[Guardian] - Patch 5.4 Survival Guide

[Wojtek]

I've got my RPS and survival trinkets nailed down now. What are the best trinkets for straight up bear DPS?

[siccora]

I don'T want to start an new thred, so i post my question in here. i am a monk main tank, played pretty much every tank class in this game, most of the time prot (BT, SWP old times) and a guardian (cata).
so with the start of mop, my raid leader told me, that guardians are bad now and i should consider taking a monk. so i did that. i am very happy with the monk but with the OQ and flex stuff i want to play my druid again. and now my question. what is the benefid of playing a guardian? what is it that guards are good at? the way i see it, i have a good self heal with YG and with FR. i have pretty much HIGH armor and a nice stam buff. but do i take lesser dmg then other tanks from pysical dmg? i don't want to put guards in a bad spot, but in any situation, a monk is better or not? i just want so know some good reasons why to play a guardian at all.

[Arielle]

I've got my RPS and survival trinkets nailed down now. What are the best trinkets for straight up bear DPS?

Dunno. The STR amp trinket (forget what it is), Hubris, and the multistrike trinket are all "ok". Nothing is as good as RoRo used to be obviously, but unfortunately the only way to know for sure is to sim it.

And I've had better things to do recently :|

i have pretty much HIGH armor and a nice stam buff. but do i take lesser dmg then other tanks from pysical dmg? i don't want to put guards in a bad spot, but in any situation, a monk is better or not? i just want so know some good reasons why to play a guardian at all.

Better DPS at low Vengeance, capable of off-role functionality, better at handling magic damage.

The only things monks are inherently better at are soaking things that weren't intended to be soaked in the first place (Malkorok Heroic), and raid healing while tanking since BrM's is passive and an abosrb, and ours is neither.

In the end, play whatever you want to play.

[Mandibleclaw]

As Guardians are designed right now, I wouldn't touch it, either. That's partly why we scoff at the FR glyph, since changing how FR works could have a vast impact on how Guardians work.

Looking in the long term, if aspects of Guardian design change, FR will likely have to change with them. Part of the function of FR is to fill in that glaring gap of what do Guardians do if we can't rely on avoiding mechanics and have to eat them in the face... if that gap is fill by another ability or a change to our abilities/toolkit, FR may have to evolve into something else.

That being said, I'm completely against a total revamp of Guardians, and I'm pretty sure Blizz is, too. Blizz has mentioned countless times that they don't want players to feel like they're playing a new class every expansion, and while there are likely tanking changes to come, the core Guardian toolkit should remain on some level. Going from Cataclysm to MoP was a pretty radical shift in how we were playing bears, doing so in the next expansion would likely be frowned upon.

Well I don't rly want it to be anything specific, for example a number of people are demanding the absorbs back, I just want it to feel like "druid".. I mean shields are coming to play with warriors and palas, and the stagger for monks makes sense, the magical shield of DKs too, I just dont want to be given an ability that doesnt feel like my class for the sake of balance and for druids to feel equal. To add, I feel awesome when im downing bosses with a spec that some people are considering underpowered, but I never felt this way. I just want mechanics that feels like us, and yea so Im with u, Im against doing a revamp of the class and how we work, Im happy being called a dodge whore, and having for example a whooping 10 HITS Dodge in a row on garrosh, feels awesome.

[Deleted]

Frenzy Regen may get adapted to give us a temporary hp boost to alleviate damage that cannot be mitigated through out current toolkit. Perhaps keeping the heal effect and increasing maximum health by 40% of active vengeance for 4 seconds?
Could be pretty sick and means we can keep our Savage Defense mitigation. Obviously the heal and hp boost effect would need some balancing. But I think it could provide a good fix.

[exochaft]

Frenzy Regen may get adapted to give us a temporary hp boost to alleviate damage that cannot be mitigated through out current toolkit. Perhaps keeping the heal effect and increasing maximum health by 40% of active vengeance for 4 seconds?
Could be pretty sick and means we can keep our Savage Defense mitigation. Obviously the heal and hp boost effect would need some balancing. But I think it could provide a good fix.

That's the heart of one of the big "problems" with Guardians: our survival is mostly passive. Yes, we need to push buttons for SD and FR to survive, but SD is still not guaranteed (unless Blizz adapts the mechanic to be a guaranteed avoidance with SD up a la Klaxxi abilities) and FR an after-the-fact ability. However, Guardians have been getting constant buffs to survival throughout this expansion to deal with burst damage and huge hits that SD may not or cannot avoid. Out of all the tanking classes, we struggle with using active mitigation to guarantee some level of survival before the hit... instead we currently are tuned to take a beating and recover as best as possible. That puts a severe damper on encounter mechanics, so much that Guardians received the reduced CD on Barkskin in 5.4 to keep the mechanics in the game.

It's a battle between the active mitigation model for tanks and keeping tank flavor for each class while avoiding homogenization. It may come down to having our AM buttons increase our armor/HP on a frequent basis, as Guardians have been the kings of these areas of tanking. It's possible to marry the two concepts for Guardians into a package that fits both ideas, but we'll have to wait until 6.0 at the very least.

[Maximum]

Shout out to the guardians out there. I publicced this for a moment to say guardians OP. Solo tank malkorok 25 M H.


http://i.imgur.com/2P2bEHW.png

[Elunedra]

nice , keep up the good work

[Maximum]

I'm mainly Feral so I couldn't really go in with optimal trinkets, what I used to do it were a 543 rentakis and a 566 juggernauts focusing crystal i got on farm, I would Have liked to do it in 549 talisman and a vial, or possibly a multistrike from this teir. However as much as I do not like Juggernauts concept of a trinket it is decent for that fight, it did close to 10 million healing over the fight and it works so strong with NV giving 25% of the healing you get into damage, interestingly giving me about 4-5k more dps. At the end I was really hoping to get good dodges, as I wouldn't want to see two melees in a row with 78 stacks :0.

[Mandibleclaw]

Noticed now that after being in full normal gear, you have so much crit that u can no longer consider crit gear as BiS for some heroic loots and u can start buffing other stats (haste excluded). What I mean is I got the immersus mastery/haste heroic neck for example from a coin roll, I wasn't too happy abt it, but as it was warforged I decided to wear it anyway and reforge to crit, my stats barely shifted Im still at 78.8% crit and i buffed another corner in my stats, which im very happy abt bcz I rly hate wasted stats.

[aggixx]

On the flipside, you'd have hard time acquiring so many crit pieces that you couldn't reforge down to crit cap, so even after you reach that point crit should still be preferrable.

[Elunedra]

why did you say (haste excluded) as haste is generly the way to go after crit cap

[aggixx]

He means that mastery is the only stat whose perceived value changes when you reach crit cap; haste is already good pre-cap and you should've already been striving to get it (as a second priority) so nothing changes there.

[Wojtek]

Picked up the multistrike trinket off dark shaman last night. Seems to be between 4-5% of my DPS. I really wish I knew how to run sims.

[exochaft]

While 5.4.1 should be uneventful and unchanging, had something odd happen in SoO tonight. During Galakras tonight, I had the rare occurrence of dying... especially since it appeared I was pretty much one-shot during an uneventful moment. After checking the combat log and WoL parse, I was actually crit by Galakras and two adds for my entire HP bar. Needless to say, I put my tanking cloak back on for the rest of the night just in case, and no, I wasn't sitting or anything obviously like that (was literally crit in bear form). Anyone else notice odd things like that?

[Arielle]

WTB Log.

10char

[Deleted]

Which level 90 talents gives you the most DPS, assuming you won't use the Heart of the Wild buff for DPS'ing.

6% agility better than nature's vigil or 10% critchance on mangle?

[Wojtek]

Can you still get crit in bear if you sit?

[Arielle]

Which level 90 talents gives you the most DPS, assuming you won't use the Heart of the Wild buff for DPS'ing.

6% agility better than nature's vigil or 10% critchance on mangle?

Well, we know that NV is 3.333333% DPS if used on CD (which you should be anyway).

The DPS increase from DoC depends on your Crit (obviously). Assuming you're softcapped it'll be ~5.6% DPS increase to Mangle. Since Mangle makes up about ~20% of your total DPS (varying by encounter), it's at best a 1% DPS increase if you don't use any HTs. But if you're not using HT you might as well take NV for more DPS and healing.

You take DoC for the healing, not the DPS.

HotW's 6% Agility comes out to somewhere between 1.5% and 3-4% of your total AP depending on the encounter - although it's usually closer to the bottom than the top. You also gain a couple of percentage points of Crit. Put those together and it winds up being somewhere around where NV is, certainly within variance anyway.

But again, you gain 0 healing.

TLDR: DoC and HotW are better if you make use of the actives. Otherwise NV is better.

Can you still get crit in bear if you sit?

Yes.

[Braindwen]

Well, we know that NV is 3.333333% DPS if used on CD (which you should be anyway).

It's 12% increased damage while active now, so that'd be 4%.
It also ends up being slightly higher if spammed on CD since the 1/3rd uptime is the bare minimum (for a fight length divisible by 90s) and because of the <1% DPS increase that it gives when combined with the 4pc.

The conclusions are right, though, so really I'm just quibbling .


Edit:

So I was just messing around with rune+Vial to see how high I could push my mastery.
What I noticed was my armor on the character sheet was capping out at 85% reduction now. I know you've mentioned this potentially happening sometime, so do you know anything about this Arielle? I don't have time at the moment to check if it's actually capping out higher, just wondering if you've heard of it.



Edit 2:

Class is over, got to check it. At least on these dread waste quest mobs, armor is still capping out at 75% (comparing "unmitigated" damage from vengeance gains to actual damage taken). Looks to be a character sheet tooltip quirk.