[Guardian] Legion Discussion

[Boredpanda]

MOD EDIT: Added the Bear section from the preview blog:

Edit: Added all relevant warcraft dev tweets.

Guardian

Like their feral brothers and sisters, guardian druids attune themselves to nature through the animal kingdom. They commune with the wild to understand how life perseveres through adversity. They know that the creatures who survive are often those built to best protect themselves and their kin. In this, the guardian druid finds a deep and harmonious value in the steadfast—all the while recognizing that sturdiness requires an aggressive stance when danger comes near.

Taking the form of a great bear, the guardian druid becomes a massive wall of fur, claw, tooth, and rage, aided by the forces of nature, standing between allies and any opposing threats.

"Taking the form of a great bear, the guardian druid becomes a massive wall of fur, claw, tooth, and rage, aided by the forces of nature, standing between allies and any opposing threats"

Gameplay
Powerful themes fuel the Guardian Druid, but the gameplay falls short of delivering on them. In particular, Guardian Druids have had a strong emphasis on avoidance, dodging attacks more than almost any other tank, with abilities accentuating that. However, this doesn’t mesh well with the image of the tough and sturdy bear. We want Guardian Druids to survive through their sheer tenacity, thick hide, massive resilience, and strong regeneration. To this end, we’ve redesigned several parts of the Druid combat ability toolkit to instead focus on those core defensive ideas—health, armor, mitigation, and regeneration—while deemphasizing dodge.

Here’s a basic look at the core combat abilities for Guardian Druids:

• Mangle
  
  • Melee Range, Instant, 6 sec cooldown
  • Mangle the target for strong Physical damage, reducing the target’s movement speed by 50% for 12 sec. Deals 20% additional damage against bleeding targets.
  • Generates 5 Rage.
• Lacerate
  
  • Melee Range, Instant, 3 sec cooldown
  • Lacerates the enemy target, dealing moderate Bleed damage and an additional moderate Bleed damage over 15 sec. Stacks up to 3 times.
  • Lacerate has a 25% chance to reset the cooldown on Mangle.
• Thrash
  
  • Instant, 6 sec cooldown
  • Strikes all enemy targets within 8 yards, dealing minor Bleed damage and applying Lacerate for an additional moderate Bleed damage over 15 sec.
• Moonfire
  
  • 40 yd range, Instant
  • A quick beam of lunar light burns the enemy for minor Arcane damage and then an additional strong Arcane damage over 12 sec.
  • Usable while in Bear Form.
• Defensive
  
  • Ironfur
    
    • 40 Rage, Instant
    • Increases armor by 100% for 6 sec.
    • Multiple uses of this ability may overlap.
  • Mark of Ursol
    
    • 40 Rage, Instant
    • Reduces magical damage taken by 30% for 6 sec.
  • Frenzied Regeneration
    
    • 10 Rage, Instant, 20 sec recharge (2 charges)
    • Heals you for 100% of all damage taken in the last 6 sec over 6 sec (minimum 5% of maximum health).
  • Mastery: Nature’s Guardian
    
    • Increases your maximum health and healing received by 40% (with Mastery from typical gear).
    • Also increases your attack power by 20% (with Mastery from typical gear).

Additionally, to give you an idea of how some talents may build upon this, here’s an example of one of their Guardian-specific talents:

• Rend and Tear
  
  • Passive
  • Your Lacerate bleed now also reduces the target's damage done to you, and increases damage you do to the target, by 3% per stack.

Dev Tweets

Auto-attacks are still the most significant source of Rage for Guardians. When we get to tuning, we'll see if more is needed.

Affinities provide two benefits: first, a passive ability that is useful at all times, even to your main role; second, access to multiple key abilities to use in associated shapeshifting forms

There's even a talent that makes all of your damage (including bleed ticks) have a chance to fire off Moonfire beams!

On Ironfur overlapping - It *overlaps*, which is slightly different. You gain and lose each stack individually. It doesn't just grow indefinitely.

Maul is only used to turn excess Rage into damage when not tanking, so it wasn't listed in the blog. It's still available.

You still keep access to the forms, but have very few (or no) abilities in the ones you don't have an Affinity for.

The version of Moonkin Form granted by Balance Affinity will have a cooldown to prevent using it rotationally.

I don't know if its too early for this I saw some Legion discussion in the 6.2 thread but thought it might be better to have a legion specific discussion with beta only a few weeks away.

Here is anything that was relevant to us from Blizzcon - Apologies if I missed anything


Blizzcon Stuff

Source - Wowhead

Putting guardians back to the fantasy of "wall of fur and rage" - high health/armor with less emphasis on avoidance.

Our Artifact - http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/blog/19950403/

Resolve is gone - Abilities that relied on Resolve have been redesigned to no longer rely on it.

Active mitigation 's too strong - if you mess up, you explode and you're dead.
We want the expert player to get more out of it but the neophyte doesn't explode.
We want it to be "use the right button at the right time"
Long cooldown abilities will count as if AM is running

Feral/Guardian the only druids that are going to keep stampeding roar.

Base abilities for druids are pruned/Dialing down base abilities that cover other roles.

Guardians can swap to cat form and will do more damage than they do now.

New talents - Affinity: Resto, Affinity: Feral, Affinity: Guardian, and Affinity: Moonkin - makes you actually good at another role i.e. if you want to be a super healy balance druid

Example: Guardian druid with Balance Affinity has Moonkin Form.

Boss mob movement is being fixed in 6.2.3 - Not legion but still nice


Personal Thoughts

Curious what others think/would like to see in Legion but for me I can't wait/would love to see the following.


Bearcat does return in some shape or form with what they have said about dealing more damage in catform or being a bearowl or something along those lines. Give all tanks something a bit more interesting to do when you arent actively tanking anything. I think they did a better job of keeping tanks engaged in hellfire but there are still times when you just arently really tanking anything. Think it could easily be expanded to other tanks so its just not a druids are op thing - glad stance/different presence for dk etc just needs to be punishing enough for other tanks that they cant tank with it

The much more spec specific talents actually providing some choices in some talent tiers is going to be nice because you know all those times you specced force of nature when you werent messing around the last two expansions as guardian.

Couple more rotational options because right now refreshing a dot as a filler is kinda boring - Perhaps solved by some new talents if you have seen the blizzcon stuff its mentioned you can pick in some instances a lot more rotational abilities like up to 5 in some cases for some specs I think was mentioned..

More AoE options/interactions compared to other tank classes again this is personal but just felt we were lacking in buttons when compared to other tanks on the AOE front. I know classes arent all meant to be the same but with only counting abilities that hit multiple mobs its something like the following (im ignoring if the thing is good or not)

Warrior - Clap/Ravager/Bladestorm/Shockwave/Revenge(ish)
Paladin - Hammer/Consecrate/Avenger/Hammer of the Righteous
DK - Defile or DND/Bloodboil/Breath
Monk - Keg Smash/Jade Wind or SCK/Breath of Fire even if it is awful/Chi Burst/Chi Torpedo to some extent
Guardian - Thrash and maybe at a push Maul with the glyph but its hardly aoe

[snuzzle]

Base abilities for druids are pruned - less core abilities that enhance other roles.

Not sure I like this. I think they pruned way too much as it is, part of the charm of being a druid was that you could, in a pinch, help a bit with healing, or DPSing, or tanking. Sure, talents help fulfil that fantasy, but with fewer "core" spells to cross over for other roles, that will be even less possible.

Withholding full jusgement, but my gut feeling is not positive on this one.

The rest sounds good. I miss being a big fat meatshield.

[Bearshield]

I agree with Snuzzle, not a fan of them removing more of our class abilities, but I am stoked about the prospect of bear feeling more like the old bear again. Also yay bearcat!

[Gephyrophobia]

Meh. I absolutely love how we are right now and don't want any changes but it's inevitable so whatever..

[Etamalgren]

Example: Guardian druid with Balance Affinity has Moonkin Form.

I seriously hope that means we'll be able to use starfall as guardian, too.
I've always wanted to be able to pull an entire zone without having to double back every two seconds to rethrash something that got out of range...

[Exerionx]

Quite excited to see how they implement their idea of becoming a massive wall of fur and health etc.

I don't really like how it is now but really considering it as my OS if it unravels to be more interesting.

[CenariusTheForestLord]

Resolve is gone - Abilities that relied on Resolve have been redesigned to no longer rely on it.

Feral/Guardian the only druids that are going to keep stampeding roar.

Base abilities for druids are pruned/Dialing down base abilities that cover other roles.

Guardians can swap to cat form and will do more damage than they do now.

New talents - Affinity: Resto, Affinity: Feral, Affinity: Guardian, and Affinity: Moonkin - makes you actually good at another role i.e. if you want to be a super healy balance druid

Example: Guardian druid with Balance Affinity has Moonkin Form.

Boss mob movement is being fixed in 6.2.3 - Not legion but still nice

Where was this said? I'm watching the blizzcon stuff now, but haven't found anything class spêcific yet. They haven't even shown our artifacts..

[Rioo]

Where was this said? I'm watching the blizzcon stuff now, but haven't found anything class spêcific yet. They haven't even shown our artifacts..

WoWhead had a nice article that covered a lot of things specific to classes: http://www.wowhead.com/news=249804/d...-class-changes

I'm really excited about the Affinity talents. I think it will benefit guild tanks more than pugs though, since it's easier to tailor a tactic around funky stuff like this for them. I wonder if we'll ever get to spec another spec and then take Affinity: Guardian, giving us even more options.

Will also be fun seeing how they'll change FR now that resolve is gone.

[CenariusTheForestLord]

WoWhead had a nice article that covered a lot of things specific to classes: http://www.wowhead.com/news=249804/d...-class-changes

I'm really excited about the Affinity talents. I think it will benefit guild tanks more than pugs though, since it's easier to tailor a tactic around funky stuff like this for them. I wonder if we'll ever get to spec another spec and then take Affinity: Guardian, giving us even more options.

Will also be fun seeing how they'll change FR now that resolve is gone.

thx
Still catching up

[Inukashi]

New talents - Affinity: Resto, Affinity: Feral, Affinity: Guardian, and Affinity: Moonkin - makes you actually good at another role i.e. if you want to be a super healy balance druid

Does this mean, it will feel like picking two specs at once?

I know it doesn't matter that much now, since dual spec is gone and we can switch to whatever we want.

[Deleted]

I hope the affinity talents are passive and just offer you options that are not as good rather than what HoTW is now which is a long ass CD which you hardly ever use and only on pull mostly.

I'd love to swap to cat form or to heal when not tanking ... but if its a long ass cooldown then its too much bother honestly.

[Deleted]

So Legion gameplay is going to be:

- Stand there and take damage, AM doesn't really matter very much. Pop a CD if in trouble.
- Pick the best DPS talents and do as much DPS as possible when not actively tanking (but this is probably going to be a CD-button, so you can use it once or twice a fight, if encounter mechanics allow - and unless the DPS is "meaningful", then why even bother?)

So it sort of amounts to "stand and eat damage"
Sorry if I'm not cheering, but that doesn't sound like very active and engaging gameplay.

[Deleted]

Our AoE is so lacking compared to any other class it's silly. I tank along side a blood DK and I can't out threat anything when it comes to AoE.

Looking forward to being a meat wall again. High stamina/health ftw.
Being able to bear/cat/kin sounds like it will be fun.
Loving our artifact weapon as well.

Generally quite hyped for Legion ^_^

[Boredpanda]

Druid class preview going to be on Wednesday so hopefully will learn a bit more then hoping to see some new talents and stuff

[snuzzle]

Druid class preview going to be on Wednesday so hopefully will learn a bit more then hoping to see some new talents and stuff

Source please?

[Jellospally]

They posted the times in the class preview set on the blue post lol

[Boredpanda]

Yeah its here

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/3...ries-overview/

[mogra]

I'm worried about what they said regarding dps "If you are trying to DPS really hard as a tank, that should translate to being a good tank at the same time." This does not sound good, are we going to just become dps with larger health pools? This is quite worrying.

[Deleted]

Really hoping that they are serious about this. I would be looking forward to enchanting defensively again and focusing my gear on survival and not dps.

Regards to the dps, I think that maybe refers to threat becoming harder again to manage? Like in the TBC days, or maybe that your survival rotation is also your biggest dps rotation.

[Rioo]

I'm worried about what they said regarding dps "If you are trying to DPS really hard as a tank, that should translate to being a good tank at the same time." This does not sound good, are we going to just become dps with larger health pools? This is quite worrying.

The importance of our DPS has only increased as the difficulty of surviving and keeping threat has decreased over the expansions. A good tank is already one that does more DPS. The only difference is that the reward for being good will be bigger in Legion. Tanking will still be the far easiest role since they need more people to roll it, but by rewarding the good players they won't grow tired and reroll something that's challenging.