[Archived] Guardian Druid 5.4

[Vladamyr 169]

Indomitable Primal Diamond only proc's off of damage/absorbs and won't proc on dodges. Are you worried about the uptime being marginalized because of SD uptime?

[Tarazet 144]

Indomitable Primal Diamond only proc's off of damage/absorbs and won't proc on dodges. Are you worried about the uptime being marginalized because of SD uptime?

Yes. On fights that cause high physical damage, any Guardian will keep high uptime on SD since it will typically result in more damage mitigated than FR would be able to heal given the same amount of Rage generation. An additional 20% off of only undodged attacks, based on a random proc, is quite subpar compared to the prospect of 10% extra damage done on average with the Capacitive Primal Diamond.

[Vladamyr 169]

Yeah, for once, I'm gonna totally disagree with you . Unless the encounter is on serious farm or you are hitting enrage timers, Capacitive has no benefit other than increasing dps. Even Destructive would provide better mitigation (due to higher crit) and the end all job of the tank is to survive. I am going to highly doubt you can keep uptime on SD high enough to negate the advantages of Indomitable but even if you could you would switch to a normal meta.

[Tarazet 144]

Yeah, for once, I'm gonna totally disagree with you . Unless the encounter is on serious farm or you are hitting enrage timers, Capacitive has no benefit other than increasing dps. Even Destructive would provide better mitigation (due to higher crit) and the end all job of the tank is to survive. I am going to highly doubt you can keep uptime on SD high enough to negate the advantages of Indomitable but even if you could you would switch to a normal meta.

According to theorycrafters and top players, the Capacitive gem is equal to roughly 3% Dodge and if you look at how well its damage reduction aids survival, it's a very minor gain that isn't outweighed by the DPS loss from going away from Capacitance.

http://www.mmo-champ...=1#post20917546

Log from a Guardian Druid running with the Capacitive Primal Diamond showing 15% of his overall damage done:

http://www.worldoflo.../?s=2788&e=3239

#1 WowProgress Guardian Druid runs with the Capacitive gem, as well as every one in the top 30 that I browsed:

http://www.wowprogre...r/eu/kazzak/Dex

Edited May 20, 2013 by Tarazet

[Vladamyr 169]

I'll agree it's a massive dps gain (currently) and for some high-end progression bears, that's a big plus. Those bears have super elite healers though, for 95% (or greater) of the tank base, that is simply not the case. Your job is survival (if you are progressing). The only thing that the Capacitive gem brings to survival is crit rating and in comparison Destructive does a better job. Now as far as the maths on Indomitable (i'm not sure, it may very well be lackluster for bears - though I doubt it as I doubt the maths that Kaiadam is using to illustrate his point). Another factor to consider is the Vengeance nerf coming in 5.3. DPS even for the ultra elite is going to become a less valued stat.

I'm definitely not saying your wrong for using it. For your group it may be the correct choice. But for overall mitigation it is incorrect.

[Tarazet 144]

I'll agree it's a massive dps gain (currently) and for some high-end progression bears, that's a big plus. Those bears have super elite healers though, for 95% (or greater) of the tank base, that is simply not the case. Your job is survival (if you are progressing). The only thing that the Capacitive gem brings to survival is crit rating and in comparison Destructive does a better job. Now as far as the maths on Indomitable (i'm not sure, it may very well be lackluster for bears - though I doubt it as I doubt the maths that Kaiadam is using to illustrate his point). Another factor to consider is the Vengeance nerf coming in 5.3. DPS even for the ultra elite is going to become a less valued stat.

I'm definitely not saying your wrong for using it. For your group it may be the correct choice. But for overall mitigation it is incorrect.

Vengeance nerf is not coming in 5.3. Ghostcrawler said "maybe 5.4" and it would cap out at 30% of health in 10s, 50% in 25s which is still substantial.

There is no mitigation benefit to the Capacitive gem, I agree, relative to other tanking meta gems. 100-odd Critical rating loss is minor, but it is a loss. It may be that the Indomitable gem would work beautifully with a high-Mastery build that can soak more hits without having SD up, especially since Mastery is being buffed.

Edited May 20, 2013 by Tarazet

[Guest Arielle]

Tarazet, some things you should probably be aware of.

• LotP is pretty worthless, and not even worth considering when making any decisions, ever.

• You should re-read on how RPPM works. It doesn't work how you seem to think it does as evidenced by post #100.

• Capacitive primal was bugged and using the Feral RPPM modifier. It has since been fixed, cutting the DPS gain by ~42%.

That all being said, the choice between Capacitive and Indom is up to each individual and their healers.

[Tarazet 144]

Tarazet, some things you should probably be aware of.

• LotP is pretty worthless, and not even worth considering when making any decisions, ever.

• You should re-read on how RPPM works. It doesn't work how you seem to think it does as evidenced by post #100.

• Capacitive primal was bugged and using the Feral RPPM modifier. It has since been fixed, cutting the DPS gain by ~42%.

That all being said, the choice between Capacitive and Indom is up to each individual and their healers.

My point about the trinket is that if a lot of attacks are dodged with SD while a damage-reduction cooldown is active, then that cooldown might have been better used at a different time, and vice versa.. if the amount of incoming damage is reduced 20%, then that's 20% less damage to try and mitigate through dodging. I try to never use Barkskin together with Savage Defense for that reason; instead I'll use Barkskin and spend the rage on FR.

That said, I did consult with my raid team and we decided to have me run the Indom gem, since I'm being considered as the main tank rather than the off-tank now and I don't feel comfortable enough taking large melee hits with the full DPS build.

[Tarazet 144]

By the by, not claiming that it's the best stat now because it probably still isn't, but Mastery makes it fairly easy to armor cap now (75% physical damage reduction).

Armor cap against level 93 boss = 130,230

Base armor at ilv 522 = 19,339

Armor in Bear Form before Mastery = 83,157

Required contribution from Mastery to reach cap = 56.60%

1% Mastery = 300 Mastery rating

Base Mastery = 16%

Difference = 40.6% = 12,180 Mastery rating

Mastery raid buff = 3,000 Mastery rating

Required Mastery to armor cap (when buffed) at ilv 522 = 9,180 Mastery

Edited May 24, 2013 by Tarazet

[Arielle 3]

Armor cap against level 93 boss = 130,230

This is incorrect. See: http://theincbear.co...?p=12226#p12226

You can theoretically cap Mastery in T16 gear, but that requires you to gem/trinket Mastery - which is incredibly, incredibly dumb from an EH perspective.

Edit: Realized you said "1%" not "1 Mastery".

Edited May 24, 2013 by Arielle

[Tarazet 144]

I've been running a Mastery build to see the difference it made. It's worth mentioning that I didn't gem/enchant for it; I gemmed and enchanted for Stamina, since it's better for effective health (EH as Arielle puts it) and got almost all of my Mastery from reforging. The result was that I took 10M less melee damage than a similarly geared Death Knight on our guild's Iron Qon kill without using SD, and some 30% less damage overall. It's made up somewhat by the DK's self-healing, so that our overall performance was pretty close, but compared to my old Rage build, I'm enjoying a very smooth damage intake and proving easy to keep alive. Moreover, I did the same amount of DPS as the DK.

I also found a nice trick that increases the effectiveness of Heart of the Wild: Berserk works to reduce the cost of Cat Form abilities and can be used during Heart of the Wild. You can achieve some truly excellent burst this way - I've seen as much as 180K in my middling gear in conjunction with Bloodlust, average in the 45 seconds before I took over tanking.

Edited May 31, 2013 by Tarazet

[Guest Uuhan]

There's actually a lil mistake in this guide, about the AoE rotation : it says "keep the bleed effect of thrash up on targets, then mangle, then swipe"

The initial damage from Thrash is higher than Swipe's, so Thrash should be used on CD on an AoE situation.

[Tarazet 144]

There's actually a lil mistake in this guide, about the AoE rotation : it says "keep the bleed effect of thrash up on targets, then mangle, then swipe"

The initial damage from Thrash is higher than Swipe's, so Thrash should be used on CD on an AoE situation.

The rotation is like this: Thrash, Swipe, Mangle, Swipe, repeat. That way you're using all of those abilities on cooldown.

If you only have 2-3 targets, keep Weakened Armor up and replace Swipe with Lacerate, keeping it up on all targets.

Edited June 8, 2013 by Tarazet

[Tarazet 144]

I rerolled from Skinning to Engineering so that our raid could have a repair bot and mailbox, and found that Synapse Springs is better for me than Phase Fingers. It's essentially an on-use Dancing Steel proc. If you prefer Dancing Steel to River's Song, then you would also want to use Synapse Springs instead of Phase Fingers.

[druideena 14]

Hi Tarazet, I was wondering how that mastery build was going, I looked you up on the armory and it seems you went back to crit. Im at the point where i think more crit is kinda wasted, i dont have problems with all the rage im getting, and was maybe thinking of gemming more for stam or mastery to make myself easier to heal... what do you think? here is my armory link:

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/turalyon/Druideena/advanced

We are starting Heroic 10 mans.

[Tarazet 144]

Hi Tarazet, I was wondering how that mastery build was going, I looked you up on the armory and it seems you went back to crit. Im at the point where i think more crit is kinda wasted, i dont have problems with all the rage im getting, and was maybe thinking of gemming more for stam or mastery to make myself easier to heal... what do you think? here is my armory link:

http://us.battle.net...ideena/advanced

We are starting Heroic 10 mans.

What I kept finding was that a Mastery build only yielded a small improvement in passive damage reduction, while severely curtailing the amount of Rage available to use active abilities and neutering my DPS output. Recently I've been running a pure Rage build with very low Stamina and had no issues at all with survivability. On our Heroic Jin-rokh pulls I'm always one of the last ones alive.

The key is always going to be Savage Defense uptime. It's the best thing we can do to limit our damage intake. A well-placed Tooth & Claw is of course helpful as well, but it only absorbs autoattack damage. It's not the complete anti-spike tool that Shield of the Righteous is.

If you do find yourself needing more health to counter spike damage - the Druid's achilles heel - then for sure, go for health, not Mastery. But in 10 mans you won't find this happening often.

[Tarazet 144]

Log for first Lei Shen kill, Stam/Mastery build. I did 77K DPS(e), 30K DPS taken, 3K HPS(e)

http://www.worldoflo.../?s=1104&e=1648

Log for second kill, full Rage. 99K DPS(e), 40K DPS taken, 7K HPS(e)

http://www.worldoflo.../?s=6743&e=7264

The difference in damage taken is mainly because I spent more time tanking him on our second kill. The difference in terms of the average size of melee hits was 5%, which is negligible. Also, the raid was better about bringing Ball Lightnings in to eat me instead of the raid.

It -is- worth noting that I had a 502 Darkwood Spiritstaff for the first kill and a 530 version of the same weapon the next time around.

Edited June 28, 2013 by Tarazet

[Guest Jaa]

So i have not read all the comments but the best in slot cloak is from the black prince and its not listed as such ;P just thought to let u know

[Tarazet 144]

So i have not read all the comments but the best in slot cloak is from the black prince and its not listed as such ;P just thought to let u know

Yes, the Tigerfang Wrap. If you're not at that step of the quest then the best you can get is the one that drops off of Chicken, I mean Ji-Kun.

Edited July 9, 2013 by Tarazet

[Guest WeeWilly]

1st off, I want to say "Thank You" to the folks who made this guide and to IV staff.  I was at my wits end trying to play a druid that I started in Cata. Unlike a lot of folks, I love Cata.  I like the changes, the story line and the Worgen (who my Druid is). I played a Feral druid and had a blast without reading any guides - it seem natural. 

 

When Mists came out, and of the changes to Druids (I was able to understand the changes to Hunters, but not to the other classes I played), I was lost.  I kept dying in the beginning quests in Jade Forest, so much so, I gave up and made Serendypity a lvl 85 bank toon.  I was leveling him, but only by doing the SW daily fishing and cooking, day after day (when I remember) and the seasonal celebrations - he made 88 that way.  But, I had just finished leveling 3 hunters to 90, leveled 2 rogues to 90 and decided, by gosh, it was time for the "druid". 

 

Armed with some info from Grumpy Elf (who also said to come here and read) and the guides from here, I made Seren a guardian bear, cleared all my icons off the button bars and put down 6 buttons.  Those six are all I used. Heck I didnt even have any glyphs, except the minor one of saving grace (the one for falling damage). 

 

I made 90 in less time and less number of quests than the 2 rogues or the hunters.   And my gosh, I am in ilvl 458 leather armour (I think), my stam is at 406K and I never lose even when taking on 10 mobs more than 10k - if that much.  I even become dangerous and added another 4 buttons to my action bars.      

 

I will never be a healer, nor will I ever do LFR or anything that requires me to be in a group of people, but I am enjoying the pve.  Maybe I will get over in the 89 and 90 areas of Mists this week-end for the Klaxxi and Pan-do quests.

 

So, thank you again for the guides!!!! 

Serendypity the Scared (aka Wee Willy, aka a lot of others)

 

(note - edit to correct some spelling and grammar)

Edited August 1, 2013 by WeeWilly

[Tarazet 144]

Guardians are really good for solo questing. They do decent damage for a tank thanks to Thrash and Mangle, and can heal themselves through pretty much anything. They just lack good emergency buttons.

[Guest WeeWilly]

thanks Tarazet.  Aye, they need a vanish or a Feigned Death. 

 

The only thing I have a problem with, but it has been explained to me, is the slowness in killing things - i.e. the buttons take a few seconds to go around and be ready again.  With hunters, they go around in a matter of nano-seconds, same for a rogue.  But I do a mangle... count to 3 and it is ready again.  In the mean time, all the other buttons seem like they are hitch-hiking on a slow bus to Brighton Beach.  :D

 

But they can take the hit as long as I remember to jump out of the way of the "black death" from sha's or the "bubbles" from everything else (fire- I am not worried about - flame retartdant fur, don'cha know).  Thank you for the feedback! 

[Tarazet 144]

thanks Tarazet.  Aye, they need a vanish or a Feigned Death. 

 

The only thing I have a problem with, but it has been explained to me, is the slowness in killing things - i.e. the buttons take a few seconds to go around and be ready again.  With hunters, they go around in a matter of nano-seconds, same for a rogue.  But I do a mangle... count to 3 and it is ready again.  In the mean time, all the other buttons seem like they are hitch-hiking on a slow bus to Brighton Beach. 

 

But they can take the hit as long as I remember to jump out of the way of the "black death" from sha's or the "bubbles" from everything else (fire- I am not worried about - flame retartdant fur, don'cha know).  Thank you for the feedback! 

 

If you do the rotation properly, you will be GCD-locked and always have buttons to press, unless you have Glyph of Fae Silence on. Against multiple targets, you can do this rotation: Thrash, Swipe, Mangle, Swipe, repeat. Ignore the Mangle! procs.

[Guest WeeWilly]

If you do the rotation properly, you will be GCD-locked and always have buttons to press, unless you have Glyph of Fae Silence on. Against multiple targets, you can do this rotation: Thrash, Swipe, Mangle, Swipe, repeat. Ignore the Mangle! procs.

 

 

Let me repeat to see if I understand - don't use fairie swarm. For more than 1 mob - use thrash, swipe, mangle, swipe, then thrash, swipe, mangle, swipe, etc.  just punch buttons and dont worry about magle procs.   Hopefully that is what you said. 

 

Now, what is GCD-locked? Whats GCD?  thanks.  Does GCD stand for global cool down?

 

I noticed I am missing a lot of alchemy recipes and I am going back into the old dungeons to get them starting tonight - but it will be a good place to practice this rotation, I think. 

 

I really do appreciate the help.

 

Serendypity (aka Wee Willy, aka Roo the Hunter, aka a bunch of alts)

Edited August 2, 2013 by WeeWilly

[Tarazet 144]

Let me repeat to see if I understand - don't use fairie swarm. For more than 1 mob - use thrash, swipe, mangle, swipe, then thrash, swipe, mangle, swipe, etc.  just punch buttons and dont worry about magle procs.   Hopefully that is what you said. 

 

Now, what is GCD-locked? Whats GCD?  thanks.  Does GCD stand for global cool down?

 

I noticed I am missing a lot of alchemy recipes and I am going back into the old dungeons to get them starting tonight - but it will be a good place to practice this rotation, I think. 

 

I really do appreciate the help.

 

Serendypity (aka Wee Willy, aka Roo the Hunter, aka a bunch of alts)

 

Apologies for double post, the first time it refused to save my text.

 

Yes, GCD stands for "global cooldown." By GCD locked I mean that you will always have an attack ready and "off cooldown," as long as you follow the correct priority list.

 

Let me amend what I said. You can use the Mangle! proc at any time and then do another Swipe after. If Thrash is still on cooldown at that point then you can weave in Faerie Fire. In any case, FF is something you will definitely use on a single target.

Edited August 2, 2013 by Tarazet