[Guardian] - Patch 5.4 Survival Guide

[Viromand]

got a question: does the fatal strike from raden mitigate armor?

[kaiadam]

Fairly sure fatal strike hits you for 75% of your max hp. Only absorbs seem to work at reducing the damage - active cds like shieldwall and barkskin or passives like thick hide, defensive stance, etc. are all ignored.

[Viromand]

just asking cause ist physical,

And the other thing since its the next melee attack and TnC counts as absorb is it affected by that?

I was goint though my logs and logs from other druids with RoRo and I take 50k dmg less per fatal than other tanks with RoRo, abosrb is about the same so dont know on that part I used bloodlust cause I thought it would be affected by amor

[Braindwen]

And the other thing since its the next melee attack and TnC counts as absorb is it affected by that?

Looking at some logs, nope.

All you can really do is make sure you're above 75% HP when it hits and have SD active, and heal up quickly after. CDs help cushion damage around it, and thanks to the stupid way stuff that ignores DR works make you get more vengeance from the fatal strike itself. But the ability is pretty much a 20% nerfed physical decimation blade that can't be dodged and hits every ~12s.

[Sonnillon]

I am going over the loot list, and are those all the trinkets we have he chance to choose from or am I missing something?

Rook's Unlucky Talisman

Assurance of Consequence

Juggernaut's Focusing Crystal

Haromm's Talisman

Vial of Living Corruption

Sigil of Rampage

Ticking Ebon Detonator

Curse of Hubris

[exochaft]

I am going over the loot list, and are those all the trinkets we have he chance to choose from or am I missing something?

Rook's Unlucky Talisman

Assurance of Consequence

Juggernaut's Focusing Crystal

Haromm's Talisman

Vial of Living Corruption

Sigil of Rampage

Ticking Ebon Detonator

Curse of Hubris

Think those are pretty much it for SoO trinkets off the top of my head. Most are situational at best, however that's how it goes for tanking trinkets generally.

Just wanted to note for the Rook's trinket, after testing it on the PTR the on-use ability does not seem to reduce damage conal AoE that are tank-swap mechanics, but it does work for others. I'm starting to think it doesn't work for directional AoE, only omnidirectional AoE... didn't get a chance to test 25man heroic Immersius to see if it would reduce damage from sitting in puddles. Unfortunately, most AoE we'll encounter that the trinket reduces will not be threatening in the least, thanks to 4PT16 and FR. Best case scenario for this trinket will probably be helping healers ignore you less during AoE damage-intensive phases... maybe if you're dying to having a debuff that makes AoE damage on top of that dangerous, that actually does happen often enough.

[Sonnillon]

In either case, as usual will be needing on all of them. Though at first glance, those all seem so.... useless x_x. Only good for the stamina you get from those...

[exochaft]

About the only reason to use any of the trinkets in SoO is for survival, since none of them are as strong as ToT trinkets for RPS. That being said, our RPS will be high enough that we can likely drop RPS trinkets for more EH via the trinkets if desired. The damage output of the Multistrike/Cleave trinkets is pretty small as a Guardian, even on encounters where they might seem powerful (using the Cleave trinket on the Spoils encounter, which is basically an adds fight for those that don't know, only yielded sub-3% damage gains). Legendary DPS items seem to always yield better results on any fight over those trinkets for Guardian, it just comes down to how much survival/mitigation people personally want to trade off for a small damage increase.

[Maximum]

Hello Guardian Community! My name is Maximum/Maximonk from <Duality> on Zul'jin. I rarely post on forums, but I saw a lot of information I wanted to comment on while stumbliung across this after being up all night.

Guardian is my old main spec but i'll be switching to it again this teir. Most of my logs were private as are my brewmasters but there are some public logs here to show my validity
- won't let me post links so just take out the spaces
ht t p : / / r a i d b o t s . c o m / e p e e n b o t / u s / m a l ' g a n i s / m a x i m u m /
h t t p : / / r a i d b o t s . c o m / e p e e n b o t / e u / m a l ' g a n i s / m a x i m u m /
h t t p : / / r a i d b o t s . c o m /e p e e n b o t / u s /D a l a r a n / m a x i m u m /
h t t p : / / r a i d b o t s . c o m / e p e e n b o t / u s / m a l f u r i o n / m a x i m u m /
-These are all my old guardian logs that were public, so this is about 20% of them. or maybe less. I had gotten 38 rank ones that teir, most of them was beating my old rank ones and by the time ToT came out I think I only still had 8 of them due to playing feral as my main spec.


As far as some things I've read. There is no doubt that we will be using 4 piece this teir, and using the crit shoulders as a "BiS" Set up, contrary to t15 where our guardian teir IMO was garbage and there was no reason to be using anything regarding teir. Full off pieces was the way to go, the 2 set might be one of the worst in the game for anything besides soloing, and the 4 sets rage gen is so pointless with our current level of crit in 550 gear. Now keep in mind when i'm talking about gearing options i'm coming from a 25H point of view and a high end raiding POV(We're the #1 25 hour or less a week guild in the world) where there isnt favoritism and loot is given out logistically. When you share teir with mages, rogues, boomkins, ferals, and Dk's. you're pretty much the last on the totem pole for teir in most situations, unless the dps teir is bad or your teir is god teir. In this case, our teir is very god teir. If you're lucky enough to snag any 4 pieces of teir in the first few weeks you're in luck. Some things to look to go for are some early off pieces that dps won't want, like any leather crit pieces. Crit is the worst or second worst secondary for ALL leather dps roles atm so you may find some good gearing options there.

Trinkets: We will always use the CD reduction trinket, ALWAYS. It scales too well with our two set besides the obvious of shorter cooldown on 5 relevant spells. Second trinket I'm kind of leaning towards the stam crit one, on non gimmicky fights. The Crit lines up really well with NV if its a NV fight. Other good trinkets are Rune obviously with no more ICD and early teir rentakis is very good as well. in my own testing cleave and multistrike are garbo and should be given to other classes, very weak for guardian.


Anyways, let me know if you have any questions. I'll try to be more active in the guardian forums

[Elunedra]

oh god you didnt have to add That many spaces in those links , nightmare to type over:
here for simpelicity:
http://raidbots.com/epeenbot/us/mal'ganis/maximum/
http://raidbots.com/epeenbot/eu/mal'ganis/maximum/
http://raidbots.com/epeenbot/us/Dalaran/maximum/
http://raidbots.com/epeenbot/us/malfurion/maximum/

[Sonnillon]

So it'll be most probably Vial and Curse... of which chances for me getting them... will be... close to 0 . As I don't know what will happen in next trier raid group vise...
But I guess Rook's along with Juggernaut, will be my option from earlier bosses... But I guess until I get any decent trinkets I will stick with HC rentaki/normal RoR

Regarding gear so any piece of gear containing crit is guardian loot? Or are the crit+exp and crit+hit pieces something not so desirable if someone else can use them? Trying to put some primary options for myself together (I know there will nice loot lists out soon, but I doubt that I will getting that "BiS" that soon).

[Viromand]

the 2 set might be one of the worst in the game for anything besides soloing

The 2piece is really strong IMO, not only does the it synergize very well with our playstyle but some setpieces have better stats than the offpieces currently.

The 4piece is not that good still unless you ahve three other heroic tf items (which is very unlikely in 10m) you could go with the 4piece which actually helps alot on most bosses.

Trinkets: We will always use the CD reduction trinket, ALWAYS. It scales too well with our two set besides the obvious of shorter cooldown on 5 relevant spells. Second trinket I'm kind of leaning towards the stam crit one, on non gimmicky fights. The Crit lines up really well with NV if its a NV fight. Other good trinkets are Rune obviously with no more ICD and early teir rentakis is very good as well. in my own testing cleave and multistrike are garbo and should be given to other classes, very weak for guardian.

The CDR trinket is a most have once you get 2piece, I would say the rest doesnt really matter at first but the gain druids get from both is insane.

I really dont favor the crit use one, still the Stamina for 25m will be very nice but I dont know about the crit use. There is a mastery trinket with agiproc or you could use renatakis,

Also rune will be overkill next tier, and with the extra mastery on the new gear I think it the mastery you dont have during that time hurts alot. Also if you already have 79% crit the proc will be a slightly RPS loss ofc on cleave fights I think RoR will be alot better than the new cleave trinkets if you get a 100% crit thrash.

From what ive seen and heard so far I quess the only items that really matter are 2piece and cdr trinket. The rest is will be pretty baseline and depending on your raidsize and playstyle. The second trinket slot will be changed alot due to the amount of choices you have and different bossmechanics. Sure the 4piece is amazing aswell but the otjher stuff is minor, if you get a crit item the other stats doesnt really matter unless you have alot of hit items and are too high on that.

So next tier our goal should be:

2piece
CDR
4piece
79% crit
after that its what you prefer either go mastery or haste depending on your playstyle and what you like best. but nothing will provide so much more mitigation and avoidance than 2piece with cdr.

A question since I didnt see all the bosses on ptr yet or read thorugh some guides is there any boss that can be solotanked, considering HoP or even without. And if there is is it really such a big gain?

[exochaft]

A question since I didnt see all the bosses on ptr yet or read thorugh some guides is there any boss that can be solotanked, considering HoP or even without. And if there is is it really such a big gain?

Only encounter I haven't done is Blackfuse... always seem to have some scheduling conflict when it's on the PTR. Be that as it may, there are some normal modes that could probably be solo-tanked. One might be able to squeak by and solo tank some heroic fights, as well. However, many encounters have debuffs that have negative consequences outside of the tank getting hit hard (which is a good enough deterrent in most cases). Consider the Nazgrim encounter and the Sunder Armor debuff: sure, the higher it stacks, the more damage you take... but the boss also gets progressively more rage each time he applies the debuff, leading to nastier mechanics the raid will have to deal with. Sha of Pride has a similar taunt-swap mechanic, where getting hit while you have the debuff is bad business. Hellscream is one of those encounters that may be deceptive in terms of solo-tanking, until the last phases of the encounter... long story short, if you die from the very damaging stacking debuff, it will explode your raid for a massive amount of damage.

I don't want to go into detail about every fight, since that will make this post a mile long. What's very different about SoO compared to ToT is that quite a few of the tanking debuffs have a negative consequence involved other than the tank taking extra damage. I know my guild is entertaining the idea of adding extra tanks to mitigate certain mechanics on heroic encounters due to things like these debuffs. Regardless, expect more than one tank for every encounter, although the reasons for the extra tank(s) will vary.

[Maximum]

The 2piece is really strong IMO, not only does the it synergize very well with our playstyle but some setpieces have better stats than the offpieces currently.

The 4piece is not that good still unless you ahve three other heroic tf items (which is very unlikely in 10m) you could go with the 4piece which actually helps alot on most bosses.



The CDR trinket is a most have once you get 2piece, I would say the rest doesnt really matter at first but the gain druids get from both is insane.

I really dont favor the crit use one, still the Stamina for 25m will be very nice but I dont know about the crit use. There is a mastery trinket with agiproc or you could use renatakis,

Also rune will be overkill next tier, and with the extra mastery on the new gear I think it the mastery you dont have during that time hurts alot. Also if you already have 79% crit the proc will be a slightly RPS loss ofc on cleave fights I think RoR will be alot better than the new cleave trinkets if you get a 100% crit thrash.

From what ive seen and heard so far I quess the only items that really matter are 2piece and cdr trinket. The rest is will be pretty baseline and depending on your raidsize and playstyle. The second trinket slot will be changed alot due to the amount of choices you have and different bossmechanics. Sure the 4piece is amazing aswell but the otjher stuff is minor, if you get a crit item the other stats doesnt really matter unless you have alot of hit items and are too high on that.

So next tier our goal should be:

2piece
CDR
4piece
79% crit
after that its what you prefer either go mastery or haste depending on your playstyle and what you like best. but nothing will provide so much more mitigation and avoidance than 2piece with cdr.

A question since I didnt see all the bosses on ptr yet or read thorugh some guides is there any boss that can be solotanked, considering HoP or even without. And if there is is it really such a big gain?

Yeah, all my ways of thinking are strictly based around 25H and yeah the 2nd trinket slot up for grabs for gimmicky things like aoe reduction or something else. I HATE running stam or non Rage regen trinkets in general. But with the 20% buff stam trinkets actually are going to be very viable for at least the cd reduction, I wish that crit on use had passive agi instead of stam. and I didn't even count the ticken ebon detonater, because unless you're rolling it there is no feasable way you'll get that over a dps. yeah, Rune can be good its better than a lot of those options and the way you have to look at it is not that it procs and you go to 160% crit and you think its overkill. Think of it as being at 57% crit and the crit on the rune will crit cap you. Effectivly meaning that it is a 40% crit increase on proc, it now has no icd, procs all day, and opposed to brewmaster rune losing our haste and mastery for 40% crit is easily worth it. In my gear (550) the stam + crit on use actually brings me to 91% with no raid buffs. so in full raid buffs and a trinket proc it could crit cap you, so its effectively worth runes crit gain but just has stam on it and it happens less often.

[Arielle]

and I didn't even count the ticken ebon detonater, because unless you're rolling it there is no feasable way you'll get that over a dps.

It's a terrible Rage trinket anyway, no idea why anyone would even want it.

You'll hit the Crit softcap easily in normal SoO gear which turns Curse into purely a DPS trinket. That's not bad mind you, just not an actual RPS trinket. Renataki's is very strong next tier because it saves you having to gem/reforge a lot of Expertise. If Expertise is not a problem, Bloodlust is also an incredibly strong Rage trinket

I've heard Rook's is not very useful (can't test PTR myself - 8-4 PDT job ) but having it around is never a bad thing.

[Maximum]

It's a terrible Rage trinket anyway, no idea why anyone would even want it.

Yeah, I should have clarified. I don't think the ebon detonator is very good at all for guardian specifically, I was just commenting that it is pretty ungettable with it being very good for rogues, enhance, hunters, and Monks. It would be an attractive option for 10 man guardians that go feral for one tank fights, if they DON'T have rune. Because obviously Rune is still far BIS and second trinket is easily cooldown reduction followed by rentakis with its new synergy with rune followed after that being the ebon detonater.

[Arielle]

Because obviously Rune is still far BIS

No it's not. For pure Rage purposes it starts losing to Bloodlust once you have 67-68% Crit or so. It actually becomes an RPS loss in SoO gear because of the amount of Haste you will end up having.

[Maximum]

No it's not. For pure Rage purposes it starts losing to Bloodlust once you have 67-68% Crit or so. It actually becomes an RPS loss in SoO gear because of the amount of Haste you will end up having.

I said rune was still far BiS for feral(Not guardian). I never said it was bis for guardian, its viable(as I stated) but it isnt BiS next teir

- - - Updated - - -

I was speaking of Guardians that also play feral. In a 10 M specifically. I'm probably not being very direct with my posting and keeping all my topics separated by paragraphs, Don't post on forums often

- - - Updated - - -

Also, Thank you Elunedra

[Elunedra]

Can any tell me how to play on those new bosses in 5.4, like is there a boss where FR is better then SD due to high dot ticks or a lot of magical dmg like on lei she

[Deleted]

Can any tell me how to play on those new bosses in 5.4, like is there a boss where FR is better then SD due to high dot ticks or a lot of magical dmg like on lei she

This sort of thing will be up on TiB after the first week of normals. In the meantime feel free to pm me on here or on the TiB forums