Guardian Druid Tank Guide — Shadowlands 9.1.5

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.

Strengths

• High health pool and short cooldowns allow for stable damage intake.
• Stackable, no-cooldown active mitigation in Ironfur.
• Flexible hybrid off-healing capabilities through the Affinity talents and Heart of the Wild.
• Good raid utility in Rebirth and Stampeding Roar.

Weaknesses

• Relatively low DPS and threat output as pure bear.
• Mediocre magic mitigation.
• Lack of a unique Raid buff/debuff.

We are maintaining a list of changes for Druids, so you can see what changes with every patch of Shadowlands. Be sure to also check out Guardian's specific changes for the upcoming patch, 9.2, to hear our thoughts on the new tier set bonuses that will be coming.

From Patch 9.1.5 onward, both Legion Timewalking and the Mage Tower have returned. As such we have created a separate guide detailing what you can expect from the Mage Tower challenge available to Guardian Druids.

Overall, Guardian got 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 they have many more tools to actively cycle through.

Patch 9.1.5 has removed the AoE cap on Swipe which has made threat easier to maintain on larger pulls and should be a slight damage increase on AoE-heavy encounters and dungeons.

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.

Shadowlands introduced a lot of new features, and even brought back some old features. Legendaries are back once again to provide us with some unique choices that can completely alter how we play; this time, however, we must craft them before we can use them, and this can take a while.

Covenants and Soulbinds are new expansion features that allow us to pick between 4 different groups (sort of like factions) that all provide us with unique signature abilities like Adaptive Swarm and Convoke the Spirits. To get a better understanding of which ones benefit Guardian Druids the most, take a look at the guides below.

Once you have made it to the maximum possible level, you can begin your journey into the main end-game activities, Raiding, Torghast, 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 pre-patch and now scaling further into the expansion, Guardian is in a very competitive state in both raids and dungeons. Their defensive power has been boosted quite significantly, making Guardian Druid one of the most stable and fun to play tanks in the game. In Patch 9.1.5 Guardian is one of the top tanks in both Mythic+ and Raids alike. The AoE cap has been removed from Swipe making it easier to maintain threat on those larger pulls.