to address things until 6.1 hits.

[revhunt]

Druid tanks make me cry. They take way, way too much damage when compared to everyone else. Both physical and spell dmg. I watch them and they do their rotation quite right - SD as much as possible, a selfheal here and there (which is, btw, probably the weakest active mitigation spell currently ingame)... They use Barkskin and SI when they feel they need to, some more than others.

It is very unpleasant to heal them, I must say. DKs and Monks are amazing, warriors too when played well, I haven't met a paladin tank yet (in like 10 normals and 15 heroics).

Sure, you can justify it (it's the healers fault, it's just low ilvl) but the healer has healed dozens of runs in the last few days and can actually compare you to other tanks. And everyone has the same (low) ilvl.

[ponies]

I was just in a game as a resto druid and my tank was a guardian and i can say that form my perspective I hated healing him he was putting me under a lot of pressure.

[aziras]

I roll with 42% damage reduction (tooltip, including bonus armor). Cannot open armory, so not sure what my dodge is, but lets just assume it is lower than 90 as well. I was well above 60% passive reduction at 90.

And I have noticed that the resolve seems very flaky on the druid as well, compared to my other characters. Often the tooltip shows a flat "0" in combat, which never happens for my other tanks.
I also noticed that the challenge mode silver tank was significantly harder than silver healer (I failed the CM:Tank:silver once *shock*). And I have been MT'ing since vanilla, so I like to think that I know how to tank.

I ended up taking the tested and true method for bypassing underbalanced specs: I changed my other spec to resto and queue as healer. Resto is more or less unchanged in WoD and apart from some minor mana issues (due to lack of spirit on my gear) I am doing great. Healing heroics without major hick-ups at 609'sh gear.