The Best Tank You're Not Playing! - Guardian Druid Patch 10.1 Class Guide [WoW Dragonflight]

hi there it's larold and today I'm going to talk about how to play Guardian Druid in dragonflight season 2. as the video title says this is the best tank you're not playing this season now obviously some of you are and feel free to save that in the comments section I encourage it I intended for this video to come out at the start of season two but I just ran out of time and I'm kind of glad that I did because bear has really proven this season that it's fun and Powerful a lot more than people expected coming into the season including myself despite the Buffs that bears received in late dragonflight season 1 it's still one of the least popular tanks in the game if you look at websites like Raider i o and Warcraft logs you'll find that in Mythic plus from around the 14 to 20 range it's in fifth place in terms of popularity only ahead of brewmaster mock once you move into the 20 to 24 range where things start to get a little harder a little more competitive it's still only around fourth place tied with brewmaster monk you know right in that fourth to fifth place spot and basically only had a prop Warrior once you get into the plus 25 range the true top of the competitive level of Mythic plus pushing bear Druid shows off its Incredible strength catapulting ahead of Monk and blood DK and clearly establishing itself as a top tier tank just like Paladin and Demon Hunter in raids bear Druid is the least popular tank but it deals a lot of damage it's easy to play effectively and it actually has one of the best defensive toolkits in the game for dealing with boss mechanics in aberus so why is bear Druid unpopular I think it really comes down to two main reasons first it was undertuned at the start of the expansion it was really good all the way up through the beta and then it got nerfed right as the expansion went live during the opening Mythic zero weeks it got buffed later in the season but that that's not a super appealing proposition for a lot of players especially considering the Buffs seemed kind of small at the time a few more seconds of defensive cooldown up time here a little bit of armor there does that all really sound like it adds up to a lot it wasn't a full-scale rework but actually it has been really good you can you can get close to 45 percent of time on bark skin which is a pretty strong defensive cooldown on par with the likes of dampen harm and icebound fortitude depending on how your talents are set up the second reason is the bigger hurdle to get over it doesn't have the right type of group utility for raid now I think bear druid's group utility is very underrated you have massive group healing thanks to after the Wildfire you're basically a walking healing tide totem in the tank position and this is a huge source of value in Mythic plus I've carried plenty of groups in which the Healer died disconnected or was just dealing with some kind of mechanic by being able to hit everyone in the group with a 100 to 250 000 Point AOE heal every 10 to 20 seconds it's nice your other group utility comes mostly in the form of AOE CC's like incapacitating Roar typhoon ursul's Vortex or in things like Mark of the wild innervate and stampeding Roar these are all great tools the problem is none of them are specific to pairs balance Druids and Resto Druids can bring all of these tools too and finding room for a balanced Druid or a Resto Druid in your raid is usually pretty easy that's especially true when you compare it to finding room for a wind walker or a mistweaver monk or a Havoc Demon Hunter so if you're devoting a tank slot to a monk or a DH and prop Paladin is still undeniably awesome best tank in the game that doesn't leave a lot of room for paratruids that doesn't mean bear Druid is bad bear Druid is good it just gets squeezed out of a lot of raid spots due to debuff Matrix pressure basically it's windwalker's fault because it's not as popular of a tank to run in raid because it just doesn't mesh as well in terms of the debuff matrix it's not as popular across the board in Mythic plus most people aren't having a character devoted solely to Mythic Plus but maybe they should because bear Druid is my favorite tank to play right now I feel tankier on a bear Druid than I do on any other class I feel like I do more to help the group succeed in Mythic Plus on bear Druid than any other class and I just really really think it's more fun than any other class but wait there's more beer Druid is getting a nice big set of Buffs and patch 10.1.5 that are kind of flying in under the radar there's single Target damage is getting a direct buff their AOE damage potential is getting a really nice buff and I think that bear Druid is not only a good underrepresented tank right now I think it's going to see a huge spike in power when that patch lands in mid-july I think bear Druid is gonna go from uh under appreciated off meta tank to just a regular good meta tank and that means everyone who got on the bear Druid Train Early will be ahead of the curve when it comes to getting up to speed on that new meta-defining tank all right now let's do the guide thing where I actually tell you how it plays and how you play it some of this will change a bit in patch 10.1.5 and I will point out those bits as I get to them I didn't want to do a patch 10.1.5 guide yet because while that stuff is very exciting one it's not out yet and uh two it's still subject to change so anyway let's get into it how does bear Druid play still pretty simple if brewmaster monks are the insanely complex high risk medium reward tank on one end of the spectrum here I think beard Druid is sitting on the exact opposite end low risk High reward that's a perfect bargain you deal a mix of direct physical damage bleed damage and spell damage you have a surprisingly weak self-heal and frenzied regeneration but you have a great collection of damage reduction tools in the form of iron fur tooth and Claw scintillating Moonlight and bark skin you have layers upon layers of damage mitigation and that really makes you feel like a brick wall compared to a lot of other tanks it's a bit like playing a prop Warrior was in season one except where prop Warrior would get turned into dust whenever it came up against a source of damage it couldn't block bergera just never has that problem the highs aren't quite as high but the lows are nowhere near as low and that's actually a great trade when you're tanking being consistently good defensively is a lot more important than being really really strong some of the time at the expense of being weak at other points now I said the frenzied regeneration is really weak and while a major frenzied regen Talent is being buffed in patch 10.1.5 bear Druid already has great self-healing after the Wildfire is an absolutely insane healing Talent every time you spin 200 rage so basically every five or six iron fur Mall casts you do a 15-yard supernova that deals an absolutely enormous amount of healing to players within that range it's capped at five targets despite that number not being in the tooltip you can regularly out heal the group's healer in polls I thought healed healers for entire dungeon runs that's not to dunk on those healers it's just to say that as a bear Druid you're making the group's lives a lot easier by doing all that healing you're not just making it easier for the Healer to keep the group alive the like most obvious thing you're also giving them time to focus on dealing with mechanics like Afflicted or bursting uh or just to deal more damage if there's nothing else going on that's great also just by keeping everybody healed up you really do make the game way easier for everyone else people get nervous when they're at half health and nervous people make stupid mistakes I found this to be the case a lot when playing like Dark Souls games when I'm fighting a boss and I'm at full health it's just so much easier to play well than when I'm at half Health even if it might with the same mechanics and all the same timings because it's just harder to keep your composure and and not panic when you know that one mistake WIll spell death the next section in my document here is titled what are bear Druids good at and in the interest of not repeating everything I've already said in the last two sections I'll just say everything next section now let's talk about beartruid's tier set bonuses they're pretty good and they're basically passive they don't really change your talents or play style in a meaningful way they just reward you with more damage more healing and more rage for playing correctly oh and more Health too isn't that great now just like the season one bonuses the season 2 bonuses have a lot going on in each bonus you're basically getting two for the price of one with each of them so four for the price of two the two-piece bonus makes it so that when you take damage you gain at 15 more rage generation from mangle and thrash your two main rage generators you gain 15 more mangle damage and 15 percent more thrash damage and that all lasts for 8 Seconds it also makes it so that you heal for six percent of all the damage you take over 8 seconds that's a lot going on in that that one Talent bonus it's good and it basically is passive it's just a lot now this doesn't actually trigger from all sources of damage taken unfortunately normal stuff like Auto attacks spell casts direct damage focused it you will trigger this and when you're in Mythic plus you basically just have 100 uptime on this buff you can kind of not think about it it'll always be active but in raid It won't always be active there are things like passive raid damage uh fire damage auras from bosses or say standing in a trap on scarn The Dot from magmarax's tank bite those kind of things won't refresh this buff there's not really anything you can do about it it's not really a huge deal either it's just something that you might notice while tanking you won't generate quite as much Rage or do quite as much damage when the other tank taunts off of you the four piece bonus is a little simpler but again it's a two-for-one deal s 20 more damage that's great and casting iron fur or Mall increases your maximum health by three percent for 12 seconds stacking up to five times you'll be casting Maul or iron fur often enough while tanking that this buff will be at five stacks pretty much all of the time outside of the starts of pulls or during boss transition phases that basically just means it's a free 15 Max health and a 20 boost to your Mall damage both of those are amazing one extra little 10.1.5 note that mall damage also applies to raise and with Rays potentially becoming a lot more usable and Powerful in the next patch this tier set bonus stands to be part of what will send bear Druids AOE damage skyrocketing once that patch lands in any case this is a really really strong pair of bonuses and I would wear the four piece at all costs I would give up item level to get the two piece and the four piece bonuses they're both passive they don't really change your play style or your talents but they are great and they make you a lot stronger definitely worth getting all right now let's move on to talents alright here I have a Mythic plus Talent setup and a raid Talent setup that I want to go through and these aren't exactly a strict Mythic plus raid divide I've used both of these in both of those situations the Mythic plus Talent setup is really just more oriented about being uh defensive against physical damage it's also very effective against magic damage but it's it's really oriented toward mitigating as much physical damage as you possibly can that does make it great Mythic plus it's still really good in Raid 2 though like the difference between the quote unquote Mythic plus and raid Talent setups here is not that huge uh in raid like offensively it's just that you you gain a little bit more damage in the quote-unquote raid Talent setup compared to the Mythic plus one at the expense of some lost physical damage but you actually gain some self-healing so let's kind of run through these Talent setups now a lot of this stuff will be the same between the two you know you're taking forensic regen you're taking improved bark skin iron fur all these Essentials well-honed instincts heart of the wild innervate all this kind of good stuff that you want to have in any any situation now one wiggle room talent that I have here is verdant heart this is a great defensive Talent 20 more healing taken during frenzied regen and barkskin personally I like to drop it and take wild charge whenever I'm well whenever I'm doing anything uh I really just like to have wild charge it's kind of a safety blanket for me security blanket that is I never want to give that Talent up but most players don't play that way most players are willing to give up that extra safety Mobility to have this constant or very high uptime really strong healing intake increase and I mean I think that's the right call for most players most of the time in the right hand tree we have this Trifecta of talents here that I really want to emphasize because that's really the difference between the two builds you have ursox endurance which increases your bark skin up Time by two seconds that's not that huge of a deal but it is nice especially when you factor in some of the other talents that are affecting it like verdant heart and reinforced fur which increases the damage reduction of bark skin so you're getting 14 seconds per cast on bark skin uptime pretty good especially with the cooldown being as low as it is 36 seconds I believe yep 32 seconds even wow yeah 14 seconds of uptime 32 a second cool down pretty great the real value here though is that iron 4 gets two extra seconds of up time so you're going from seven seconds per cast to nine that's about 28 more uptime on iron fur and given that the idea here is that you're going to be hitting iron for as much as you can to mitigate as much physical damage as you can you have these other two talents here layered main which is giving you 20 chance to get two stacks of iron per iron fur per cast and reinforced fur which is kind of more valuable than layered main but you have to take layered main to get to it 15 more armor per iron fur and again that bark skin damage reduction these three talents all synergize really really nicely with Thorns of iron which converts casting iron fur into damage this is great in Mythic plus and this really is the reason why bear Druid is able to do so much damage in Mythic plus it also works really well in AOE fights and raid thanks to blood frenzy unfortunate that there's not a lot of AOE fights in this raid because I think bear Druid would be probably a top tier tank in the raid instead of being you know kind of like an underrated gym if there were a lot more spots for blood frenzy to shine and give you a lot more fuel to hit iron fur you know a ton and do a lot more damage with Thorns of iron but even so spiritual would really really good at kind of converting AOE damage AOE tanking into damage output and just it's really good at mitigating physical damage because of this Trifecta of talents that then all funnel into Thorns of iron now there are obviously still some really important talents in here after the Wildfire I've talked about a bunch survival of the fittest here is really good at making it so that you have bark skin and survival instincts on much shorter cooldowns you know that that close to 45 percent uptime that you're getting on bark skin when you're running Earth Sox endurance and survival of the fittest and uh all of this you know it is because of that survival of the fittest cooldown reduction that you're able to get that insanely high uptime without without this your bark scan up time is going to be you know 12 to 14 seconds a minute much much lower much more like a normal tank defensive cooldown instead of something that's up you know pretty much any time that you're dealing with uh any kind of raid mechanic or at the start of basically every pull in a Mythic Plus a lot of these talents down here at the bottom of the tree things like scintillating Moonlight Galactic Guardian uh Incarnation circle of life and death these are things you're going to run in any Talent setup and so now we'll take a look here at the raid Talent setup that is a little bit different it's dropping in the left-hand tree it's dropping typhoon uh just to be able to pick up improved stampeding Roar really just a little bit more Mobility for the raid uh I have in this setup I do have wild charge instead of verdant heart but again that's something that's just sort of a personal preference and one thing I did skip over is that you can take hibernate whenever you feel like you need that for dealing with incorporeal ads and Mythic plus it does not shift you out of bear form so you can take that in the Mythic plus setup if it's in corporeal week anyway moving on from that over here in the right hand tree you can still take your socks endurance if you're in raid and you're dealing with a fight that deals a fair amount of physical damage like natharian uh it's still a great talent for mitigating physical damage you know it's basically 28 more uptime on iron fur pretty good but the extra heal charge that you get out of N8 resolve is just kind of a nice Lifeline you know a good safety tool that is pretty helpful and you know it's not reliant on any other talents to have good Synergy with each other Vicious Cycles are really good damage increased Talent it just synergizes nicely with you know you're hitting Mall you're hitting mangle you're hitting Maul you're hitting mangle and you're adding a lot more single Target damage it doesn't really have that much value in AOE in in Mythic Plus like it does in raid it's kind of a negative Synergy between vicious cycle and Thorns of iron you're basically taking one or the other you're either hitting Mall offensively to dump rage and do damage whenever you're not feeling like you need to spam iron fur to stay alive or you're taking Thorns of iron so that you can hit iron for as much as you can to stay alive but also turn that into dealing direct damage similarly in most of the raid situations you're not really going to be dealing with enough enemies at a time for blood frenzy to generate that much rage so you really just don't need this Talent here and instead you're better off taking moonless light or moonless night which makes it so that your it says your direct damage melee abilities which the way I would read this is mangle Mall thrash and swipe those all deal direct damage now thrash deals a DOT afterward but I would think you know direct damage half of it would work with this and the dot wouldn't and swipe would work with this and right but for some reason those two talents don't so mangle and mole both work with this and this basically just makes it so that you deal 10 more manual damage and 10 more ball damage it's okay it's definitely not a mandatory Talent if you felt like you needed damage reduction from another source you could take pulverize instead and that gives you a really strong defensive cooldown kind of like bark skin you know very powerful it is only single Target that's kind of the one knock against it but it's a really strong defensive cooldown option that you can take instead of moonless night if you're looking to get some more damage reduction and especially like on a uh burst window of damn introduction for dealing with some sort of raid boss mechanic but moonless Knight's just like a good fallback add some damage pretty simple sort of talent two last things I want to close out on here uh the first is that innate resolve is poised to be changed in patch 10.1.5 it will still give you an additional charge of frenzied region but instead of just doing 20 more healing so that instead of hitting you for 32 percent of your health it hits you for like 38 it's going to heal up to 150 percent more um based on how much health you're missing so you're never gonna like hit forensic region when you're at full health and that just scales linearly so like if you're at 50 Health it'll hit you for 75 percent more so it'd be hitting for over half your health at that point so it actually winds up being a very substantial heal in patch 10.1.5 this is kind of a talent that's Fallen by the wayside in Mythic plus because the armor Talent Trio here on this right side is so strong and has made it so you really don't need innate resolve to stay alive and the feeling them out that it adds it's just so pathetic but I think in 10.1.5 this is going to go back to being a staple talent because it's just going to provide an absolutely insane amount of healing also I kind of skipped over improved survival Instinct it is a talent that's seen a bit of decline historically this is something you would have never thought about playing bear Druid without two charges of survival instincts but actually it's pretty manageable you can absolutely take it if you like it if you miss it you know feel uncomfortable without it but I gotta say I've gotten pretty comfortable playing without it and it hasn't really been a problem for me okay that's it okay now I want to cover rotational skills mangle thrash and moon fire are your most important offensive skills you want to use mangle whenever possible hit thrash on cooldown as well and maintain the moon fire debuff on enemies if you have an empowered Mall cast available thanks to tooth and Claw you should spin those as well once all of those priorities are taken care of you want to fill any remaining spots in between with Maul if you're comfortable spinning that rage offensively or swipe if you're trying to play defensively the 15 damage reduction debuff that you get from tooth and Claw won't stack and it won't extend its duration you know if you hit a mall with five seconds left on a tooth and Claw debuff you're gonna just go back up to six seconds so if you're playing defensively you kind of want to wait until that debuff is about to fall off before you recast mall and refresh That Bass duration but if you're fine defensively you can kind of just let those malls rip whenever mangle and Thrasher on cooldown and that'll be better for maximizing your damage in terms of how to use Galactic Guardian procs you actually don't want to use the manually most of the time if Galactic Guardian procs while the galactic Guardian buff is active it triggers the buff just the same as if you had actually pressed Moonfire to cast it it counts as a manual Moonfire cast it's just piggybacked onto whatever you did that caused the proc so you can cast Moonfire and use the proc if you're out of range or if you really need the rage and damage right now and all you have other than that to cast a swipe but otherwise you're better off hitting mangle thrash swipe or mall and just letting the moon fire proc trigger on top of that and give you some free damage The Only Exception here is if Galactic Guardian is about to expire in the next couple of seconds you are better off casting it manually than just letting it wear off and waste uh wasting the proc this is another spot where we have a 10.1.5 note this is all no longer going to be the case in patch 10.1.5 Galactic Guardian procs will no longer consume themselves with new procs so you want to instantly use those GG procs by manually casting Moon fire that's not the case yet and there's a chance blizzard could revert it but I wouldn't hold my breath all right now let's talk cooldowns Ferris cooldowns are kind of a window to the entire class they're very strong but extremely simple unless you're holding Incarnation or rage of the sleeper for a specific purpose like dealing with a high damage phase or an ad spawn or waiting for the end of an intermission you generally want to just use them as soon as they're available whenever possible you should try and overlap those two together as well because they will give you more value when they're combined during Incarnation you have two basic rotational options available you can alternate between casting mangle and thrash and this will be the best choice for dealing AOE damage and generating rage so it's generally the best defensive play style mangle thrash mangle thrash repeat you can spam iron fur like crazy while you're doing this and that'll give you tons and tons of stacks of iron for like 14 or more you'll basically be unkillable by physical damage the other play style option is to alternate between mangle and Maul and that's for maximizing your single Target damage you still want to maintain thrash and you still want to maintain Moon fire during this time and that's true with either setup you're going to want to maintain thrash and moon fire the whole time you're tanking but your goal during the window would be just to cast as many mangles and as many malls as you can for the purposes of maximizing your single Target damage output both play Styles work fine and whichever approach is right for you really just a is a matter of what you need at a given moment if you need single Target damage mangle and Mall mangle and mall if you need defensive value or AOE damage mangle thrash megal thrash mangle thrash either way you're going to be hitting iron for a fair amount it's just a matter of whether you're spending every point of rage you can on iron fur to maximize that physical damage reduction or if you're dumping some of that rage into mall for more priority Target damage single Target damage now let's transition into talking about your main defensive skills as a bear Druid you have iron fur as your main defensive rage spender and frenzied regeneration as your main self-heal you will cast iron for a lot that's going to be your main rage spender the vast majority of the time frenzied reach in is useful when you need a big heel it's pretty self-explanatory but it is a useful on-demand self-heal and it increases your healing taken while it's active as long as you uh have the talent for it verdant whatever Vernon brace or something so that is very helpful even if the healing number attached to it is a little underwhelming given the long cooldown it has you also have renewal as an off-gcd self-heal it's pretty simple but it's very strong basically a reusable health stone verdant heart that's the name of the talent now let's talk about defensive cooldowns Incarnation and rage of the sleeper are both sort of defensive cooldowns their offensive cooldowns for sure but they add a ton of defensive value while they're active too which is really good bark skin and survival instincts are your two other main defensive cooldowns they're both very basic if you know you're about to take a bunch of damage you can use survival instincts to reduce that that's pretty much it bark skin I mean it works the same way but it has really high uptime with your more defensive Talent setup and that makes it great for mitigating most of the dangerous mechanics in the raid you know the usually they feature some sort of like big tank hit and then a long debuff damage over time effect afterwards so if you get bark skin up for that initial hit it's still gonna keep you safe for the majority of that dot it's also just really really good for making the start of dangerous Mythic plus pulls a lot less painful you know that short 32 second cooldown I mean it makes it so that it's basically available for the start of every pull in Mythic plus and being able to start off with over 12 I guess 14 seconds of 30 damage reduction on top of all the rest of the damage reduction tools you have in your toolkit you're you're like a god you're just so so tanky at the start of pulse now which has historically been a spot where bear Druid has really really suffered you know the the fact that bear Druid doesn't have some way to On Demand to generate a huge burst of Rage like prop Warrior does with charging or charge demoralizing shouts you'll charge and quickly get a hundred plus rage you know bear Druid your way of getting raids at the start of a poll is to Moon fire and mangle it's always been a problem but the Incredible strength that bark skin has now uh really helps compensate for that nicely now let me go over your group utility you can take a lot of AOE crowd control abilities and those can be very useful when dealing with some of the weekly affixes in Mythic plus Earth's Vortex is amazing for spiteful ads uh innervate is great for helping out your healers and unlike at the start of the expansion it no longer shifts you out of bear form hibernate can be really useful during incorporeal weeks and it also will not shift you out of bear form to cast so it is a good option if you don't have a better choice in your group for dealing with those ads like Mug paralysis or Demon Hunter in prison or or something that's instant and a little bit easier to cast than actually having a hard cast hibernate I've already mentioned it a bunch but after the Wildfire is an amazing source of group healing it basically is like having a healing tied totem around most of the time at least during your Incarnation when you're really really able to pump out a ton of iron first really quickly you really are basically just a raid healing cooldown but even outside of those windows you still provide a lot of healing you take a lot of pressure off the Healer a lot of pressure off all the people in the group and um you know you just make the make the game easier for everybody around you what's better than that okay now we should talk about how to pull on a bear Druid because I think this is one of the most important things that every tank player you know wants to have a good handle on it's probably the hardest part of any pull for a tank if you have Incarnation available that makes things way way easier you run into melee range you hit thrash and mangle and pop incarn and rage with a sleeper then thrash mangle thrash mangle thrash mangle and you hit iron for a whole bunch while you're doing that if you need to cast forensic regeneration at any point to get your health stable you do that but otherwise that thrash mangle train just keeps rolling if you don't have Incarnation available you just want to run in cast thrash and bark skin as your first offensive skills in melee range and you want to hit mangle swipe whatever until you get mangle and thrash available again and just try to hit those as much as you can it's pretty simple in any case you want to apply Moonfire to everything in a pole that you can but hitting skills like thrash and mangle to deal direct damage are more important early on in a pull to establish that initial threat since they will deal more upfront damage and thus generate more threat than the initial hit of a moon fire now if we're talking about a single Target tanking situation you know you're pulling a boss and a Mythic Plus or in a raid you start out by hitting taunt and moon fire while you're still getting in a melee range and then thrash and mangle as soon as you've gotten into melee range you want to get as many gcds as you can into that taunt window because taunt effects or I guess growl for Bear Druid but taunt effects do increase your threat dealt to that Target during the three seconds that they're active so getting the mangle and thrash in that taunt Windows is pretty important for holding that initial threat in terms of stats bear drones want to enchant and gym for versatility as their main secondary stat and then haste is your second best secondary stat so for crafted gear you would do versatility haste for gyms in a chance you would do versatility agility is very valuable so maximizing your item level is typically the most important aspect of gearing with secondary stat balance being you know secondary you do want to get tier set bonuses that is important and worth giving up some item level to do so if needed alright before I wrap things up here I just want to say that I'm really looking forward to patch 10.1.5 for Bear Druids I think it's going to be a really awesome time one of the best moments in Bear Druid uh history at least in modern memory the new patch and the talent reshuffle is going to open up a lot of possibilities for the class that that just haven't existed in the current Talent configuration or in the talent configuration that existed earlier in the expansion and I'm very excited for potentially seeing a huge increase in damage output and um you know also potentially seeing some really really strong new defensive Talent setups alright that's it beer druid's already really fun and strong and it looks like it's just gonna be getting a lot better pretty soon I'm very excited about that thanks for watching bye [Music] [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: WoW at Night

Views: 2,656

Keywords: wow, world of warcraft, gaming, df, dragonflight, druid, guardian, bear, drood, tank, 10.1.5

Id: iVmyCh4Aj9Y

Length: 34min 48sec (2088 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 26 2023