[MoP Bear] Guardian Druid MoP Discussion Thread

[Elunedra]

Reading the updates to this thread gives me no hope for being a Bear tank in Mists. I understand the reasoning for wanting active tanking, but I don't want to be doing math and watching 100 extra timer bars while trying to tank. I want to go back to tanking in TBC where you stack stam, focus on specific threat generation/trading threat with tanks on non tauntable bosses, and moving/positioning like you are supposed to.

Fire add tanking on Illidan was challenging where I had to look at the game to know what to do, not stare at bars to make sure I was maximizing my damage reduction uptimes. This is a terribly sad day for bears everywhere.

dont wurry bear tanking is piss easy you can basicly macro it all under 1 button and spam it.
all you have todo is use SD each time you can, or FR if its damage that cant be dodged

the rest is as simpel as magle spam whit some trash and lacarate and such.

bears be the most boring class to tank with tbh

[Hinalover]

If you really want, if you use power auras or Weak auras (both viable) you can make conditional auras to say

a) Rage >= 60 then show X icon

b) If Savage Defense stack > 0 then show Y icon.

That is all you REALLY need to know for your resources. Yes there is others (Mangle procs, Thrash debuff, etc) but in terms of mitigation point of view those two is all you need.

[Kujako]

Reading the updates to this thread gives me no hope for being a Bear tank in Mists. I understand the reasoning for wanting active tanking, but I don't want to be doing math and watching 100 extra timer bars while trying to tank. I want to go back to tanking in TBC where you stack stam, focus on specific threat generation/trading threat with tanks on non tauntable bosses, and moving/positioning like you are supposed to.

Fire add tanking on Illidan was challenging where I had to look at the game to know what to do, not stare at bars to make sure I was maximizing my damage reduction uptimes. This is a terribly sad day for bears everywhere.

From my tests, you can still tank well enough by spamming a single macro and occasionally hitting a defensive cool down. Frankly, the changes seem to be change for changes sake. I dont really see the point in modifying how every single ability works if the end result is going to be more or less the same.

[aggixx]

From my tests, you can still tank well enough by spamming a single macro and occasionally hitting a defensive cool down. Frankly, the changes seem to be change for changes sake. I dont really see the point in modifying how every single ability works if the end result is going to be more or less the same.

Well, the difference from cataclysm is that executing the rotation correctly instead of facerolling affects your survival, not just your DPS, which is a definitely a good thing.

[Kelimbror]

dont wurry bear tanking is piss easy you can basicly macro it all under 1 button and spam it.
all you have todo is use SD each time you can, or FR if its damage that cant be dodged

the rest is as simpel as magle spam whit some trash and lacarate and such.

bears be the most boring class to tank with tbh

Yes, but I am a perfectionist. I'm going to want to go in depth with the numbers if that actually is where the weight of the action is. I'm just afraid that because of the design they will make other things suffer. I guess I'm just an old schooler who liked when being able to always have aggro and/or drop it when needed made you a great tank. Not to mention that it used to be if tanks made a mistake the whold raid wiped. It was, imo, a much better skill level plateau.

I just can hear the cries of healers blaming tanks not using enough dmg reduction as to why they went OOM and we wiped 10 minutes later. "Well Mr. Bear, recount shows you had SD up 60% of the time. If you had it up 65% of the time we would not be failing right now. God you suck"

[Kujako]

I just can hear the cries of healers blaming tanks not using enough dmg reduction as to why they went OOM and we wiped 10 minutes later. "Well Mr. Bear, recount shows you had SD up 60% of the time. If you had it up 65% of the time we would not be failing right now. God you suck"

Sounds like you need to find a better class of healer to play with. Frankly, I dont anticipate using Savage Defense that much because the hard hitting stuff cant be dodged and even if you have it up 100% of the time it may have no effect. Its a poorly designed ability in my opinion. Passive dodge is fine because in the long run it pays off, activated dodge feels like a poor mechanic because it costs a lot of resources to use and could do nothing to effect your survivability. With the number of short cool down self heals and direct damage reductions I dont think its going to be that much of a requirement to keep SD up all the time.

[Arielle]

Sounds like you need to find a better class of healer to play with. Frankly, I dont anticipate using Savage Defense that much because the hard hitting stuff cant be dodged and even if you have it up 100% of the time it may have no effect. Its a poorly designed ability in my opinion. Passive dodge is fine because in the long run it pays off, activated dodge feels like a poor mechanic because it costs a lot of resources to use and could do nothing to effect your survivability. With the number of short cool down self heals and direct damage reductions I dont think its going to be that much of a requirement to keep SD up all the time.

It all depends on the encounter.

For something like Zon'Ozz or Blackhorn, you'd be doing it very wrong by not using SD. On the flipside for Yor'Sahj or Madness, FR is better.

[Kelimbror]

Sounds like you need to find a better class of healer to play with. Frankly, I dont anticipate using Savage Defense that much because the hard hitting stuff cant be dodged and even if you have it up 100% of the time it may have no effect. Its a poorly designed ability in my opinion. Passive dodge is fine because in the long run it pays off, activated dodge feels like a poor mechanic because it costs a lot of resources to use and could do nothing to effect your survivability. With the number of short cool down self heals and direct damage reductions I dont think its going to be that much of a requirement to keep SD up all the time.

Oh my healers won't have a problem. I will make sure to properly blame their poor overhealing and the dps standing in fire. I'm of course just making an amusing point, but one nonetheless that will be encountered by lots of people.

It all depends on the encounter.

For something like Zon'Ozz or Blackhorn, you'd be doing it very wrong by not using SD. On the flipside for Yor'Sahj or Madness, FR is better.

And this is just the problem. SD, regardless of the percentage is subject to terrible spouts of RNG. I think Hit, Dodge, Splat is a terrible way to design encounters. It's been something we've seen for far too long. Not to mention that you can't dodge spells. I think you start getting too far into theorycrafting just to play your class if you have to calculate for each boss whether SD or FR is going to provide more survivability....this was kinda my original point.

I think they are trying to go the right direction, but in all the wrong ways. I would honestly just prefer much harder movement, add pickup, and boss mechanics, instead of all this numbery garbage to min/max.

[Arielle]

I think you start getting too far into theorycrafting just to play your class if you have to calculate for each boss whether SD or FR is going to provide more survivability....this was kinda my original point.

There really isn't any numbery stuff. It's just a simple question: "Can you Dodge it?"

[Kelimbror]

There really isn't any numbery stuff. It's just a simple question: "Can you Dodge it?"

Sure let's completely disregard probability as a mathematical concept at the expense of feeling witty.

[Arielle]

Sure let's completely disregard probability as a mathematical concept at the expense of feeling witty.

You're comparing "less effective but consistent" against "more effective but less consistent". Determining the sources of damage you are taking is something you should be doing as a tank anyway. It's not a new concept.

Once you know where the damage is coming from, you know what you should be using for which situations. It's nothing more different than knowing the optimal way to use your cooldowns. Is there a chance that you will not Dodge a hit when Savage Defense is active? Sure. Most boss melee swings are normalized to 1.5s, so it's around 2.5% or so. Less as your gear improves over the course of the expansion.

[Kelimbror]

You're comparing "less effective but consistent" against "more effective but less consistent". Determining the sources of damage you are taking is something you should be doing as a tank anyway. It's not a new concept.

Once you know where the damage is coming from, you know what you should be using for which situations. It's nothing more different than knowing the optimal way to use your cooldowns. Is there a chance that you will not Dodge a hit when Savage Defense is active? Sure. Most boss melee swings are normalized to 1.5s, so it's around 2.5% or so. Less as your gear improves over the course of the expansion.

The whole point is that in order to max your potential of the least amount of damage taken, you need to take into account all kinds of random factors on top of abilities for each fight. It should either be, this fight is mostly physical damage so I'm going to use SD the whole time/this fight is mostly magic damage I'm going to use FR the whole time and that is the ONLY way to be the most effective.

However, given the nature of dodge, DRs, RNG, etc.......you have no idea what is going to actually provide a better chance at success. Maybe I've just been burned way too many times on RNG splat to be able to support this system. I'd rather SD increase something guaranteed, just like FR is guaranteed to heal you. I don't like wasting resources on 'chances', no matter how high they are.

[Arielle]

The whole point is that in order to max your potential of the least amount of damage taken, you need to take into account all kinds of random factors on top of abilities for each fight. It should either be, this fight is mostly physical damage so I'm going to use SD the whole time/this fight is mostly magic damage I'm going to use FR the whole time and that is the ONLY way to be the most effective.

However, given the nature of dodge, DRs, RNG, etc.......you have no idea what is going to actually provide a better chance at success. Maybe I've just been burned way too many times on RNG splat to be able to support this system. I'd rather SD increase something guaranteed, just like FR is guaranteed to heal you. I don't like wasting resources on 'chances', no matter how high they are.

What does DR have to do with anything?

[Kelimbror]

What does DR have to do with anything?

It makes the values change as you progress through gear...which alters the numbers you have to factor in to your play choices. Since you clearly have no meaningful input on anything I'm commenting on, I guess I have no need to continue trying to discuss this. There's clearly a disconnect between someone wanting to post just to read their own words and someone who actually wants to have conversation.

It's ok to be mad that someone disagrees with you. I can just look at your own post history to say that Guardian tanking involves way too much math over the last couple of iterations on our abilities. So your past self proved me right anyways.

I'm so sorry that you lost your way. Have a great week anyways.

[Arielle]

It makes the values change as you progress through gear

To which values are you referring?

All it means is that it takes more Dodge Rating and/or Agility to gain a static percentage (usually normalized to 1%) additional Dodge when you add more to your gear.

In all honesty I'm just getting confused by your statements and trying to figure out what exactly it is that you are talking about.

[exochaft]

In all honesty I'm just getting confused by your statements and trying to figure out what exactly it is that you are talking about.

I'm slightly confused, as well, but I'll see if I can get close to hitting the nail on the head.

I think Kittyvicious is of the mindset that regardless of how much dodge SD provides, if we cannot be unhittable when we use SD it has the potential to be a waste of rage. The simple view is that SD has two problems as a cooldown: using SD results in the bear getting hit since it doesn't guarantee a non-hit, using SD results in the bear not getting hit but perhaps the bear would've avoided it anyways w/o SD.

I do have some issues with SD in this regard, because you cannot use SD and say, "Yup, using SD really saved me there!" Maybe it did, maybe it didn't... while active in use, SD provides a very passive defense. While statistically it may be a very good defense, the results will justify whether using SD was good or not. If you avoid every attack while SD is up, the best we can say is that SD allowed that to happen. If we do not avoid attacks (or don't avoid all of them, which I've seen happen on the beta a couple times), the usage of SD will seem like a waste when we could've pooled rage for FR instead.

So I think Kitty's view comes down to that he/she doesn't like that a major tanking cooldown still has an element of RNG involved and has the potential to "fail." While I personally would like SD to guarantee something, I think Blizz is okay with SD's current state since they're advocates of always having a bit of RNG built into everything. Plus, as we can infer from blue posts, SD is supposed to be better than FR on average when your concern is typically melee, and they'll design it around this assumption. About the only time people will likely see SD "failing" is if they're pushing the limits of the content they can tackle, but with our Mastery/armor and how hard/often raid bosses are hitting, I don't think this will break Guardian druids.

Honestly, I haven't recently had an instance of bad avoidance RNG being the sole cause of my death other than heroic Chimaeron and perhaps heroic Baleroc (but those were implemented on purpose). Almost all cases of bad RNG avoidance directly leading to tank splat was left in WotLK and before. The trend for raids is suppose to lean away from boss melee/basic attacks insta-gibbing tanks, beyond mechanics designed to do so (which all tanks' equivalent of SD should not be useful). In this environment, the design of SD works well since even if it does fail, it shouldn't kill you... and if it works, even better.

*edit* - For Kitty's sake, I just wanted to mention that even the current version of SD on live is highly subject to RNG. Early in Cataclysm, half the battle was being able to proc an SD bubble (which disappeared in one hit then), which was a chance on crit. I had times when I would crit the brains out of a boss and not have SD proc once for extended periods of time. With changes to SD, such as allow the absorb to persist if it wasn't totally depleted and our tier set bonus allowing a higher chance to proc SD, the RNG involved has been slightly obscured with SD, but it still exists. The RNG with Cataclysm SD is its activation: a chance to activate on a chance to crit. The RNG with MoP SD is the effect: a chance to avoid melee attacks. I suppose Cataclysm guaranteed that SD would do something, MoP guarantees that you can use SD when you want.

[Kelimbror]

*snip*

Dear lord thank you. There's only so much I can type at work on flu meds and try to get a point across. This is definitely part of what goes in to my thinking...I'm just putting a whole lot more into how we can completely calculate the value of it as well, though this is getting into theoretical math. Now that you've elaborated on the basis of my thinking, it makes me realize how much more I hate it.

It's like they took the Moonwell phial and made it the crux of our tanking 'rotation'...does no one else see how this is silly? If they let it absorb a percent of damage and also add dodge, I would at least concede that there is something we can see 100% of the time for our efforts. I just don't think straight dodge is really attractive or rewarding. I even felt shitty having to gem for it last xpac...probably will feel shitty gemming for it again since the values have doubled over stat gems.

Then what are we going to get, trinkets with on use dodge? Are they going to put dodge in our dodge so we can dodge while we dodge?

[Deleted]

What i dont like is that loads of bosses in mop have attacks that do shitloads of damage, and all we can do is hope we dodge or use a heal after and hope we even survive it. meanwhile paladins and warriors just pop there 45% damagereduce shit 1sec befor and know how much damage they might take if they dont dodge it. warriors also have Shield Barrier for magic superattacks, but we stand there with our random dodge and a heal :[. dont think they will be able to balance it good at all tbh

[exochaft]

What i dont like is that loads of bosses in mop have attacks that do shitloads of damage, and all we can do is hope we dodge or use a heal after and hope we even survive it. meanwhile paladins and warriors just pop there 45% damagereduce shit 1sec befor and know how much damage they might take if they dont dodge it. warriors also have Shield Barrier for magic superattacks, but we stand there with our random dodge and a heal :[. dont think they will be able to balance it good at all tbh

I suppose the best way I should respond is that Blizz wants all the tanks to have a different flavor?

The one thing that really separates Guardians from all the other tanks is the level of passive damage reduction we have. Unless I'm mistaken, we still have the best passive magic damage reduction build into Bear Form. I know all the non-druid tank specs have damage reduction built into their tanking specs, however I think our 25% magic damage reduction and armor mitigation should beat all other tanks from a passive perspective (Monks I'm still not sure of, I haven't raided with any yet). Simply put, anything that gets through and hits us should hit a tank of another class for more innately, perhaps with the slight exception to Monks and their Stagger mechanic... Guardians should take less damage overall for the received attack may be a better way to put it.

So, if a Guardian druid takes less damage when hit, the other tanks need a way to be "on par" with druid tanks. The model ends up being that when a non-druid tank uses their active mitigation, they should reduce the damage more than what a druid tank passively does. Now, let's assume druids are designed around having a higher pure avoidance than other tanks over a fight (via SD), so the other tanks needs to be able to reduce the damage they take even more with their active mitigation buttons. THAT'S why non-druid active mitigation abilities look so good on their own.

Of course, the obvious flaw is when receiving fatal or high dangerous levels of damage... if these attacks can be dodged/blocked/parried/etc, this system can easily fail. For example, think of fights where there's an insta-kill mechanic that a tank needs to eat: if some tanks can use their SD/FR equivalents to mitigate the damage and others cannot, that is a huge problem. What Blizz has to ensure with their new active mitigation model for tanks is that no one tank is glaringly better than the others (or that one tank is glaringly worse than the rest).

Another touchy area would be all the attacks in between auto/basic attacks and insta-tank killers. These attacks are ones that happen too often to be able to use major/external CDs, but they occur seldom enough that we can plan for them. This will likely be where most people will say one tank is better than another based upon their short-term active mitigation CDs. Guardian druids will likely lag when proactive damage mitigation surpasses reactive damage mitigation, since FR is a heal instead of an absorb and SD doesn't guarantee you can avoid an attack. However, I don't think we'll get into the scenario where all other tanks except druids can use their short-duration active mitigation abilities to survive, leaving druids dead in the water.

[Deleted]

What you guys seem to neglect is the fact that druid tanks always had and come MoP will still have the highest raw HP. That and our mastery being pure passive mitigation against physical damage means we will be able to soak higher damage before dying when we actually DON'T dodge that one hit/attack during SD. And that's the mechanic Blizzard seems to have intended for us. That's what separates us from the other tanks who rely on mitigating incoming damage through active abilities because as pointed out already, the damage they receive when the hit comes through is mitigated much less by their armor or whatnot.