Dragonflight Class Tuning Incoming - February 7

[Lumy]

Dragonflight Class Tuning Incoming - February 7

With scheduled weekly maintenance on February 7, we intend to deploy a number of tuning adjustments to specializations based on their performance in endgame content.

Due to the nature of our internal testing, some of these changes will also appear in the 10.0.7 PTR between now and February 7. This thread is for changes that will go into the live game on version 10.0.5 next week.

Druid

• Guardian
  
  • Armor from Ironfur increased by 20%.
  • Reinforced Fur now increases Armor from Ironfur by 15% and Barkskin’s damage reduction by 10% (was 8% and 5%).
  • Ursoc’s Fury now grants an absorb shield based on 50% of damage dealt by Thrash and Maul (was 30%).
  • Reinvigoration’s Frenzied Regeneration cooldown reduction increased to 20/40% (was 15/30%).
  • Layered Mane chance to proc increased to 10/20% (was 5/10%).
  • Lunar Beam healing increased by 130% and cooldown reduced to 1 minute.
• Developers’ notes: We are keeping a close eye on variances in survivability across tank specializations. These changes are intended to alleviate some difficulties Guardian Druids have been experiencing with certain damage types, as well as targeting some underperforming talents which were not delivering meaningful survivability improvements.

This is a work in progress, and we intend to add more tuning adjustments to the list above over the next few days.

[Lora]

about time guardian sees some buffs

[TobiasAmaranth]

2500 Bear here, did 18s and 19s. Gave up after reaching my goal because I felt like I was holding the pugs back with my lack of sustained Magic Resist capabilities.

Would be nice if Ironfur contributed some portion of armor reduction into magic reduction, or flat magic reduction per stack. I realize that, when we can stack to 10 stacks of Ironfur during a burst that it's kind of unfeasible to give us 10% reduction of magic damage per stack of it, but really, there's gotta be some solution that doesn't just outright bring back the Magic Reduction Ironfur variant we had at the start of Legion... I really don't want another key to press, even if there's only a few places I need to be using it. It wasn't fun back then, and I don't think most would find it fun now.

Also, I really miss the comfort of being able to spam Thrash during Incarn. I *get* the nerf, but my fingers don't like it.

Here's hoping for a few more things here. I haven't felt too weak, but somehow since 10.0.5 I've been less happy with my class.

[Cracked]

2500 Bear here, did 18s and 19s. Gave up after reaching my goal because I felt like I was holding the pugs back with my lack of sustained Magic Resist capabilities.

Would be nice if Ironfur contributed some portion of armor reduction into magic reduction, or flat magic reduction per stack. I realize that, when we can stack to 10 stacks of Ironfur during a burst that it's kind of unfeasible to give us 10% reduction of magic damage per stack of it, but really, there's gotta be some solution that doesn't just outright bring back the Magic Reduction Ironfur variant we had at the start of Legion... I really don't want another key to press, even if there's only a few places I need to be using it. It wasn't fun back then, and I don't think most would find it fun now.

Also, I really miss the comfort of being able to spam Thrash during Incarn. I *get* the nerf, but my fingers don't like it.

Here's hoping for a few more things here. I haven't felt too weak, but somehow since 10.0.5 I've been less happy with my class.

They could add a talent that makes Ironfur grant a shield got magic damage equivalent to 50% of armor or something. But even that would be very strong in many situations.

[Thalrend]

I don't get these changes, they buffed the talents where guardians don't use, which is fine since i believe there should not be utterly shit and dead talents, but I don't get why they cannot something to ironfur affecting magic damage. Like deadass give ironfur like, i don't know, %4 magic damage reduction per stack. Probably not enough but fuck it I am happy with it, i can get like 3 stacks without any issues, so it ends up being %12 reduction, and like %40 reduction in incarn pulls but lets be real its not like you are dying in your incarn anyway.

Or make if you have more than 3 stacks of ironfur you get like , i dont know, some fucking amount of damage reduction or some form of damage shield. ANYTHING for love of god, but it feels so SHIT to tank some thrash packs and bosses, because we literally get a heart attack whenever there is magic damage involved.

Or you know, give the fucking %10 damage reduction baseline we had back, so we can actually feel tanky, which would be a fucking easy fix, since the tank nerfs they did without even assesing which tank was strong and which tank was weak was the most idiotic change they could do by a mile.

[Kikazz]

2500 Bear here, did 18s and 19s. Gave up after reaching my goal because I felt like I was holding the pugs back with my lack of sustained Magic Resist capabilities.

Would be nice if Ironfur contributed some portion of armor reduction into magic reduction, or flat magic reduction per stack. I realize that, when we can stack to 10 stacks of Ironfur during a burst that it's kind of unfeasible to give us 10% reduction of magic damage per stack of it, but really, there's gotta be some solution that doesn't just outright bring back the Magic Reduction Ironfur variant we had at the start of Legion... I really don't want another key to press, even if there's only a few places I need to be using it. It wasn't fun back then, and I don't think most would find it fun now.

Also, I really miss the comfort of being able to spam Thrash during Incarn. I *get* the nerf, but my fingers don't like it.

Here's hoping for a few more things here. I haven't felt too weak, but somehow since 10.0.5 I've been less happy with my class.

i wouldnt mind brining Mark of Ursol back if it was like a 6 second buff that used 40 Rage, like Ironfur, so you could use Ironfur OR Mark of Ursol.

so you had options for Magic damage.

every other tank has options for Magic bar Druid.

Druid lost it due to being the best Physical Soak Damage tank, and now we have even lost that.

[Swnem]

I don't get these changes, they buffed the talents where guardians don't use, which is fine since i believe there should not be utterly shit and dead talents, but I don't get why they cannot something to ironfur affecting magic damage. Like deadass give ironfur like, i don't know, %4 magic damage reduction per stack. Probably not enough but fuck it I am happy with it, i can get like 3 stacks without any issues, so it ends up being %12 reduction, and like %40 reduction in incarn pulls but lets be real its not like you are dying in your incarn anyway.

Or make if you have more than 3 stacks of ironfur you get like , i dont know, some fucking amount of damage reduction or some form of damage shield. ANYTHING for love of god, but it feels so SHIT to tank some thrash packs and bosses, because we literally get a heart attack whenever there is magic damage involved.

Or you know, give the fucking %10 damage reduction baseline we had back, so we can actually feel tanky, which would be a fucking easy fix, since the tank nerfs they did without even assesing which tank was strong and which tank was weak was the most idiotic change they could do by a mile.

They should give the 10% back to every tank except the warrior and the tanks would be better balanced.
That was such a bad nerf. Based on mythic0 no less. Complete joke.

And guess what? We can still solo mythic0, no problem. The people crying did nothing but cripple their own progression.

Changes based on pre-patch and the first 2 weeks of the expansion are completely unnecessary. They just ruin the game. To fix a couple of weeks classes get broken for months. In what world is this worthwhile?

[exochaft]

Would be nice if Ironfur contributed some portion of armor reduction into magic reduction, or flat magic reduction per stack. I realize that, when we can stack to 10 stacks of Ironfur during a burst that it's kind of unfeasible to give us 10% reduction of magic damage per stack of it, but really, there's gotta be some solution that doesn't just outright bring back the Magic Reduction Ironfur variant we had at the start of Legion... I really don't want another key to press, even if there's only a few places I need to be using it. It wasn't fun back then, and I don't think most would find it fun now.

Here's the irony: there are solutions that have worked in the past, but instead of tuning them they tend to just get rid of them (as they were temporary powers, scaling changes due to mechanical changes, or they just didn't want to bother try to make something work).

For example, you were referencing Mark of Ursoc from Legion. As it was implemented, it was very powerful but was basically the only thing that kept bears alive when it came to frequent burst magic damage (like the first boss in Maw of Souls did). However, instead of adjusting how much magic damage reduction it provided or having it be an actual choice instead of being able to keep MoU and IF up constantly to make us more in line with other tanks (via a cooldown, resource constraint, make it like FR and scale off of rage spent instead of a cheap fixed DR percentage, not being able to be used concurrently with IF, or any number of adjustments), they axed it. What's ironic is that when bears had MoU during the first half of Legion, we were actually on par with blood DKs for M+ representation... I remember because I was constantly competing with bears on the high end of M+. Once MoU got removed, bears just disappeared from the leaderboards. Granted bears were still perfectly fine in mythic raids, but so were most tanks as the damage profile between content was vastly different.

So what's the actual problem? Ironically enough, it's probably that Blizz doesn't have a clear define idea of what bears should be anymore. In the past, Blizz put out blue posts that declared their intent of what bears should be and how they're designing the class as such. Nowadays, I don't think we'd get that, which is either a lack of direction or a result of homegenization with a dash of too much emphasis on trying to balance the game. Actually it might be all of the above, as many of the talent changes indicate that they just grabbed popular talents/spells/etc. and threw them into the tree as they don't seem to have a clue as to why the old abilities were popular or useful (to be fair, this happened prior to Dragonflight with the talent tree quite often). In some cases, they added abilities that have always been useless and inferior to other options.

Furthermore, Blizz has had a long history of creating new things (whether systems, abilities, etc.) only to just dump them and never iterate or improve upon them. This is why for many of WoW's issues, you can find a solution to the issue in the past that works better than current solutions or could be iterated upon to fix an existing issue. Mark of Ursoc is a classic example of this, as they recognized an issue with bear tanks, found a solution that worked but needed some tuning, but just removed it mid-expansion instead of putting in the effort to make it work.

[TobiasAmaranth]

I play in general isolation of other players, and tend to only have my own experiences to draw conclusions from. So I admit it's somewhat interesting to have the same general thoughts / fears as a fellow bear.

Oh, and... Let's not forget the cases where our armor mitigation gets completely removed due to debuffs, either. Suddenly -75% armor and oh look I'm exploding into a pile of shredded fur. Just feels like, sometimes, all the ways they attack our defensives aren't well balanced against each other for the sake of making numbers all pretty looking. :P

[Thalrend]

Here's the irony: there are solutions that have worked in the past, but instead of tuning them they tend to just get rid of them (as they were temporary powers, scaling changes due to mechanical changes, or they just didn't want to bother try to make something work).

For example, you were referencing Mark of Ursoc from Legion. As it was implemented, it was very powerful but was basically the only thing that kept bears alive when it came to frequent burst magic damage (like the first boss in Maw of Souls did). However, instead of adjusting how much magic damage reduction it provided or having it be an actual choice instead of being able to keep MoU and IF up constantly to make us more in line with other tanks (via a cooldown, resource constraint, make it like FR and scale off of rage spent instead of a cheap fixed DR percentage, not being able to be used concurrently with IF, or any number of adjustments), they axed it. What's ironic is that when bears had MoU during the first half of Legion, we were actually on par with blood DKs for M+ representation... I remember because I was constantly competing with bears on the high end of M+. Once MoU got removed, bears just disappeared from the leaderboards. Granted bears were still perfectly fine in mythic raids, but so were most tanks as the damage profile between content was vastly different.

So what's the actual problem? Ironically enough, it's probably that Blizz doesn't have a clear define idea of what bears should be anymore. In the past, Blizz put out blue posts that declared their intent of what bears should be and how they're designing the class as such. Nowadays, I don't think we'd get that, which is either a lack of direction or a result of homegenization with a dash of too much emphasis on trying to balance the game. Actually it might be all of the above, as many of the talent changes indicate that they just grabbed popular talents/spells/etc. and threw them into the tree as they don't seem to have a clue as to why the old abilities were popular or useful (to be fair, this happened prior to Dragonflight with the talent tree quite often). In some cases, they added abilities that have always been useless and inferior to other options.

Furthermore, Blizz has had a long history of creating new things (whether systems, abilities, etc.) only to just dump them and never iterate or improve upon them. This is why for many of WoW's issues, you can find a solution to the issue in the past that works better than current solutions or could be iterated upon to fix an existing issue. Mark of Ursoc is a classic example of this, as they recognized an issue with bear tanks, found a solution that worked but needed some tuning, but just removed it mid-expansion instead of putting in the effort to make it work.

Problem is mark of ursol was pretty much a overpowered version, since we also had a artifact power passive that procs and spell damage so bears had something like %45 damage reduction in magic with ursol, and ursol lasted long, which i will also argue is to strong.

If they ever bring back ursol, it should either have a huge rage cost, something like 60-80, and shouldnt last too long. But even than every single bear tank will take the fucking thing. EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME. Or simply they should put a damage reduction effect/absord effect on ironfur, something to deal with magic. But old iteration of ursol should never come back.

And instead of buffing ironfur, they should simply increase our base armor I would say. Right now if you charge into a fucking pack without a cd on in fortified in 18 plus keys, you have a chance to get instagibbed, I rotate my cds for each pack, but it kind of feels dogshit that I HAVE TO have a cd per pack otherwise i die before i can get my ironfur stacks on, which feels dogshit.

[ghost]

They need to fix bugs too.

"Tooth and Claw" is supposed to reduce magic damage taken, but it currently only works against physical damage.
"Raze" can't be used against bosses with large hit boxes where you can't get to the center -- so both the earth elemental boss and spider boss in raid, Raze is unusable against. I'm sure there are M+ bosses that also are bugged for Raze.

They are buffing talents bears don't use. But the problem is that there are to many 'not great' talents that take 2 points, so the reason bears aren't taking those survival talents is because we don't have points available to spend on them, to get to functionally "mandatory" talents. To raid tank, you really want the cooldown reduction and wildfire.
Any build using Incarnation requires you to spend 5 points to get the full use out of it. But if you are not building for Incarnation, you are forced to take subpar berserk nodes. Berserk should be a single node that leads in to incarnation.

Honestly, Bear tree has great bones, but needs to be seriously rearranged. And the class tree needs to be cleaned up so bears are not required to take a bunch of abilities they can not use. The class tree is well optimized for moonkin & tree, but sort of crap for bear.

[Kognos]

They need to fix bugs too.

"Tooth and Claw" is supposed to reduce magic damage taken, but it currently only works against physical damage.

Holy sweet jebus I just read as of the 2/2 patch this should be resolved. Yay!