Guardian Druid Review - Battle for Azeroth Community Opinions

Faide is a Guardian theorycrafter, moderator and expert in the Dreamgrove, guide writer, SimC dev, and raider in Synergy on Bleeding Hollow-US. Follow him on Twitter.

Panphage is a regular in the Dreamgrove, and raider in Pure on Turalyon-EU.

铁鬃 remains one of the strongest active mitigations of all tanks, through sheer consistency in uptime and damage reduction. Rage generation has improved in most situations, which helps us maintain more stacks at higher averages. Guardian looks to be a very stable and consistent raid tank, in terms of raw damage smoothing.

The talent rows have opened up with the removal of legendaries. Notably, 星河守护者 on the 75 row (and to a lesser extent, 狂乱撕扯 on the 100 row) is no longer a must-take talent due to its interactions with legendaries, which will introduce some decision making back into the talent tree.

The addition of 休眠 and 安抚 were welcome improvements to our utility in small group content. 休眠 affords us more options to skip packs or control mobs, and 安抚 looks to be very strong against the numerous enrage effects that are present in BfA dungeons, in particular the Raging affix in Mythic+.

The return of Catweaving is good news for anyone who enjoyed the playstyle in early Legion, and to those who are looking for a challenging rotation to reward them with a small DPS gain. Some may argue that catweaving being a gain is not a good thing, since it promotes selfish, non-defensive play for a DPS gain, but it’s nice to at least have the option to play it.

狂暴回复 has been aggressively nerfed. What used to be a tool used to consistently and quickly rebound from high burst damage is now a slow, long-cooldown heal over time, and turned us into a tank with near total reliance on healers at any moderately dangerous level of damage.

The loss of Rage of the Sleeper, and lack of compensation for it, has left us without an offensive cooldown in our base kit. As a result, Guardian gameplay is very slow with no points of excitement like you would find on a tank with an offensive cooldown. You can talent into 化身：乌索克的守护者 to fix this, but the cost of losing the consistent Rage generation of 丛林之魂 or 星河守护者 is very high and has a significant impact on your survivability.

Another side effect of losing the artifact is the removal of many quality-of-life improvements found in artifact traits. The most noticeable is the loss of the 血腥之爪 trait, which gave us the ability to keep mobs at a distance while giving yourself and your healer time to catch up in healing or drop stacks of Necrotic. Now that it’s gone, Guardian has almost zero kite potential; their only movement option that doesn’t drop 熊形态 is 狂奔怒吼 (which was also nerfed with the removal of Guttural Roars).

Despite the addition of 休眠 and 安抚, Guardian utility in dungeons continues to be on the weaker side when compared to other tanks. We have very poor mass crowd control, poor self-healing, and poor kiting potential as outlined above.

The base Guardian rotation is extremely simple, by design. We have a single proc mechanic 淤血, and 4 core rotational buttons (one of which is a maintenance DoT). Our spenders 铁鬃 and 重殴 do not interact with each other and present a very binary choice of either mitigation or damage, which makes for a non-engaging experience. This is somewhat addressed by talents that spice things up (粉碎 and 星河守护者, for example), but in cases where these talents are worse than their alternatives, what we’re left with is a core rotation that does not feel very rewarding to play.

Give Guardian an offensive cooldown. This would go a long way toward increasing the enjoyment of the spec, as you have something to look forward to pressing every so often.

Restore our group utility by giving us either improved mass crowd control (e.g. 乌索尔旋风), improved self-sustain (e.g. 塞纳留斯的梦境), improved kiting potential (e.g. 血腥之爪), or some combination of the three.

Take 狂暴回复 off the global cooldown. It’s already far weaker than its Legion version, but having to spend a global to cast just feels bad.

[Sign In to Post a Comment] 英文评论（30）

发表评论