Guardian Druid feedback

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9/19/2020

This is pretty informal just wanted to put my thoughts down after spending some time on the class in shadowlands beta and now that tuning is pretty close to what it will be on live.

Disclamer: This is mainly a high end wow opinion. As with every class at a lower guild rank all tanks are viable and have been for every raid for years.

Talents:

This class as opposed to most tanks actually has decent choices across all the rows so I'll point out the problem areas.

Level 50 row: Tooth and Claw, is AWESOME for raids. Obviously it's a little overtuned atm, with high haste you could keep it up all the time. It will be nerfed but when it is I really hope it is only nerfed in its proc rate not its ability to stack. Being able to bank 2 charges for a 30%-45% DR for a short time really helps them bridge the gap between other tanks in mythic and is in my opinion the best talent on that row if nerfed like that. I do not understand losing Lunar beam on that talent row over removing Pulverize. Pulverize and TaC are so similar and pulverize just seems like a worse version of it where you could have just buffed lunar beam by 10x damage or some number like that to make it relevant like it hasn't been for the past 3-4 years.

Level 35 row: has good options but I would really like them to lean into guardians strengths in raid by buffing heart of the wild to its state in other expansions. Guardians are not the tankiest tanks, they dont bring the most utility so they need a place to shine in raids. IMO if they make guardian the highest ST tank when in cat form with feral affinity, the highest tank raid healing with resto affinity it would lean into their class fantasy of form switching and also give them a unique niche in raids where currently they have none. HotW is too weak at the moment to facilitate any of this.

Gameplay:

Guardian for a while has been deemed the "most boring" tank to play. I dont actually have too many gripes with this, if you were to ask a blizzard dev honestly about this spec I would think they intentionally designed it to be a beginner learning spec and it is great at this. If you were to ask me how to get into tanking I would reccomend guardian 100/100 times over any other spec. Simple generators, simple spenders and in a raid envirornment some of the form swapping stuff isnt as relevant for new players to feel overwhelmed. If anything I would like a talent with this class similar to momentum for demon hunter where you can amplify the difficulty by a fair amount for some kind of reward, I have no idea how to achieve or design this because i'm an idiot but the class is begging for it.

Gcd:

Frenzied Regeneration and Maul HAVE to come off the GCD it is so glaringly obvious if you play this class in any real content.

Top level raiding:

I currently dont see a scenario where guardian is used in world first raiding content as its only utility is brought by other classes that are more useful. Its in the same scenario as others where it would have to be very very highly tuned relative to others to ever be brought over other tanks. See disclaimer above if going for world first isnt your thing

Dungeons:

Right now they are SO feast or famine. They probably do the most burst AOE in the game with incarn/venthyr and either thrash legendary. Outside of this they do 0 damage aoe or ST(in raids ST is higher with TaC, you dont play this in dungeons). They will often lose threat against higher burst dps specs. Survivability is the same as damage at the moment, you are LITERALLY unkillable with the thrash absorb legendary with incarn up with a few targets, this is insanely powerful. Outside of incarn you get dunked harder than any tank in dungeons at the moment. A proper buff would be obviously nerfing the thrash legendarys absorb and also improving their damage and defense outside of this cooldown.

TLDR a little undertuned when they nerf Ursoc legendary will be fine for non WF mythic progress, pretty subpar in dungeons outside of cd's

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