Guardian Druid Tank Guide — Battle for Azeroth (BfA) 8.3

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. 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.

The chances to Guardian were not huge in Patch 8.3, but you can take a look at the list of Druid changes below.

In addition, we have:

• new gear from the Ny'alotha raid, which can drop corrupted (see our guide to Corrupted Items for more information);
• a new Legendary Cloak;
• 7 new Patch 8.3 Essences;
• changes to existing Essences (including a 3rd Minor slot);
• a new Azerite trait ( Heart of Darkness);
• and a new reusable augment rune ( Lightning-Forged Augment Rune).

• Strong passive damage reductions
• High Health pool for stable damage intake
• Stackable, no-cooldown active mitigation in Ironfur
• Good raid utility in Rebirth and Stampeding Roar
• Able to perform flexible hybrid duties through the affinity talents

• Has to sacrifice significant amounts of survivability to be competitive
• Weak self-sustain leads to a heavy reliance on healers
• Poor magic damage mitigation

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 to levels above 50% passively, 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.