Guardian Alpha Patchnotes

[Karnudge]

You do realize that tuning continues even past launch, right? The only real "deadline" is when Mythic opens, which is December.

Granted, but if your first choice character is completely botched, why would you play it for a month and hope they fix it after the fact?

[Dreyen]

It started out as 1 min cd/50% reduction on next 3 hits, but then changed it to 1 min CD/50% reduction next 3 seconds.

That was the ONLY change it has recieved.

I swear i saw a 1.5min cd once.. maybe im wrong then.

Also, callsignecho, it's obvious pulverize needs a nerf, but bristling fur needs some more oomph regardless. I'd say guardian of elune does also... 3seconds is really short, even with a 8sec recharge, which makes you spend more rage on savage defense too..

[Gemini Soul]

I swear i saw a 1.5min cd once.. maybe im wrong then.

Also, callsignecho, it's obvious pulverize needs a nerf, but bristling fur needs some more oomph regardless. I'd say guardian of elune does also... 3seconds is really short, even with a 8sec recharge, which makes you spend more rage on savage defense too..

They could drop it down to 80% dodge and increase its duration, if they drop down pulverize dmg reduction they should extend its duration to about 12-15 secs allowing us more free time.

What bothers me is they still haven't addressed Incarnation, with all the changes to our rage system they nerfed the strength of the talent. Now its only good for taunt/mangle spam which means it makes keeping up pulverize more of a pain while trying to maximize the benefit of it. In order to make it more valuable they could have it also reduce our GCD to 1sec for its duration.

[Arielle]

Granted, but if your first choice character is completely botched, why would you play it for a month and hope they fix it after the fact?

I think you're asking the wrong person

I'm not saying things don't need to change. I'm just saying "OMG SKY IS FALLING IT'S ALMOST ON MY HEAD" is massively premature. MMOs by their nature allow the developers to continue numbers tuning well past when the product is shipped to manufacturers.

[Braindwen]

What bothers me is they still haven't addressed Incarnation, with all the changes to our rage system they nerfed the strength of the talent. Now its only good for taunt/mangle spam which means it makes keeping up pulverize more of a pain while trying to maximize the benefit of it. In order to make it more valuable they could have it also reduce our GCD to 1sec for its duration.

So... make it make haste almost useless for the duration?

Incarnation doesn't really need any fixes. The only real problem it has is that it clashes with pulverize, and that's only a big deal because pulverize is OP and therefore mandatory. Otherwise, you just say "don't take these two talents together". It's RPS being low is much more easily fixed by adjusting our other abilities and/or SotF. At most, I'd make it refresh pulverize whenever you attack in that form, to remove that one big flaw. (and remove it from the GCD, because that's annoying. Probably a lost cause though )

Also, Incarnation has been addressed. Might of Ursoc, Ursa Major, and Bristling Fur all had their form restrictions removed so that Incarnation wouldn't remove them, and SotF was nerfed. Sure, it's still weaker, but that's the best way to fix Incarnation; adjust other stuff.

[Dreyen]

I really think pulverize should no longer consume lacerate stacks and just have a cooldown.. or no cooldown and really low damage/no rage gen so you want to press it as little as you can but want to keep a 100% uptime. Would fix a lot of issues like incarnation synergy and pulverize forcing us between aoe dps and maintaining it...

[Deleted]

Tooth and Claw doesn't seem to be making maul free. Is this a bug or intentional? I looked through the patch notes and couldn't find anything. The tooltip still states in game that it makes Maul free.

[Dreyen]

It has been changed last patch, T&C doesn't make maul free anymore, but maul has been reduced from 30 to 20 in rage cost... it's part of their way to cut down on rage generation since it was completly ridiculous.

[Deleted]

Ah right. Thanks for clearing that up

[Gemini Soul]

I really think pulverize should no longer consume lacerate stacks and just have a cooldown.. or no cooldown and really low damage/no rage gen so you want to press it as little as you can but want to keep a 100% uptime. Would fix a lot of issues like incarnation synergy and pulverize forcing us between aoe dps and maintaining it...

Could make it so Pulverize requires 3 stacks of lacerate up on the target in order to be used, but doesn't consume them, give it a 7-8 sec cd which would also match the time it takes to build 3 stacks and consume them. This way we can keep it up like we normally can, not loose out on the lacerate damage and not have incarnation gimped

[Totaltotemic]

Could make it so Pulverize requires 3 stacks of lacerate up on the target in order to be used, but doesn't consume them, give it a 7-8 sec cd which would also match the time it takes to build 3 stacks and consume them. This way we can keep it up like we normally can, not loose out on the lacerate damage and not have incarnation gimped

Or just not have a talent that can provide 100% uptime on a 20% damage reduction so that it's not thoroughly devastating when it falls off. Warriors get s 5% damage reduction, DKs have at most a 10% damage reduction, Paladins can get 10% block and block magic, BrMs get to stagger magic, but I don't see anyone else with any available talent that reduces damage taken by anywhere near 20%. Hell, for Bristling Fur to provide that kind of damage reduction it'd have to be a 50% reduction for 24 seconds, and you know that'd be absurd as a talent.

I mean yeah the mechanics of it are bad, but before refining those it should maybe actually be balanced as a tanking talent instead of Guardians being nerfed to oblivion just because they have an incredibly overpowered but annoying talent. Maybe no one would really care if it fell off every so often in multitarget situations if it wasn't absolutely critical to Guardian survival?

[Raugnaut]

Or just not have a talent that can provide 100% uptime on a 20% damage reduction so that it's not thoroughly devastating when it falls off. Warriors get s 5% damage reduction, DKs have at most a 10% damage reduction, Paladins can get 10% block and block magic, BrMs get to stagger magic, but I don't see anyone else with any available talent that reduces damage taken by anywhere near 20%. Hell, for Bristling Fur to provide that kind of damage reduction it'd have to be a 50% reduction for 24 seconds, and you know that'd be absurd as a talent.

I mean yeah the mechanics of it are bad, but before refining those it should maybe actually be balanced as a tanking talent instead of Guardians being nerfed to oblivion just because they have an incredibly overpowered but annoying talent. Maybe no one would really care if it fell off every so often in multitarget situations if it wasn't absolutely critical to Guardian survival?

Indeed.

Nerf Pulverize to 10% damage reduction, increase duration to 20 seconds. Have it deal FoF-esque damage. (Meteor, but main target takes full damage)

Thick Hide increased to ~35% magical damage reduction, 10% physical damage reduction.

Bristling Fur given 5% damage reduction.

GoE granted 10% dodge chance baseline. In addition, causes SD to become cheaper as you get more dodge.

[Gemini Soul]

I don't understand why they would nerf our passive dmg reductions instead of pulverize, all it does is forces us to take that talent even more.

[exochaft]

I don't understand why they would nerf our passive dmg reductions instead of pulverize, all it does is forces us to take that talent even more.

I think the choice of Pulverize may be more of a function of rage than the damage reduction it provides in light of passive damage reduction... although, the talent by itself is hard to pass up.

With the current RPS tuning, it'd be crazy to reduce the power of passive damage reduction or Pulverize further. Once you ding 100, even after getting gear upgrades, single-target RPS is horrid to the point where I've had the recharge time for SD actually be shorter than the time generating 60 rage. You almost are a slave to passive survival because you can barely maintain optimal SD, using T&C/FR leads to massive SD downtimes if you don't get lucky with crits and free Mangle procs (think first raid tier of MoP before having gear... well, probably after having gear, too, still couldn't really use FR w/o having less SD uptime without luck). In this regard, Pulverize is incredibly mandatory, because there's no rage requirement, and using Guardian of Elune makes you almost exclusively dependent on passive survivability since it requires more rage than a Pulverize build to work.

Now, if RPS is brought up higher (<insert prayer to Elune>), survival can be more about the buttons we push than living long enough to use them, allowing passive survivability to drop to compensate for increased active mitigation usage. This also makes using Guardian of Elune much easier as well as allowing Pulverize to not be as necessary/mandatory. The catch is that Pulverize is still good even in high RPS situations, it just makes passive survivability less important via active mitigation while bringing up GoE.

Yeah, I purposefully left out Bristling Fur... might as well make the talent add on an extra charge to SI instead with how useful it currently is.

Regardless, one concern I have for Guardians is the ease of use by an average player and how it may be affecting how Guardians are designed as a whole. In terms of damaging ability rotation... alright, yeah, that's crazy easy. Survival and not going splat is quite another. Current tuning, especially in the RPS/scaling department, leads to the sensation of making "wrong" decisions and being heavily penalized for them. This could be the push for Guardians wanting more passive survival stats to be balanced (the more passive Guardians are in terms of survivability, the more mistakes one can make), but couple that with avoiding a "wrong" way of gearing it just doesn't make sense as an overall package. Simply put, Guardians need to work regardless of what talents you pick and your stats allocation along with gear level for an average player, because you cannot have a tank that only works properly with a skilled player meeting a certain gear/stats level with specific talents. I'm eagerly awaiting a good numbers pass to see if/how this improves.

[Totaltotemic]

I think the choice of Pulverize may be more of a function of rage than the damage reduction it provides in light of passive damage reduction... although, the talent by itself is hard to pass up.

It doesn't have anything to do with the rage availability of other AM, the fact is that neither of the other talents provide meaningful damage reduction at all, not even 5%. Brisling Fur is a 50% damage reduction with 5% uptime and Guardian of Elune doesn't actually provide any more total damage reduction because it cuts the duration in half for less than double of the benefit (15% to 60% dodge is a 53% total damage reduction). Pulverize could be 5% damage reduction up all of the time and it would still be a better talent in most situations.

[Dreyen]

For all the raid testing i've done, i've never felt rage starved.. had plenty of rage to keep SD 100% up and use some FR, had to choose a bit between maul and FR though.

Pulverize defijnitely needs to go down to at least 5-10%, Guardian of elune is weak weak weak, on top of making you spend more rage on SD, makes you empowered for a shorter period of time (3sec of no damage taken, 5 secs of almost guaranteed hits, repeat..) GoE is barely 3% less damage taken if i remember? could be wrong... It's only good for certain mechanics that are avoidable, such as twin ogron's shield bash for exemple. I'd dare to say it's the talent that requires the most skill because of all the timings you can have and how you can use it, but other than timings it's plain bad/horrible.

Anyways, i just want pulverize to be useable without punishing our aoe damage, a CD not consuming lacerate stacks is the best i could think of, you can't exactly make pulverize cleave either, since those talents are meant to be survival only, aka dps neutral... unless they balance lacerate x3> pulverize to do just as much damage as 4 thrashes, making it a keg smash.

[Gemini Soul]

It doesn't have anything to do with the rage availability of other AM, the fact is that neither of the other talents provide meaningful damage reduction at all, not even 5%. Brisling Fur is a 50% damage reduction with 5% uptime and Guardian of Elune doesn't actually provide any more total damage reduction because it cuts the duration in half for less than double of the benefit (15% to 60% dodge is a 53% total damage reduction). Pulverize could be 5% damage reduction up all of the time and it would still be a better talent in most situations.

I just hope they don't do to Pulverize like what they did to DK and NP, instead of buffing/making the other talents more competitive they just nerf NP instead.

A simple fix to GoE would be to drop its dodge % down about 10-15% because 100% is overkill with our passive avoidance and dodge already, and instead buff its duration instead.

Bristle Fur, when i first saw the name i thought it was them giving us thorns back in a way lol. It needs some major changes, its just a weaker version of SI, up-time wise. There wont be an encounter where we will actually need this because if our current tools BS, SI, and Ursoc are not enough then the other tanks are just as shafted as we are.

On a side note something else that bothers me a lot, in WoD we will be the ONLY tank that has no range-able AoE aggro DK's got DnD, pallys have AS and can glyph Conc, wars have their banner and now ravager, monks have their new statue change and brew toss. We are the odd man out, just like how Pallys and Monks can use their cleanse while tanking we can't because we have to shift out.

- - - Updated - - -

Anyways, i just want pulverize to be useable without punishing our aoe damage, a CD not consuming lacerate stacks is the best i could think of, you can't exactly make pulverize cleave either, since those talents are meant to be survival only, aka dps neutral... unless they balance lacerate x3> pulverize to do just as much damage as 4 thrashes, making it a keg smash.

Agree 100%

[Dreyen]

On a side note something else that bothers me a lot, in WoD we will be the ONLY tank that has no range-able AoE aggro DK's got DnD, pallys have AS and can glyph Conc, wars have their banner and now ravager, monks have their new statue change and brew toss. We are the odd man out, just like how Pallys and Monks can use their cleanse while tanking we can't because we have to shift out.

It's always been a weakness of ours, but we have the most spammable aoe, charge, tons of mass crowd-control, and now we have no gcd on faerie fire.

Honestly, most of the stuff in there are long CDs or not that potent.. monk is the only class with the truly overpowered ranged aoe threat.

[Andaja]

I would almost say that make maul like glyph for fff, then well talk XD.

[Arielle]

Anyways, i just want pulverize to be useable without punishing our aoe damage, a CD not consuming lacerate stacks is the best i could think of, you can't exactly make pulverize cleave either, since those talents are meant to be survival only, aka dps neutral... unless they balance lacerate x3> pulverize to do just as much damage as 4 thrashes, making it a keg smash.

You're combining two problems into one, when there's really 2 problems.

Problem 1: Thrash does too much damage period (also the PF bug is still in which is probably skewing everyone's feedback).
Problem 2: Pulverize is too good.

Re-adding Swipe solves problem 1. Nerfing Pulverize solves problem 2. Changing AoE to 2 buttons that cannot be spammed (Swipe) or give you no benefit from spamming (Thrash) solves your "AoE Problem" (which is one that I don't believe exists quite frankly).