Why are you ignoring Guardian druids’ all these complains and threads? Are you aware how many threads were open and how many great posts by nice people are written? Being nice is not enough?
Not even one blue post is presented to explain the plan or future or whatever idea you have to imply regarding to our terrible situation.
Do you even care about your players?
Or maybe you are busy improving protection warriors because it is not enough that they are immune to physical and magical damage?
Or maybe you are busy adding more healing and new utilities to paladins?
Or maybe you are adding new grip and immortality and healing bonuses to blood DKs?
Or maybe you are busy giving DHs more dmg and new jumping and kiting and teleporting and silencing and ninjaing and speeding resources?
Or maybe you are buffing brewmaster dps and self healing because they are still in toe to toe with other roles but brewmaster should outdps and outheal every role?
No offense to other tank classes but my point is why in the world someone will invite a guardian druid to a high key for? Are your guardian druid developer is a real bear and is he/she in winter sleep because we are in winter? Are you blind to see guardian druid talent tree is in a mess where you can go only 1 build which is not even defensive and there is no way to survive especially in pugs? Why are there so many useless talents that just block the way to needed talents? Why is protection paladin having a total remake in 10.0.7 where it is arguable they needed that change more than guardians and there is not even 1 change about us? Are you kidding?
Hey Blizzard, where is the guardian druid you showed us in last recent MDI cinematic? Probably died in that cinematic Algethar Academy trying to do 1st pull to way Vexamus or Treant? Or maybe poor bear died bleeding to Crawth’s super melee attack? Maybe he died to whirlwind arcane damage attacks to Algethar Echoknights before last boss?
Edit to low intelligence trolls out there who think they are above everyone with their retarded attitude: Heavy retailation will come to you in this thread, I don’t care about ban. I want justice to guardian druids and we will take it or I just won’t add any additional game time and quit. Yes writing in this forum and stopping my subscription are the only way to show my reaction. What do you want me to do?
So Blood DK and Prot Pala is getting buffed now, but Guardian is still on suicide watch… What a joke!
Considering these buffs are coming AFTER Prot Paladin has entered as S tier pick for higher M+ keys, only goes to show how out of touch Blizzard is.
Blizzard has announced more upcoming class tuning on the Weekly Reset which includes buffs to Blood DK, Protection Paladin, Elemental Shamans and more except Guardian druids so if you are guardian you dont need to read. Thanks for the info Blizzard.
I agree we could use some decent changes, but I don’t want to poop on other tanks because of that. For now I’d settle for more stamina and some magic dmg reduction using Ironfur.
Let’s be honest. 3% buff to the lowest dps tank is a joke. If they didn’t put it in the notes, 99% of the playerbase wouldn’t notice a difference.
Sadly though, I did the mistake of reading the latest 10.0.7 PTR notes and found this
Thorns of Iron When you cast Ironfur, also deal Physical damage equal to 30% of your armor, split among enemies within 12 yards. Damage reduced above 4 applications.
The effect in mythic plus will be negligible. The buffs are to increase prot pala’s damage in raid, where it’s one of the weakest tanks due to not doing enough ST damage.
Is the damage of it too high, though? I don’t know because I can’t bring myself to play my bear until they fix survivability and stop forcing us to play laser bear. I mean, my understanding from listening to other people is that guardian’s damage is not a problem, and is actually at the higher end of the tank scale.
I’m not making excuses for them not fixing guardian’s real problems, just wondering how much of an issue this actually is.
Afaik Guardian is very good when it comes to damage, so while this might have been warranted it still feels like a slap in the face when it’s the weakest and least played tank by a large margin. The PTR has been up for a while and after complete silence on Blizzards end about all the Guardian issues, the first thing they do is nerfing them.
My bear has never felt weaker or more annoying to play compared to my alt Warrior, Paladin or DK…
They are just mountains between in difference of what they can handle…
Tested my prot pala (411 ilvl) against my bear (414 ilvl) on the normal tank dummy in Valdrakken.
They both went to around 60 stacks before I felt like I was running out of CDs and the next uber strike (magic tank buster) was going to kill me. The bear took 15 million overall damage to the pala’s 11 million, which fits with bears taking more damage than other tanks in content.
BUT the damage breakdown was weird. The paladin took 43% from uber strike and 40% from melee and the bear took 47% from melee and only 34% from uber strike. I tried to have a CD (in addition to ironfur/SOTR) up for every uber strike on both of them, but it wasn’t always possible and I was sometimes forced to take the hit and heal up again afterwards. From that, it looks like bears are actually doing a good job of mitigating magic damage as long as they have a CD up for it.
It makes me wonder if what guardian needs right now (in lieu of a proper rework) is a flat HP buff of around 25% when in bear form to enable them to manage the extra damage they’re taking.
Just thinking outloud here but would not buffing mastery so it is the best or second best stat also fix this issue or is it something that hinders this?
I’ve played some more on the druid since then (and I had 2 attempts on the tank dummy with different talents) so it’s difficult to tell what the actual amounts of damage were, but I think they took about the same amount of magic damage, but the bear took significantly more physical damage.
This can be explained by the difference in base armor (pala 13k, druid 11k) and the difference in armor from the main physical mitigation (SOTR ~14k, ironfur ~7k). It takes 2 stacks of ironfur to gain the same defensive value as SOTR and I wasn’t able to maintain 2 stacks on a single target. Against multiple targets with Blood Frenzy talented, it’s easy to maintain 2 or more stacks, but this doesn’t change the fact that the base armor of the (supposedly) big, tough bear is less than a paladin of slightly lower ilvl.
Also, there’s a lot more to it than just armor rating because paladin gets extra damage reduction from standing in consecration, and its kit all interacts to affect damage taken and done. When you start digging into the prot pala tree, you see how every ability does so much more than just does damage or mitigates it, and you can really see how poorly designed guardian is by comparison.
They can, with Holy Shield talented (which everyone does), although block is a bit of a misleading stat because it’s a chance to block a portion of the damage. It isn’t like dodge which avoids it completely.
Buffing mastery will increase HP, but it will also increase damage done (as it works currently), which isn’t something bear needs.
Makes sense.
Also “(170 * Strength / 100) for 4.5 sec.” For SotR and (120 * Agility / 100) for 7 sec. For ironfur explains the different numbers you get on your ironfur and SotR
But i have to say it would be really odd to see ironfur do as much as SotR when it can stack.
But armor i did not think would be that different also i find it weird that i have the same amount of armour as your prot paladin yet this paladin is almost 10ilvls lower
But out of curiosity what ilvl is your shield on the paladin you are using?
I agree. I was interested to see what caused the difference rather than saying the lower armor from ironfur was bad.
It’s the same as yours - 411. And that’s another interesting point because my druid’s 2-hander is 418, so that’s another 7 ilvls worth of armor that the paladin can gain to put her on equivalent gear with the druid.
Did you account for damage mitigated by blocking on the paladin during your tests?
Anyways, the main issue with Bear is how incredibly weak you are in the opener of a pull without pre-popping big cds or if you have full rage from previous pulls. I rarely die 10-15 seconds into a pull on my Bear. It’s falling too far behind in the opener which is the biggest issue.
Buffing baseline HP of bears by around 20% would put them on par with Blood DK, and give them a bit of a buffer on the start of pulls. I am fine with Bears getting chunked down, but then they should at least have the HP pool to recover, just like Blood DK, and it would indirectly buff Frenzied Regen healing since it’s %HP based.
Would also like to see a buff to baseline armor. It is ridiculous that Prot warrior with shield block up has the same physical mitigation as a Bear with 8 stacks of ironfur.
Basically dying before get any mitigation rolling.
Some other potential fixes
Having our SL tier set bonus back where you get Incarn for 4 seconds after you press Barkskin.
Having the old legendary back as a talent where you cast frenzied regen at the beginning and end of barkskin.
Buff renewal, either by reducing the CD or increasing the healing.
Buff Ursocs Fury or move it to a better position in the talent tree.
Passively generate 5 rage every second outside of combat, up to 40 so you can get 1 ironfur up instantly at the start of a pull.
Noxxic do not use the same kinds of sims as simulationcraft the tool that things like raidbots are using.
Noxxic do far better with pvp things then pve things.
This is also aoe sims at 6+ targets and damage sims more then damage taken sims as they are actually not using a SINGLE ironfur in that sim.
Wow a tank spec not using mitigation takes more damage then classes that uses their mitigation that is special.
No. I just used Details for numbers. Should have logged so I could post it, but didn’t think about it until I’d already done it on the druid and decided to compare with the pala. Anyway, I can estimate:
Pala: 51% chance to block 35% of damage is around 18% of damage avoided.
Druid: 29% dodge is around 29% of damage avoided. (Druid’s crit is higher than it should be from being feral main.)
I know block and dodge are both unreliable stats because you could get unlucky and avoid small hits and not big ones, but they were ~10 minute fights, so it should average out fairly well.
They’re bears. They should have the highest HP of all tank classes, by a significant margin. It’s absurd that we even have to say this.
I had an idea last night that could make laser bear fun for everyone and also overcome this problem.
Change the Twin Moonfire talent to work like Improved Sunfire (apply to all targets within 8 yards).
Add a talent that works like Blood Frenzy does for Thrash, but for Moonfire.
It would require communicating to dps that they’re not to do anything until we have mobs in melee range, but we could pull with Moonfire at range and have enough rage for Ironfur by the time they reach us. For people like me, who struggle to get their head around a build that’s focused around a ‘filler’ spell, it would also change laser bear to something that makes sense because Moonfire would become a primary resource generator.
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Thorns of Iron