Hey Blizz, you gonna look into the cluster bomb of guardian tree you made, and actually make it viable?
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The developer who was working on Druid left Blizzard. They moved his job to somebody else, we see changes to druid other specs right now, and probably fine-tuning to the guardian is coming in the near future. However, from what I saw on PTR Guardian tree isn’t looking that bad.
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No, it is bad. Even Druid Tree is bad, I mean, really …
Maybe its not that bad right now, because is overtuned (will be nerfed in the future) for now. But these talents are plain bad - their connections as well.
I am waiting for these changes as a little boy 
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Guardian didn’t even get any blue posts yet, right? Balance was last and it’s looking much better now already. Guardians will probably be next.
Another issue is that as a druid u cant realy test stuff . Half of mandatory stuff isnt even working on alpha . Or wasnt week ago
Seeing that they are going into tunings and bug fixing, seems then that guardian is left in the dumpster and set on fire. Another F tier expansion. This execution with berserk nodes and the horrible pathing they have inside Guardian tree AND the general druid tree, is just a joke. Not only do we lose a ton of baseline utility, but all the useless stuff you must pick to get to something “useful” is insane… GG blizz, hope next time you can actually listen to the community 
see you in next-next expansion
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/dragonflight-class-design-progress/1346916
Sorry, seems Bears are getting the Feral treatment this time round.
I’d say druid in general is getting shafted.
Our utility & cc is very weak a niche compared to…everything else out there. Our mobility is nothing special anymore. We dont bring the burst dps needed in all content.
Unless they completely overtune our dps/healing/survivability there wont be any use for druids in any content.
From a PVE perspective:
Moonkin in theory sounds quit nice tbh, resto is also good. I think it’s not druid in general. Guardian is missing changes right now.
Well, the Druid class tree definitely needs a good overhaul.
From a guardian perspective I assume? Because As Balance or Resto I do not feel like lacking substantial parts of my utility toolkit right now.
Also I tried tanking some instances right now and Ursocs Guidance is either buggy or totally OP. The playstyle with almost 90% uptime berserk on the beta realm is more fun than SL bear experience as a whole.
I’m pretty sure they will adjust guardian and some parts of the druid tree but it is not as bad as one thought it might be by only reading forum posts.
Rather from a Feral perspective. Though Guardian issue with the class tree might be similar. Lots of stuff you have to pick up that you had before, nothing particularly exciting and very restricted and awkward pathing.
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It’s a little funny to read all the comments from a month ago saying “don’t worry guys, I’m sure a guardian tree rework is just around the corner!” and all that’s happened since then is they nerfed one of the only good talents in half.
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Its not i did beta m+ tanking ,tower tank, has good hps, maybe abit lack dmg. But holding horde of adds and boss without hp moving.
The nerfed version of Ursocs fury is a huge problem, losing the set bonus and ursocs fury being nerfed, also with the talents we have atm in Shadowlands being lost, and being forced to spec something else now, Guardian is going to drop like a rock, sure we’re getting alot of single target damage, but we’ve not been compensated in any way shape or form on the tanky side.
Losing Venthyr from Ursocs Fury aswell and being given a weak convoke and the weak Maldraxxus garbage that no one can use, big yikes.
So we’re losing significantly on - Utillity, AoE Damage, Surviability. We are only gaining on Single Target…feels bad man.
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Really hope they come out with a rework for pre-patch or atleast before Dragonflight Launch.
All the issues described above is very true, and from playing around with the talents on beta in dungeons and on dummies, aswell as in the talent calculator is very obvious that the aside from the very poor pathing, the tree is simply to bloated.
Talents
Talents that are impossible to get:
- Infected wounds
- Front of the Pack
- Pulverize
Talents that er very hard to get:
- Ursoc´s Endurance
- Improved Survival Instincts
- Vulnerable Flesh
- Afer the Wildefire/guardan of elune
- Pulverize
Side note, I ended up never taking Berserk:Ravage.
Now hear me out, with more Gore procs with a tier set that makes it hit on aoe, and aswell as moonfire procs, while maybe not the same damage potential, you have plenty of good buttons to press during berserk. But if you count this talents as a must have which i imagine some might, that just makes it even harder to get the above mentioned talents.
Talent Tuning
Pathing could also solve some of the below mentions issus.
- Ursine Adept and Infected Wounds should simply be baseline
- A talent in place of infected wounds that extends infected wounds slow to work with Thrash
- Improved Survival insticts should be backed into Survival instincts.
- Tooth and Claw is a really great way to make Maul a button to press for both more single taget damage, and defense. However I do believe Vulnerable Flesh is pretty lack luster. Especially for a 2 pointer. It woul be great to see more intergration with the empowered Mauls from tooth and claw, an example could be to make a talent that makes empowered Mauls do AoE dmg and apply the DR on AoE. It could be a choice node with something that further Empowers Maul on Single target.
Just want to emphasize here that making Maul and actually button for damage and defense is very welcome - Simply making Vulnerable flesh increase the chance and empowerment of Tooth and Claw would be better. But double down, more empowered Maul integration in the toolkit would be good for the spec
- Layerd Mane just feels weak to play with, and again 2 points for the effect is to much.
- Front of the Pack needs to be buffed to be considered (the bonus is 33% on live)
- Ursoc´s Endurance should be a 1 pointer and/or take the place of Usince Adept
- Reinvigoration is uninteresting, and with other talents in the tree seems almost unnessecary
- Why does pulverize still consume thrash stacks ?
- Rage of the Sleeper just feels lackluster without a damage increase or integration with the druid rotation, if not a % based damage increase, maybe empower Thrash, Mangle and Maul
Pathing
Im sure others have better takes on pathing that me. So I will focus on the main issue I see. The arcane damage/Moonfire damage increases.
In the middle path to get to incarnation, you are forced to take a 2 pointer for total of 20% increase to arcane damage, which not only is boring, to immediatly pushes you into taking Elune´s Favored.
Once these 2 talents have been taken, there is no way around taking all the moonfire related talents, otherwise you are litterally making a less effecient build, both defensively and offensively.
Now just to make my own bias known, Im a huge fan of the Moon Bear, so Im not sad to be pigeon holed into that playstyle, but it seems very strange and really removes build diversity since it basically locks in 7 talent points, in a poorly pathed tree, so its hard to travel to something else interesting with the remaining points.
I do believe that the Moon Bear playstyle can be moved to the right side of the tree while moving things like Blood Frenzy/Soul of the forest and Rage of the Sleeper(buffed) to the center. These are universally usefull and lets you have some left over points to move around on the left or right side of the tree. Though there should be more connectors such that a larger variety of builds can be played
General Tree
The general tree for Guardian is just a bit strange.
Firstly the generel tree is okay, and I see how its hard to have every points matter for all 4 specs.
But currently if you want Typhoon you have to spend 3 points you might not want, to get 2 points that arent bad, and the you get typhoon, then you have to take sunfire as a guardian druid, to get Ursols, then innervate which im not sure you can use in bear form as is to get Natures vigil, its like less than 50% of the points you spend your actually looking for. Now thats assuming you have enough points to go down that way.
From what I can tell you want to make sure you get Thick Hide, Lycaras Teachings, Well-Honed instincts, Natural Recovery , Nurturing Instincts, Killer instincts, and potentially Astral Influence and Feline Swiftness. Which when you lay it out makes for a lot of talents your dont really care about to put alot of points into 2 and 3 pointers. So you can not really get Natures vigil without sacrificing some things and taking alot of points you simply wont use.
Protecter of the Pack is okay, but casting regrowth as a bear is quite rare. I would suggest swapping Natures vigil and Protecter of the Pack on the tree, as well as changing all the 3 pointers into 2 pointers.
Tuning
I´ve talked about the tuning of some talents so i wont touch more and that here.
Basicly if you play Guardian on beta right now, a good 40% average of your damage is moonfire. For single target you wont really notice/care, but in dungeons getting and keeping aggro with Thrash that does almost no damage is very awkward.
So my main point here is to adjust the balance of damage between abilities.
Tuning is still ongoing and a potential change to the guardian tree would change some things tuning wise. But generally the other tanks are doing high damage, and once again Guardian is at the bottom, on aoe and ST.
So i would suggest a minor adjustment to moonfire and a decent aura buff to Guardians damage. If not Guardian will have Major threat issues.
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I just checked out the new talent tree today, and my question is:
What have you done to my boy, blizzard? Half of my skills are missing. Give us 30 extra talent points or change the spec name from Guardian to Crippled Druid.
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