[Guardian] Considering the jump?

[Deleted]

Guardians are fine on every fight that doesn't involve magic damage. It's absolutely horrendous on Imperator adds for instance.
Our DPS on the other hand is tragic.

Indeed. It's not like were the best tank, but in all honesty we are not that much behind. Dps is not that great though, compared to the other tanks. Especially single target damage could use a bump.

[CenariusTheForestLord]

Indeed. It's not like were the best tank, but in all honesty we are not that much behind. Dps is not that great though, compared to the other tanks. Especially single target damage could use a bump.

My damage taken (that I'm not already healing up) is 19% higher than my co-tank, who is a paladin and 17 ilvls below me. With a dps trinket.
I'm not dying consistently though on mythic content, so yes we're viable. But that's about all you can say about guardians right now...

[Deleted]

My damage taken (that I'm not already healing up) is 19% higher than my co-tank, who is a paladin and 17 ilvls below me. With a dps trinket.
I'm not dying consistently though on mythic content, so yes we're viable. But that's about all you can say about guardians right now...

I'm not having such large differences in damage taken once I take absorbs and healing into consideration. My co-tank is a warrior. Maybe its the difference between the paladin and a warrior.

I could lower my damage taken by having higher uptime on pulverize. Especially on the fights where I'm constantly tanking something. Though in most of the cases it just feels "wasted". I'm getting X amount of healing (mainly HoT's rolling) no matter if I press pulverize or not. So in theory I take slightly more damage, but then again I'm not causing any extra effort for the healers. Of course everything is situational like always.

I'm not saying that we don't need buffs, but I think bear community is bit overreacting the state of the bears. I agree that at the lower item level we are squishy and the whole feel of the class is bad. I had that feeling too. Until I started getting better gear. Having more rage to spend to FR just felt godsend. Quite a few times having that FR saved me in the situations, where my co-tank fell to the ground.

Thrash was just too good and Blizzard realized it. Maybe something like 30% nerf to direct damage would have been more suited, since high AoE dps was one of our strengths. Now our AoE dps is at the same level with the other tanks, maybe even worse on some cases. 50% nerf to thrash would have been okay if Blizzard would have compromised it by buffing lacerate or mangle. If the idea was to bring our AoE dps to the level of other tanks, then they could have buffed our single target damage to that level as well. But I guess it doesn't work like that.

Lower CD on barkskin would be nice, but then again I don't feel its that needed. Maybe Pulverize could consume one stack of lacerate or thrash. Other T7 talents have been buffed already, but I don't think it changed the whole row a lot. Downside of GoE has been eliminated at least, but it doesn't change the fact that the whole talent is situational. Its pretty much the same with the bristling fur.

[Deleted]

I'm not having such large differences in damage taken once I take absorbs and healing into consideration. My co-tank is a warrior. Maybe its the difference between the paladin and a warrior.

Have you actually checked your logs? Taking a look at Butcher we're both taking around 40-50% more damage (it's more pronounced on my logs as my Warrior took less damage than yours). We do heal for a lot but so do DKs and Monks, so given the choice why bring the Bear? It's not a fun thing to consider as someone who's been tanking as Bear since TBC launch.

I could lower my damage taken by having higher uptime on pulverize. Especially on the fights where I'm constantly tanking something. Though in most of the cases it just feels "wasted". I'm getting X amount of healing (mainly HoT's rolling) no matter if I press pulverize or not. So in theory I take slightly more damage, but then again I'm not causing any extra effort for the healers. Of course everything is situational like always.

Have you actually said this to your healers? I don't think you realise how much focus you're taking away from them.

I'm not saying that we don't need buffs, but I think bear community is bit overreacting the state of the bears. I agree that at the lower item level we are squishy and the whole feel of the class is bad. I had that feeling too. Until I started getting better gear. Having more rage to spend to FR just felt godsend. Quite a few times having that FR saved me in the situations, where my co-tank fell to the ground.

This is entirely Blizzard's fault, by nerfing our strongest area without any other real changes they've just exposed the flaws in the rest of our toolkit.

The majority of players seem to have accepted that a nerf to Thrash was justified and personally it always felt clunky having to spam Thrash over everything but the most irritating part about this change is it doesn't actually improve our quality of life as we still have to spam it for AOE.

Thrash was just too good and Blizzard realized it. Maybe something like 30% nerf to direct damage would have been more suited, since high AoE dps was one of our strengths. Now our AoE dps is at the same level with the other tanks, maybe even worse on some cases. 50% nerf to thrash would have been okay if Blizzard would have compromised it by buffing lacerate or mangle. If the idea was to bring our AoE dps to the level of other tanks, then they could have buffed our single target damage to that level as well. But I guess it doesn't work like that.

It's confusing because it was a huge nerf while they gave Warriors a solid buff, I don't begrudge Warriors the buffs as they clearly needed them but it's just led to Bears ending up last. I'm now finding I need to work harder than other tanks for the same results and that's ignoring our lack of utility, I used to pick up the adds on the final phase of Margok but now I'm stuck humping the boss around despite my toolkit being well suited to getting those adds.

Lower CD on barkskin would be nice, but then again I don't feel its that needed. Maybe Pulverize could consume one stack of lacerate or thrash. Other T7 talents have been buffed already, but I don't think it changed the whole row a lot. Downside of GoE has been eliminated at least, but it doesn't change the fact that the whole talent is situational. Its pretty much the same with the bristling fur.

The class needs a redesign, the band aid changes to the level 100 talents sends a worrying signal they don't really know how to fix Druids or even what's wrong as the changes don't really stop Pulverize being the best choice or improve the quality of life of Bears and they're terribly designed in comparison to other tanks where they actually have viable choices beyond damage reduction ability a, b or c.

At the very least Bears could use a 10-15% damage buff and the addition of a burst ability (like every other tank and like we used to have in NV before they nerfed it).

[Geckoo]

The class needs a redesign, the band aid changes to the level 100 talents sends a worrying signal they don't really know how to fix Druids or even what's wrong as the changes don't really stop Pulverize being the best choice or improve the quality of life of Bears and they're terribly designed in comparison to other tanks where they actually have viable choices beyond damage reduction ability a, b or c.

The biggest change would be to actually make pulverize baseline and change it so it doesn't depend on consuming 3 stacks of lacerate and can actually work well with berserk, incarnation or in AoE situations. That's something that has to happen and i hope they realize why. It seems like bear form has only a 10% DR because they assume that we'll have a 15% extra from pulverize, so better make it baseline to give some coherence to the whole class.

The other issues, and i know that pulverize is not the only 'bad' talent, just need small tweaks and QoL improvements.
- Having our mastery also have some impact in our dodge chance or savage defense to make our active mitigation conceptually stronger.
- allowing to battle rez in any form.
- Give bears a glyph that allows us to use displaced beast or dash in bear form.
- Instead of pulverize, a talent specially tailored to deal with magic damage that works with our toolset: our mastery can also absorb magic damage or when damaged by a magic attack you get X rage (let's not think about numbers here, but yes, if a magic attack deals 60% of your HP as damage, you get 60 rage)...
- Guardian of elune reduces CD and rage cost, but not duration and doesn't change the dodge chance. We don't need 100% dodge, but we do need less downtime between SD.
- BF change is good, but i think it should replace barskin and just make us choose between actual barskin or old barskin.

I don't know, there are tons of ideas that might work that don't need to redesign the whole class. Guardian druid is a mess, but is a playable mess that even makes sense.

[CenariusTheForestLord]

I'm not having such large differences in damage taken once I take absorbs and healing into consideration. My co-tank is a warrior. Maybe its the difference between the paladin and a warrior.

I co-tank with both a warrior and a paladin, the pala is new and lower geared than all of us, yet is beating us on DTPS and TMI even at his ilvl. Keeping up with our warrior is easier than with the pala. But I am doing considerably more work than he is. CD uptime is higher, AM uptime is higher... And our damage is abysmal compared to them. On AOE they are both dishing out between 27-30k and I'm here stuck at 21. ST is even worse, 23-24k against my 18.... If I'm not using pulverize i can maybe hit 20. But using pulverize consistently (to keep up with mitigated damage) drops everything to almost lower numbers than our healers.

- - - Updated - - -

Have you actually checked your logs? Taking a look at Butcher we're both taking around 40-50% more damage (it's more pronounced on my logs as my Warrior took less damage than yours). We do heal for a lot but so do DKs and Monks, so given the choice why bring the Bear? It's not a fun thing to consider as someone who's been tanking as Bear since TBC launch.

Same here, I'm actually gearing up a paladin. I'm hoping I'm wasting my time. I'll be happy to see BRF released and me just ignoring the paladin because they made class changes. It'll be a month of my life wasted, but at least I'll be playing my druid.
Right now on progress fights I can see I'm holding my team back, and that's never ever happened before.

[Deleted]

We do heal for a lot but so do DKs and Monks, so given the choice why bring the Bear? It's not a fun thing to consider as someone who's been tanking as Bear since TBC launch.

I agree with you and its true that we don't have certain gimmick which would make us wanted. After all we are the worst tank at the moment. My whole point was that the scenario is not as bad as it seems. At least I don't feel that situation is Tanks > Paper > Bear. Our "rotation" is bit clunky, but I have never played bear at the point where it didn't feel clunky compared to my paladin for example. Maybe its just me.

Have you actually said this to your healers? I don't think you realise how much focus you're taking away from them.

Yes, I think that is kinda natural discussion during progress. They said healing me was never a problem. Of course such things can be seen from logs as well. I know when I spike, so I can search that point at logs and review the healing that I have received. Search for things like: Loads of flash heal, healing surge etc. casted on me? Was our druid forced to use genesis? Life savers like LoH, Life Cocoon etc. used on me? Of course everyone fails at some point and I'm not saying that such scenarios have never occured, but they weren't consistent at all. I didn't really feel that my life was at stake during whole progress.

[exochaft]

I agree with you and its true that we don't have certain gimmick which would make us wanted. After all we are the worst tank at the moment. My whole point was that the scenario is not as bad as it seems. At least I don't feel that situation is Tanks > Paper > Bear. Our "rotation" is bit clunky, but I have never played bear at the point where it didn't feel clunky compared to my paladin for example. Maybe its just me.

You're not the only one, as outside of extreme cases Guardian survival is decently solid. I don't know if it's playstyle or reaction to our healers, but layering our actual damage mitigation tools keeps healers from freaking out goes a long way. In terms of needing external cooldowns, I felt as a Guardian I didn't need them nearly as much as our DK/warrior tanks outside of specific situations. I still had times where SD failed me (while I bring this up every xpac, the situations can happen and are dangerous), forcing me to use cooldowns/abilities that I really didn't want or risk dying. Short story is that using major CD's frequently helps our damage intake/stability, but the downside is that you may not have them for emergencies.

While some of the survival concerns stem from our toolkit or lack thereof, I kind of blame Blizz with their content design and tanking goals originally implying that tank damage would be less bursty and/or spread out over time. However, actual content on mythic has some creatures hitting ridiculously hard to where you could still get 2-3 shot before accounting for whatever else is damaging you, or the size of the hits are smaller but you're getting hit by a massive amount of them at the same time which equates to a quick death. From the toolkit aspect, some tanks get abilities that completely trivialize mechanics with ease while we're pretty clunky (staying in bear when using Displacer Beast would help immensely, but there is probably room for improvement beyond that) Gear certainly helps, however the pain is felt when you progress with less gear than one would like.

I suppose the bigger problem is if it takes more effort to do the same job as well as other tanks, and if our damage output is lacking compared to other tanks, bringing a Guardian to raid feels detrimental.

[Grayfeather]

So far the changes to GoE are going in the right direction, but the change to BF is just a joke really. Currently there isn't enough pull to make me want to stay, but the night is still young I think.

Anyone have the mapkin nath behind the FoN buff? Is the AI behind the treants still garbage?

[Deleted]

Thrash was just too good and Blizzard realized it. Maybe something like 30% nerf to direct damage would have been more suited, since high AoE dps was one of our strengths. Now our AoE dps is at the same level with the other tanks, maybe even worse on some cases. 50% nerf to thrash would have been okay if Blizzard would have compromised it by buffing lacerate or mangle. If the idea was to bring our AoE dps to the level of other tanks, then they could have buffed our single target damage to that level as well. But I guess it doesn't work like that.

I'm sorry, at the same level as other tanks? thats clearly not true, we're rock bottom on aoe damage amongst the tanks, impossible to even keep any kind of aoe threat from a warrior.

It's funny actually, they nerf bear aoe and buff warriors so now warriors are doing the same amount of aoe as bears used to do and bears are rock bottom, but apparently blizzard are ok with that.

[teddabear]

While some of the survival concerns stem from our toolkit or lack thereof, I kind of blame Blizz with their content design and tanking goals originally implying that tank damage would be less bursty and/or spread out over time. However, actual content on mythic has some creatures hitting ridiculously hard to where you could still get 2-3 shot before accounting for whatever else is damaging you, or the size of the hits are smaller but you're getting hit by a massive amount of them at the same time which equates to a quick death.

I never bought for a second that Blizzard would stick with their new healing philosophy and said so quite a few times. Besides the unreliable mitigation; the weaker taunts and mobility have been a problem for a long time now. Bears have almost zero utility to boot, especially when compared to Hands, Stuns and real Raid CDs. The level 100 talents are still brain dead, the Pulverize rotation is too restrictive to give Bears enough time to actually tank. It should be baseline and less restrictive. Preferably replaced with something creative. I know Blizzard hates to waste creativity on Bears but after 5 years they can throw you guys 1 bone.

[Deleted]

Which tank class seems to be the most fun to play and why? If you compare it to druids. I have only tanked as a druid in raids.

[Grayfeather]

Which tank class seems to be the most fun to play and why? If you compare it to druids. I have only tanked as a druid in raids.

So far I'm floored by how much more stuff you can accomplish with a Blood DK. I had hardly any buttons on my action bars for my Bear, so much so that I had to add a new bar for my DK. So many CDs....so many fun abilities.

The skill cap just seems higher (ie: pushing dps with BoS while still being an effective tank, Rolling CDs to cheese different mechanics, etc.). I was definitely overwhelmed with the kit the first few raids, but it is a breath of fresh air.

Only real cons are the lack of a stun (unless talented....but why would you take it over Death's Advance) and mobility (hopefully will change after I cap engi....[Go go engi love!]).

[teddabear]

So far I'm floored by how much more stuff you can accomplish with a Blood DK. I had hardly any buttons on my action bars for my Bear, so much so that I had to add a new bar for my DK. So many CDs....so many fun abilities.

The skill cap just seems higher (ie: pushing dps with BoS while still being an effective tank, Rolling CDs to cheese different mechanics, etc.). I was definitely overwhelmed with the kit the first few raids, but it is a breath of fresh air.

Only real cons are the lack of a stun (unless talented....but why would you take it over Death's Advance) and mobility (hopefully will change after I cap engi....[Go go engi love!]).

Indeed but I believe most people are of the opinion that DKs are the second worst tank after Bears. I didn't even mention the uber abilities some tanks have that entirely negate mechanics that can kill Guardians.

[Grayfeather]

It was really the double whammy effect of being the "worst tank" compared to other classes AND being the absolute most boring tank to play that made me really seriously consider swapping in the first place. DKs may not be top tier, but jeebus they are fun. There is actual fluidity and rhythm behind tanking properly instead of a dull 3-4 button "rotation."

[Farseer]

In revised 6.1 Patch notes, Mangle damage is now increased by 27%

Seems like a good change to me, dps during Berserk will be EPIC compared to before. No changes to survivability though. How do you guys feel about this?

[Deleted]

It's a start, I have a fairly well geared Brewmaster (677 atm) and it always seemed perverse I could hit harder with keg smash than mangle or pulverize considering Keg smash has no build up, is an aoe and the Brewmaster is under geared compared to my Druid.

This still doesn't fix the disconnect on Pulverize, the lackluster options for our level 100 talents, the lack of a burst ability, our relative weakness to any focused magic damage and the lack of utility.

[Deleted]

In revised 6.1 Patch notes, Mangle damage is now increased by 27%

Seems like a good change to me, dps during Berserk will be EPIC compared to before. No changes to survivability though. How do you guys feel about this?

Based on some napkin math, some really bad logs of mine, and Simcraft, I'd say its ballpark ~6% increase overall. I guess it will play well with Berserk, buts its a very boring change.

I've played my bear since TBC, having already tanked as a warrior and paladin before that. Every expansion I've gone through the same should-I-shouldn't-I about re-rolling, but I've stuck with my bear. I think its finally time that changed.

I like what they tried to do with bears this expansion. We do have high healing, and Ursa Major is meant to give us lots of health - we're like the spongy bear tank of old, where we have big health pools and big heals. I like that, being an effective-health based tank is fun, but its too unbalanced at the moment. I'm not dying, even when I spike healers have plenty of time to respond; but that's kind of the problem. I depend on those healers to heal up the damage I take, and since we're being all spongy I take more than the other tanks (and they don't die through lack of EH either). All the 6.1 changes serve to decrease our spikyness; they don't really decrease our overall damage intake or improve our healing intake which really shows that Blizzard don't know what they want with us at the moment. We have half a toolkit based on EH-style tanking (soak the spikes and heal it back) and half a toolkit based on typical DR-style tanking (don't take spikes).

Even though I'm not dying, I'm a mana-drain for our healers and that holds us back a lot on fights like M Butcher/Bracken.

It's always going to be difficult to balance that EH-style of tank, but if that's the way they want to go with druids they need to address our healing problems, not the spiky problems. The old glyph of frenzied regen was along the right lines for this expansion, but there are much more creative ways to solve it. It would be great to see a level-100 talent along these lines - something like increasing healing received actively/passively. Even just a buff to DoC which improves its reliability (i.e. not so proc-based and not stuck on the GCD) might be enough.

Having said all that, I could live with the current state of druids if our only job was to stand still and take hits. We have a boring job there, a slow 4-spell rotation, simple AM and simple cooldowns. That's fine, I'm raidleading so I'm not exactly bored. As soon as we are required to do anything 'special' though, we just don't have the abilities there to do it well. We have decent movement talents and we have a ranged silence, that's basically it. Every druid brings HoTW, typhoon and vortex and their usage is very situational anyway.

Playing my monk in our mythic farm raid yesterday (at 650 ilvl), it felt like I had something for every situation. Aoe taunts, aoe stun, statue, ranged threat, aoe slows, flexible AM, a useful choice of talents (dampen harm vs magic, chi explosion vs serenity, etc., etc.). It was interesting, exciting and effective. I was spiky, but at 30ilvls lower than my druid that's hardly surprising - and the spikes still weren't killing me (so what's the point in all that EH Mr. Bear?). The healers enjoyed healing me too.

The DPS doesn't concern me too much, and it seems like they're on the right lines with balancing that between tank classes too.

I had to rant.

TL;DR: It feels like they tried to make us an effective-health based tank without giving us the self-healing or healing-taken buffs to accommodate. We can soak more damage than other tanks but we rely on our healers to bring our health back up which costs them a lot of mana and aggravation, holding us back on progress. Recent 6.1 'changes' are trying to make us less spiky, which isn't the problem anyway. On top of that, our utility is terrible. I'm rolling (with momentum) to my monk. One day, they will work out how to make our EH-based style work and druids will be FOTM... but I'm bored of holding my breath.

[Alianthos]

I main Resto but I've been OS as a bear from time to time.

Don't you guys believe when are going be SICK as raid tiers advances ? Like at the end of BRF already, full BRF heroic/mythic gear, so much mastery/crit, HUGE health pool, some decent avoidance... I mean it would still be spiky somehow, but when you reach +600k hp unbuff, does it matter really ?

I seriously feel that we were somehow weaksauce during Highmaul but Guardians will become monsters when T17 and mythic BRF gear starts to come in.

Thoughts ?

[exochaft]

Don't you guys believe when are going be SICK as raid tiers advances ? Like at the end of BRF already, full BRF heroic/mythic gear, so much mastery/crit, HUGE health pool, some decent avoidance... I mean it would still be spiky somehow, but when you reach +600k hp unbuff, does it matter really ?

I seriously feel that we were somehow weaksauce during Highmaul but Guardians will become monsters when T17 and mythic BRF gear starts to come in.

Thoughts ?

Perhaps the concern is more about the journey than the end of the road. While we may end up being very powerful at the end of WoD, it doesn't really help bears out if they can't do well until they're all geared out in the best-of-the-best gear. Also, while a Guardian's ability to tank may increase very well with gear, it's not like the other tanks won't have similar benefit. I suppose the same could be said for our damage output, as it's only really a concern during progression versus farming content in preparation for the next content. If we're talking the jump between Highmaul and BRF, it's only 10 ilvls difference between gear on corresponding difficulties versus the heroic dungeon to normal Highmaul difference of 25 ilvls (or 55 ilvls if you go from heroic dungeons to mythic).

I also don't like thinking of our high HP pool (especially inflated with multistrike) as an advantage over other tanks, as it's a double-edged sword in terms of our ability to tank. If we are really designed need that extra HP to live, that's a sizable amount of extra healing that healers are going to need to provide to keep us alive. If we don't need that extra HP... well, what's the point if it's not necessary? The middle ground is that it potentially allows healers to be more efficient in terms of their heals and cooldown usage on a Guardian compared to other tanks. Whether that actually ends up occurring is quite another matter.

Don't get me wrong, I think Guardians will get better as the expansion progresses, but there are some facets of the total bear package that will still have us lagging other tanks despite our gear scaling.