Guardian Druid Tank Guide — Shadowlands Pre-Patch 9.0.1

Guardian Druid is a sturdy tank that manages damage intake through having strong passive reductions, a large health pool, increased healing received from Mastery, and a stackable active mitigation with Ironfur. They are an excellent sponge tank and once you have acquired enough gear they are mostly self-sufficient with a unique playstyle unlike any class. They bring good utility to raid and Mythic+ groups as a tank.

Guardian Druids excel against encounters where a large majority of incoming damage is Physical or Melee damage.

This guide focuses specifically on Guardian Druid. As such, the more general aspects of tanking will not be covered here. If you'd like to learn more about tanking in general, we recommend you read our tanking guide.

We are maintaining a list of changes for Druids for Shadowlands, the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion, which you can access using the link below. We also have pages for the new Covenant abilities and Anima Powers.

Overall, Guardian is looking to get significantly stronger with the arrival of Shadowlands, gaining Berserk back as a baseline cooldown, as well as Barkskin and Survival Instincts getting their cooldowns reduced. This means we will have many more tools to actively cycle through.

Before you begin leveling, you may want to take a quick look at our Addons page, as setting up your UI before you begin will allow you to get more comfortable with where things are and improve your gameplay significantly. Levelling as a tank has quite a few advantages, one of the main ones being the amount of mobs you can comfortably pull and survive thanks to your powerful defensive capabilities. Levelling as a tank is also great in a group, as all your party members will appreciate your ability to quickly tag and collect mobs. It can also be a fantastic way to learn your rotational abilities and get more comfortable with the spec. Starting to play a tank may be daunting at first, but if you are seeking a better understanding of leveling as a Guardian Druid, you can look at our leveling guide below.

Being one of the tank specializations, your main goal first and foremost is to stay alive and to ensure that you have aggro on all of the enemies, so that they are not on your weaker party/raid members. To tank efficiently as a Guardian Druid, you will try to generate as much Rage as possible, with spells like Mangle and Thrash. This Rage can be spent defensively, with Ironfur and Frenzied Regeneration, or offensively, with Maul. You can learn about all the various Guardian spells that will be at your disposal by reading the Spell Summary page.

To get a quick rundown of how the class works in practice, you can look into the Easy Mode guide linked below. This page will go over all the things you will need to know to play the class.

If you are already slightly familiar with what Guardian Druids can do, you may benefit from heading to our more in-depth breakdown of Talents and the Rotation linked below. This will cover everything you need to play Guardian Druid optimally.

There are quite a few different things to consider when looking at how to gear and it can be overwhelming at the beginning. To start with, you can take a look at our Best in Slot guide linked below. This will go over the best gear available to you from Mythic+ and Raid content.

Understanding what stats to go for on your gear is an integral part of knowing which gear will be good for you or not. The same goes for other gear improvements like enchants, consumables and gems. Fortunately, we have pages dedicated to all of that information to assist in finding what is the best for you.

Once you have made it to the maximum possible level, you can begin your journey into the main end-game activities, Raiding, Mythic+, and PvP. Starting with Mythic+ is a good choice, as you only need 5 players and it can be done at any time. Progressing into raids, you will likely need to find a guild, especially if you want to do Mythic raid content. For PvP, however, it is likely you will find more success as Resto/Balance or Feral, although Guardian does have some viability, especially in Rated Battlegrounds. For whichever end-game content you are focusing on, if not all three, we have guides to assist you on how to perform at your very best.

After you have become more comfortable playing as a Guardian Druid, you may benefit from browsing our pages on common mistakes or frequently asked questions by people who also play Guardian. Not everything will be immediately clear to everyone and these pages hopefully can clear up any confusion or misconceptions quickly, allowing you to further improve and progress.

After receiving numerous buffs in the previous patch and now scaling into the final tier of the expansion, Guardian is in a very competitive state in both raids and dungeons. Their defensive power has been boosted quite significantly by the amount of Agility and secondary stats we will be acquiring, increasing Armor gained from Ironfur greatly and raising our dodge significantly, making Druid one of the most stable and fun to play tanks in the game in 8.3. Guardian is shaping up to be one of the top tanks in both Mythic+ and Raids alike.

Self-sustain is still a weak point for Guardian; even with the significant buff to Frenzied Regeneration's healing capacity, it is still on the global cooldown and therefore difficult to use as an emergency heal. As our health pool increases, this is becoming less of an issue.