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 good start, but something really needs to done with the bottom heavy node placement and all the points we need to dump into Berserk nodes. Maybe take a look at some of the 2 point nodes and convert them into 1 pointers.
Blood Frenzy for example is way too far down the tree and it’s needed for rage generation regardless if you play Thrash build or Laser bear.
Also, please revert the nerf to Berserk:Ravage that came with 10.0.5
Its ok but we need magic dr asap. dark claw and hunting rise from the shas and the slice from shadowmoon is killing the spec atm. Reinforced Fur should be accassible without the usless first talents and sould give something vs magic like 15% per stack that goes up to 50% or something. they will finde the balanced number.
Ah and they should fix our mastery. 1% per 300 something mastery is a joke
Yeah we still neee magic DR. I don’t really miss Mark of Ursol. Would rather have magic DR baked into ironfur like 6% pr stack with a cap around 30-36%, otherwise it’s going to be too strong.
I’d still say the biggest issue we have is talent node placement and how many points we need to dump into low impact choices because of pathing.
Also, I know I’m repeating myself here but Blood Frenzy needs to be at the top of the tree so any build/path can easily pick it up.
Buffing the under used talents is a start but there still unlikely to be picked up due to there strength.
Bottom of the trees still overloaded with talents with us only being able to get 50% of the points at maximum, some could do with moving to the middle tier or combining to make them worth the investment.
As mentioned above we still issues with magic damage intake that none of this assists with outside the UFR buffs, a alternative idea if you don’t want to give us the magic DR as suggested by the posts above is to massively buff mastery allowing our large health pools to allow us to absorb it in combination with our self heals.
Lunar beam is still massively undertuned for a capstone even with the proposed changes and is unlikely to see play when it should the peak of the lazor bear spec.
Lastly we still have not had a Dev talk about the direction or plans for guardian druids during the whole of dragonflight including alpha and beta and it would be good to see where you see the spec going.
This pleases me. I’m just astonished that it’s taken them so long to realise it was necessary.
Flashing Claws needs to be moved up, Elune’s Favored needs to be moved up, and Scintillating Moonlight. In other spec trees those type of talents are in the middle section, not the bottom. Blood Frenzy is a slightly different kind of talent, but I wouldn’t object to it being moved to a more accessible spot in the middle-centre of the tree.
The change they made to the feral tree Berserk nodes put them all in the middle, in a diamond shape. There’s an alternative middle talent, so you could choose to take the top core talent, then path through the middle to Incarn, avoiding the side ones. Or you could take one of the side ones, but not the other. And if you do want to take them all (which we typically do at the moment), they’re easy to access so you don’t need to spend points on random stuff getting to them. It works well, and I think they should do something like that with Guardian. (The idea to spread Berserk points across the tree was a bad idea from a dev who is no longer with the company, and the idea needs to go too.)
I’ve been wondering about the possibility of putting magic DR onto Maul, seeing as we’re encouraged to use it now. Something like, Maul ‘… weakens your target, reducing the damage of their next magical attack by (significant amount/percent)’. And maybe a talent that makes Maul do reduced damage/DR to additional nearby targets, or even a choice node between that and making it more effective against the primary target. That would make it a really fun button to press, and make the choice between spending rage on Ironfur or Maul much more interesting than ‘do I need mitigation or can I spend my rage on damage’.
I very much agree with this. Communication from the dev working on the spec is crucial to player confidence. Without it you can never be certain if something that does make a spec feel good to play is an intentional design choice or just random chance.