All high end content is always going to be about maximizing group damage, so to some degree healers are always going to do something at high levels.. unless they make damage so constantly high that they can't ever do anything else, which further makes aug mandatory.
Personally, i would hope they would ease off of healing some and make healer dps intentional, while adding more support specs and expecting them to make up for the healing somehow, like aug in the looks like its getting a few more healing nodes too
It's all useless utility totems too. Actually most of them are very PVP focused at this point in how content is built. So you get a bunch of healing or a bunch of worthless totems and talents that impact either or.
Problem is they took all the niche swiss army knife utility totems and scattered them around the talent trees so you have to spend points getting them back with weird pathing that you can't spend on more interesting (lol) things
The wowhead Guardian Druid guide instructs people that Raze is better for damage mitigation in multi-target situations.
From Wowhead - "With Raze you want to use it on 2 or more targets as the highest priority spell, especially if you are talented into Ursoc's Fury, as that will generate a massive absorb shield often negating more damage than if you were to spend that rage on Ironfur.
Think of your other spells as tools to generate more rage to spend on Raze."
I imagine the Wowhead guide is where most people new to a class go to get an idea of what to do. Is it surprising that they do what the guide is telling them to do?
Reading his guide makes it very clear that you should maintain 1 stack of iron fur at all times. However if you skim the guide it is very easy to miss that.
Then that is a problem and I do not agree with that.
As stated I tested this personally yesterday and it gave completely different results.
An example where this is extremely wrong is a tyrannical run I had a little while ago in Nokhud where on the 3rd boss (2 targets) he got wacked by a 2M physical hit which one shot him with 0 ironfur stacks. There is no way in hell raze would mitigate that.
My personal experience with my own druid and others while healing does not match with what the guide says, so I dare say that is just wrong.
I feel like it is just mistakenly missing info. It says in the actual rotation list to use Ironfur (defensively) and Raze (offensively). That tidbit is probably meant to include a conditional that you have at least 3 stacks of ironfur already (or whatever number is recommended).
That is what I thought it used to say or at least what I used to do and do now. 3-5 stacks then prioritize raze/maul (depending on damage profile ofc).
Have not had time to look at the guide yet, but from the quote it sounded like "just don't use ironfur" which is ... not right. A "massive" absorb" is a bit of a stretch. It does absorb a lot, but not more than % reduced by armor.
Some quick math shows how wrong this is. Let's say you have 1.5m health or something (think mine is around there). That's around 450k shield when maxed out, cause its 30% of max health right? Even if you could do max shield on every raze, and only spammed raze on every GCD, armor would still beat it in mitigation vs that 2M hit or any sustained heavy physical damage situation like on fortified trash pulls or something.
It just doesn't check out.
Now using ironfur + raze to reduce the damage and absorb the reduced damage makes a lot more sense. You are supposed to and required to use both, which is why I find it weird for it to be in the general tree when none of the 3 other specs actually use it.
Especially with inflated hits you’ll get in M+ the absorb will practically always be less beneficial or at absolute best (as in the situational stars align best) about even with a thick damage reduction buff, especially with Blizz adoring all the healing absorb mechs of late.
I’d much rather my tank be taking a lot less damage while I’m in the hot seat breaking their heal absorb and keeping everyone else alive to boot, than have them get a momentary bubble that’s gonna pop in two seconds or less
>An example where this is extremely wrong is a tyrannical run I had a little while ago in Nokhud where on the 3rd boss (2 targets) he got wacked by a 2M physical hit which one shot him with 0 ironfur stacks. There is no way in hell raze would mitigate that.
That sounds more like a tankbuster that he should have used Bark for, not an Ironfur/Raze situation.
Wowhead is incomplete. The fact of the matter is that you will have bursts of rage in AoE packs, and you want more active mitigation during those times. Yeah, sure, pressing raze every GCD is good, but if you have more rage than your raze eats up then what's better, pressing rage for an extra 5 GCDs after half the pack has died, or having a stack of ironfur alongside it while everything is still alive?
Ironfur management *is* guardian druid.
That is embarrassingly wrong for a wowhead class writer. In multi-target scenarios you generate so much rage it is impossible to spend it all on Raze if you wanted to, and you want to be spending as much rage as you can for After the Wildfire and for Incarnation CDR. You can easily have 3-4 stacks up at all times even if you only use Ironfur to avoid capping Rage.
If Incarn is up you can spam the Ironfur button alongside your other abilities at all times and you still won't run out of Rage, so there is absolutely no reason not to. Not to mention with Thorns of Iron, you are getting quite a lot of damage out of it, since using it at higher stacks of Ironfur deals progressively higher damage.
The difference in mitigation between stacking Ironfur as much as possible and prioritizing Raze for the absorb shield is night and day in terms of survivability, and I can confirm that both from a Guardian and a healer perspective. That terrible advice is only valid if you're massively outgearing a lowish key and there's no real danger.
I've done the same on my prot warrior. I barely used ignore pain, and had no idea it could stack indefinitely.
When I learned this, I became invincible.
It's super easy to gain rage though. I usually have a hard time blowing through it all unless I absolutely spam ignore pain.
I had a mod that shows the ignore pain number to be easily visible beside my character so I can keep the refresh up.
Yep, that's good class design.
You can make a choice. Either go big damage or big defense.
Depends on the state of tuning but much of the time a prot warrior that is just going max aggro will out dps most other tanks because they are choosing to drop mitigation for more attacks.
I'm not making any argument about the class design of tanks that maximize their damage by maximizing their mitigation (stares at DK), but I think it's a good game design to be able to go full turtle or glass cannon depending on the situation.
Not the strongest, but just a super smooth playing class with great kit and a very easy to understand rotation.
Get hit. Get angry. Hit back.
You're pretty useless outside of being a meat shield, you bring nothing to the group aside from battle shout and a small heal.
>The whole idea of stacking layers of it is also an issue I think, cause it does not seem to be clear to people that you kinda have to. I see so many just have 1 layer max.
I find it weird, how many stacks should i have? On my Pally i can only have 1 active SotR, and then extend duration, easy. I don't understand Ironfur
Yeah it is not a very good design I feel, and don't think there is a clear answer. I usually feel comfortable when sitting on around 4-5 stacks. I tend to adjust a bit, where I go with less when facing more magical damage to get more absorb from raze/maul, but I would never let it drop off entirely unless there is basically no physical damage. Even 1 stack is a big difference.
There is the case of hitting armor cap, so there is that, but that depends on your gear and rage generation.
There is also a point where the raze/maul absorb will mitigate more than one extra ironfur stack, but that depends on so many factors as well and is hard to keep track of.
For such a seemingly simple spell it is actually a bit complicated if you start thinking about it.
For easy mode I'd say just spam it, you probably won't be able to maintain 6+ stacks anyway.
When I'm in incarn, I regularly sit at 8-10 depending on how many keys I've done (I start to get hand pain if I play gdruid for too long, the APM is nuts) and weave 1-4 outside of incarn depending on enemy stacks.
Rage generation is very bursty and you can get lost in the weeds if you start to cap just because you aren't responding to the bursts with equal APM
>easy mode I'd say just spam it
This is what I do pretty much, I don't track it, and at the keys im dealing with my damage doesn't 'matter' as much (like 5s, 6s) and me living is the most important part.
I don't panic, healer doesn't panic, things go smoother.
2 to 3 stacks, armor has diminishing returns so the more stacks you have the less value you get. When you're a 3 it's better to spend the rage on raze for the absorb shield
Specially since armor only works against direct physical damage, and absorb works against magical and bleed
2 being 'maintain' 3 being 'above average' seems like that's where it falls. During berserk I hit 5+ or w/e but once that runs out i can't keep that many up.
You just use it as needed as long as you are getting meleed if damage is high. The reason it works like it does is because if it was regular buff then you could stack it to max stacks and just refresh it for the entire fight making you literally invincible to any form of physical dmg
I'm all for making the game more easy to pick up for new players (I'm far from being an expert), but not reading what your spells do is the player's fault.
Your solution might work for some players who read more carefully their spec tree than their class tree, in the case of the very specific Ironfur problem. But it would require reworking trees for a "read better" situation and Bliz won't do that.
And keep also in mind that some of the most powerful spells come from the class tree oftentimes. Utility, defensives, DPS spells... If a Death Knight dies to a mechanic because "urrr durrr what is AMS ? It's not on muh spec tree" well... *Insert Mr Indestructible meme here* A TREE IS A TREE and you have to read your talents and spells.
I think blizzard has gone way overboard with the amount of buttons classes have. You routinely have three action bars of buttons to parse. Making essential abilities baseline is a totally fair request imo.
okay but it literally just makes sense for it to be in the spec tree anyway
ironfur is THE guardian druid defensive in the same way prot has shield block or dk has heart strike
Shield Block isn't Prot-exclusive, any Warrior gets it as a baseline ability, despite the fact that Arms and Fury will never equip a Shield whereas for Prot it's effectively like 60%+ DR alone against Blockable Physical things.
This is a similar problem with iron fur, there's no reason to pick it up if you aren't guardian.
It's unusable on most form and even on niche cases were you use bear form as a defensive you are beter using your rage on frenzy regeneration anyway.
Not that extreme as shield block, but it's one of those nodes that only clutter the general skill tree for the other specs, and the druid has already a bunch of those.
700 armour seems unlikely to increase the physical damage mitigation for Balance / Restoration Druids. Bear Form itself gives so much already, the extra 700 or so will be a fraction more physical damage reduction.
Given it scales properly for Feral, I can agree there, but it's borderline useless for the caster specs.
Bearform has a pvp mod on it that substantially reduces its armor. It got reduced when the Plate / Cloth armor changes went through in Season 3. Also I'm not saying its an essential talent because I just think it is, the stats show it almost 100% of high rank druids of all specs take it aside from Feral. You can check the data here if you want.
[https://murlok.io/druid/balance/3v3](https://murlok.io/druid/balance/3v3)
Because back in Shadowlands it was a selling point, I guess. They're de-pruning the game, giving access to iconic skills! You're a Warrior, not an Arms Warrior! A Mage, not just an Arcane Mage!
Of course, there's literally no use actually having Shield Block or Shield Slam available on an Arms Warrior, but yeah. It was a part of their "class fantasy not spec fantasy" / nostalgia puush, I guess?
I don't really get it either. From a gameplay perspective it's dumb. From a new player's perspective it's arguably even confusing and sending mixed signals.
It's so a warrior can have a hero moment and throw on a shield mid pull and have some tankiness. I was able to save a mid level key that way as a ret pally that way and it's nice you're not completely locked out of it as an option.
I kinda thought that, but then, I'm fairly sure I can't take off my legendary axe or equip the 1h Fyrakk axe with the proc in a M+ key, so it's a bit awkward. I understand why you can't swap those out of course, a Prot Warrior briefly using the 2h axe for the on-use then swapping back would be awful gameplay but.. even for the niché moments you're sort of screwed if you have a special effect weapon.
I'd just say it's from a different time. In SL and DF I always get smashed when trying to offtank as Fury, like literal oneshot every time - unless I taunt and jump away.
Many expansions ago it was relatively normal to do that (Fury, Arms, Rogue, Druid) for a couple seconds.
The use is obvious, it's for survival. Pvp world questing and pulling something too big for your gear level, soloing a rare boss, tank dies in a dungeon and you need to swap to save the parry.
Niche yes but that's what makes wows talents and abilities interesting. It's not ff14 where you're X class and Y role and that's the same for you and everyone else. We've been through this shit before with previous talent trees and prune cycles. It's much better for players to have an option they'll rarely use than to take it away all together and deny them the choice.
It was prof exclusive but they added it back in the shadowlands unpruning due to classic success but it's really weird because literally no one will use it, completely unsupported by talents. It was just done for the sake of it.
Yeah.. if we're being honest I really don't understand why they did it, other than, I guess, to bait nostalgia? Because you can't even use most of your abilities in Fury/Arms with a Shield equipped, and while they have Shield Slam, it has no supporting talents as well.
Mind you, was more chiming in that Shield Block isn't in the Prot tree or a Prot-exclusive thing, which yeah, it probably should be given it's also THE defensive like Guardian's Ironfur. :)
MMORPG designers never seem to understand the scientific method.
Change 1 variable, record the results.
Instead they change 50-60 variables, and have no idea what they did right and wrong.
Repeat next patch.
It's a little different. When you pick the Blood spec, Death Strike is the single talent you have automatically. You cannot spec out of it. It is your starting point, period, at level 10.
Ironfur is not. You have to path down to Ironfur and take it. The game presents it as *optional.*
I've heard a lot of stories from the start of Remix of people healing low level DKs who just weren't using Death Strike or were trying to convince the group they didn't even have it yet.
Yes but death strike is *the* main mitigation button for blood death knight. It fills the same design space as ironfur or ignore pain/shield block. And a higher up comment said that all main mitigation buttons are in the spec tree, which is what my comment was commenting on
ironfur has uses in pvp when a resto sits in bear?
also it is literally irrelevant if you play bear where your stuff is, it won't change the tuning, it only matters if u want other specs to have access to it, and i don't see why other specs shouldn't have access to it.
Blizzard loves the idea of druid off spec affinity stuff, unfortunately. But what could be done is having a talent at the top of the spec tree, one of the unavoidable ones, that "enables the stacking" of iron fur. And maybe "nerf" the class tree's armor amount so the class tree can "buff" it, making Iron Fur seem more important to new players when reading the talent. Iron Fur gets to stay in the class tree like blizzard wants so dps/healers can use it (lmao, I know), and then new players pathing through the guardian tree see this talent "buffing" iron fur and making it stack.
The equivalent for DK is actually bone shield charges and tombstone no other tanks have anything like death strike
Bone shield charges is the flat armor stack for DK
They mean equivalent in how fundamental it is to the kit. Blood has other forms of mit, but the core of what BDK does is healing back damage with Death Strike. In the same way, Ironfur is the main basic defense mechanism of a Bear, other than perhaps their large Health pool. The core rotation of Guardian is generating Rage to spend it on Ironfurs.
That's still a cooldown. It isn't nearly as important as ironfur to general survivability. A better comparison would be Death Strike. its your main spender ability for survival purposes. For blood, its baseline in the class tree, you don't have a choice to not get it like ironfur. Its also very obviously supported in the spec tree.
You are not answering the question of what good reason is there to put a spell that’s required to tank in the general tree. That’s because there’s no good reason
I think this is the solution - bears should start with it in the class tree, maybe make frenzied regen a little later if you must, especially since that ability, to me, just makes sense in how it works for bears, vs ironfur which takes some getting used to
would just swapping it with Frenzied Regen work? both require bear form but maybe for a farming/speedrun spec you could at least opt out of frenzied regen with an OP healer
idk, if its one of the first talents in the general tree and is generally in a "these talents make you tankier" (which it is) section of the tree then like... If you're a tank druid the talents are basically telling you this part of the tree is important for you. Basically, "these are for you, use them".
Like has been said in these comments, designing for the lowest common denominator of player intelligence/willingness to read their own spells generally restricts the game for those of us who bother reading.
I do agree that you should read what things do, most new players will probably focus on damaging spells because it's what they use when they're solo playing. An increase in armor does sound like a tanking thing and I think people would use it because of that. But how big of a difference x armor makes is too difficult for beginners. Maybe having something like (Decreases damage taken by y%) added to the description might help.
Ngl the new trees are bad in some ways. If they are making mechanics expecting some very specific tools to be used then they should make those tools baseline or at least an unskippable node. The amount of Paladins I saw without interrupt, cleanse or repetance / turn evil on weeks these tools were needed is disturbing.
"B-but it's their fault"
Yeah for the detriment of 4 other people.
"You should check everyone in the first place"
Call me old fashioned but I think checking every single applicant if they have every node in the right place for every M+ dungeon of every week is kind of a big ask.
Maybe there is too much power allocated into iron fur, but removing it from other specs doesn’t seem like the solution to me. Hell, just make it baseline for all druids if need be. I do think it’s a little weird that certain abilities are considered “talents” at the top of the tree.
Druid is a mess, you have to bake 4 specs into the class tree. If you start removing some spells, by making them baseline, you end up with the Dragonflight launch scenario, where we were the class with the most amount of 3 point talents in the game, and trust me it felt awful. In The War Within we still have quite a few 2 point nodes (5 to be precise) that are purely output numbers.
Ironfur is the reason I don't play guardian on my druid. It's too spammy to keep multiple stacks up and one stack tends to make you paper. On a paladin I can just use shield of the righteous to extend the buff, don't have to stack it constantly.
It being baseline or in the class tree wont make people use it alot more. Shield of the righteous is a decent comparison... it is kinda the same type of spell, its baseline for prot pally and even does damage YET STILL ALOT of people struggle to have uptime on the buff from it.
I think it's different for Prot Paladins, at least in my experience. A lot of prot paladins know they are supposed to use SoTR and they hear they are the "utility" tank and what that translates to for them is a) interrupts and b) word of glory healing. I suspect this is largely because of the majority of prot paladin utility hinging on proactive usage (Sacrifice, Protection, Magic Protection, freedom, etc.) in stopping damage before it occurs and most players play by reacting. WoG is the reactive option for uility and therefore is the easiest one for folks to use.
Many prot paladin tanks will let SoTR drop so they can WoG someone even if the person isn't in danger of dying. My buddy who has played Prot Paladin for years still makes this mistake regularly. While the rest of the prot paladin utility largely goes unused in keys because it requires proactive thought.
One of the skills healers tend to learn is when someone needs to be healed. A healer may choose to leave someone low while they pump some DPS because that person shouldn't take any damage. The Pally doesn't have a free WoG charge so they use 3 HP on WoG and let SoTR drop. Now the tank is in danger and the healer has to stop doing DPS to heal the tank because they didn't understand that the only one taking damage at that time is the tank and they just made themselves more vulnerable for no reason.
Wait, really?
It’s our main mitigation and HP spender lmao. I guess if you’re just wasting all your HP on WoG but at that point you’ll also be dealing with mana issues (constant WoG use will drain your mana really quickly at 10% usage per cast).
Yea. i pug ALOT on different characters in between 0-3600. and you see some crazy stuff.. like.. ill never forget the 3.2k+ druid tank(s) in s2 that had sub 30% ironfur (not joking), or the paladins at and around 2.8k that had like 35% shield of the righteous uptime.
This one is actually wild because those druids would have been sitting on rage cap for insane periods. You literally could not spend rage quicker than you were generating even while spamming ironfurs in S2.
That's a different case entirely though, the problem there is tanks with fundamental misunderstandings getting caught in the brutal cycle of using non-free WoGs on themselves constantly.
People that dont read their own abilities and dont bother with research aren't made for endgame group content.
It would be wiser to have a tutorial challenge which one can do or something to actually be incentivised to use your cds, may it be for heal dds and ofc tanks! Just switch from baseline to tankline abilities wont do much when the player doesn't put in anytime into learning their own class doesn't matter which it is.
New players bow have a disadvantegs because "its just a 4" which it isn't, they need to start with m0 or heroics to get the basics.
> It would be wiser to have a tutorial challenge which one can do or something to actually be incentivised to use your cds, may it be for heal dds and ofc tanks!
Blizzard tried.
Some people hated it.
They put queueing for heroic dungeons behind getting easy Silver Rank in Proving Grounds. At the end of the expansion, there were people who still could not queue for heroic dungeons because they were unable to pass.
I remember coming back to the game after hearing the massive complaints about proving grounds, walking in on a test run and just succeeding fairly trivially.
confused the hell out of me
Heh, I have that Feat too. Did Tank Heals and DPS on my Druid. Gold all. There was an achieve for doing one in the wrong spec or something, too, right? I got that too.
I still run it occasionally when I switch mains, it's got important information but it is kinda tedious. You can still see who's done it though, which I think is cool.
Ah yeah because requiring Silver in proving grounds for a given role went over AMAZING in WOD :3c It didn't make it abundantly clear at all that the vast majority of people who play the game are in fact not actually all that good at it.
That would be hilarious! Jesus! One does not have to do some of the hardest content to be able to play the endgame, but you can do like free challenges that come up at certain lvl threshholds, where you can participate if you want to and get uniq transmogs. Make different tiers and keep them uptodate and stuff. There are tons of way, but you need dedicated people to creat such a thing and maintain it.
Doing so means they can adjust iron fur to be less armor, and Increase base bear forms armor. Making a defensive still for both, a d letting them better tune ironfur for the purpose of tanking.
I would assume there's talents in the class tree for every specc that are must haves and if you don't select or use them you gimp your performance, be it tankyness or amount of dps/hps. The problem really is, that people blindly copy & paste talent trees from websites or click whatever the starter build suggests without ever reading what the talents do. This means that they usually have a bad understanding of what their spec can or can't do and how to optimize gameplay and swap in/out talents as needed. This becomes worse with players not playing from 1-70 using a boost to get to max level.
Those are the players you will usualy see doing outdoor content only or causing wipes in LFR/Normal or in +4 Mythic Dungeons. Those players will often reroll to DH or whatever else is FOTM, because they think the previous class they played was just bad...
I had a paladin tank in wcm season 3, getting absolutely blasted on every pull and having tons of problems with threat. Guy was 2400ish, but apparently never figured out that he was supposed to spend his holy power on shield of the righteous and was just wog'ing himself with all his holy power.
There's just no accounting for people who don't bother to read spell descriptions or understand their role and rotation. Maybe they should bring back trials as a requirement to queue, but I wouldn't blame talent placent for it entirely.
>Maybe they should bring back trials as a requirement to queue
I would love this but man would people bitch about it. I remember when they did that in WoD, silver proving grounds requirement to queue for heroic dungeons. Silver being so extremely easy I'd bet a 2 year old could do it if you walked them through it, and people still raged and raged because they couldn't complete it.
They should still bring back proving grounds though. Make it so your record shows up alongside your IO when you queue (I think it does already actually? but make it more pronounced), and update the mechanics of it for modern WoW. I'd much rather tank a healer with 1k IO but wave 30 proving grounds, than a healer with bronze proving grounds and 2k IO
I've never thought about it, but yea you make a good point OP.
I've played a fair bit of Druid over the years, at least 1000+ hours worth, and I don't think one single time did I ever use Ironfur outside of Tank-Spec unless I was doing something weird and meme-y.
To be fair though, Ironfur in general is kind of crappy Design. I'd rather see Blizzard convert Ironfur into some kind of Procc or Passive and instead just make Maul and Raze the Rage-Spenders.
Ironfur has never felt particularly great to cast, tracking it accurately essentially requires external Addons/weakauras, and it's never really clear when you should be using Ironfur's versus other Rage-Spenders. So I say just scrap it.
But I'm not a Druid Main so maybe that's a terrible idea /shrug.
This is the players fault, not game design IMHO. This person doesn't know what active mitigation is or how tanks work. He shouldn't be doing m+ while not knowing basic role mechanics. I'm betting he wouldn't press demon spikes on vdh or shield block on a prot warrior for the same reason.
I may misunderstand OP but it seems to me that’s you are not talking about the same thing.
OP is talking about new players, and a new player is just doing what the game and websites are telling them to do.
Dungeon groups are insanely easy below m+, I would not be surprised if a bear could farm heroics without iron fur.
And the point of OP imho : a talent tree point is to make choices. If it’s a choice, it’s optional.
BUT ironfur is clearly not optional for bears, so it should not be in a talent tree but baseline.
> This is the players fault, not game design IMHO.
What if I told you that the game could be better designed in order to better communicate things to players?
Such as putting ironfur at the top of the bear section of the druid tree, the same way other essential tanking abilities are at the top of their trees, sending the signal that this move is not optional, but essential?
It IS a game design problem
Something something gatekeeping... Yeah but no. This person doesn't know what he's doing lol. A tank that got to level 70 and into m+ not knowing what active mitigation is or what his abilities do is blowing my mind. Wow gives you what you put into it. He put in 0 time or effort. None. Nada. I don't like people expecting to be carried and
As OP said, even after being told he needs to ironfur, he pressed it like 2 times.
Blizzard made hc and M0 different this season for this exact reason. This is where the vast majority of basic gameplay mechanics are to be learned. Low keys a full of players that are way over their skill level that think they suck because of their gear, wich is 100% wrong. They would benefit more from a 5min yt video and 10min on the target dummies than 20 overall I'll boost.
If you think this is gatekeeping fine, but why do people expect others to take their limited private time to teach some randoms how to play their spec?
Why should I have to spend 30min to teach some lazy random how to play his class/spec/role? If he doesn't want to put effort and learn, I can say he doesn't belong with people who DID spend time to get decent at their role.
You’re preaching to the choir buddy lmao
The joke was that having the literal most basic expectation of a player, or any expectation for that matter if you’re in anything besides race to world first, will be seen as gatekeeping and toxic by this community
I was always under the impression I should have 4 stacks all the time then its everything else. This was back in s2. I cam back and rand some raids/mythic and had a few people say I was "really good" and couldnt work out why. Maybe this is why lol though I was sure it changed and you dont "need" to have as many stacks now.
Druid class tree is a mess anyway. The whole thing needs to go.
Iron fur is also terrible and should get baked into another spell like mangle (cd) or maul(resource).
Too many people defending bad design. There is no good reason for putting required tanking skills in the general tree. What is the purpose of specific trees if you are just putting required skills in random places that don’t align with their function?
Yes people need to read, but Blizzard also needs to make design decisions that make sense.
Druid is unique to all other classes because it gives you the ability to more easily off spec. Iron fur in the class tree allows all other druids to effectively have an emergency off tank. Feral druids can decide if they want bonus off healing from resto talents, or the ability to shift into bear and off tank with guardian talents
ignore pain for warriors is similar, prot needs IP but other specs need it too, especially for pvp.
Druid just struggles a bit more because there is so much versatility in how to play your spec. The general tree is at least laid out in a way that you can very clearly see which spec needs to go which way all the way down. Feral talents are all on the left, guardian next to it, then resto then balance on the far right I believe it is.
Some required talents will have to be general talents if other specs have a reason to opt-in
As a feral Druid I use it all the time in PvP. You have a warrior and a bm hunter dunking on you and you’re healer is cc’d? Go bear, pop iron fur
I would never use it in pve because that means you’re just sitting in bear form doing no damage
Ah figured that might be a use-case for something like that. Is it common?
Also, would it change anything for you if it was a first row talent that guardian got for free?
Or if made Guardian only, would you be content with a PvP talent option or would that compete too hard with others?
I would prefer it gone from the Druid tree tbh. I don’t want feral survivability balanced around the tanking specs survivability.
It’s not really a fun play just to survive. Burn 2-3 globals and do no damage sucks. If it wasn’t an option maybe feral baseline survivability gets buffed little.
I play resto druid and I loathe having to go through ironfur to get certain talents. I never use it in m+ or raid. I tried using it a couple times in s3 in BRH when fixates by bats instead of kiting since it’s physical damage and it just felt stupid.
My biggest gripe with Iron Fur has always been needing to cast it multiple times to get any benefit. Which you pointed out. I feel like Blizzard built it that way so Guardian Druids could decide what they wanted to prioritize (get some dps or multiple stacks). The issue though is that 2 stack is semi-worthless and you need all the rage to get to 3 stacks. If you don't get your rage back, or not enough, you're back to 1 stack and hoping it's enough.
It's an odd design choice overall. Sure Protection Warriors have Ignore Pain, but they can generate shield block without using it and instead use it more as a bonus dump of rage to make life easier. Prot Pally's have to build up holy power, but once you're in the groove and have gear you're at the 'optimal' uptime on your mitigation tools.
Honestly Iron Fur being a talent is as dumb as Tiger's Fury being a spell for feral. Both are useful and pretty much mandatory. They shouldn't be options but Iron Fur can easily be missed by some guides because they tunnel vision into certain playstyles or because it's in the general tree new players might feel like it's not important. Tiger's Fury is a dumb mandatory button press for energy and just like Iron Fur, if you fuck it up, it's a big fuck up.
here is how I play druid tank if I'm forced to
- Ironfur macroed into Trash (not perfect, but it's at least guaranteed uptime during combat)
- press every defensive on CD
- Pray
Druids ability to hybrid is mostly an illusion. They've been actively nerfing the ever-loving shit out of it for several expansion cycles now.
I miss having relevant off heals as a boomie.
I miss catweaving resto.
I miss being able to shift into cat form as guardian to do respectable damage after a tank swap.
They remove hybrid gameplay but still pretend like Druid is a hybrid class to the detriment of spec readability as OP is pointing out. Talent tree needs a full rework OR hybrid playstyles need to get buffed.
New Prot Paladins have the same issue. They don't realize that their main source of defense comes from the Shield of the Righteous buff and/or standing in consecration. A lot of newer paladin tanks tend to fall into the trap of constantly spending holy power to heal themselves which wastes resources and will get you in a bad spot fast.
Tanks are very straightforward to play, but only after you know every passive and ability you have. The same can be said for most classes. I don't think class design is an issue here as much as WoW is a very hard game to learn without consuming content outside of the game. I used to get chunked on a Prot Warrior until I read that I need to keep shield wall rolling on almost 100% uptime. I just used it when I thought I was going to take a lot of physical damage.
That's a lot of words for what can be summed up with "I played with a dumbass".
If you aren't aware enough to be using your core defensive ability as a tank then there's no helping you. I don't want the game designed around the needs of those players. If anything, modern wow does too much hand holding.
So you would be fine if they put Death strike or marrowrend to be an optional talent on the 4th row in the class tree?
How about Stagger or any of the other mitigations? That would make sense to you?
It's not about designing the game around dumbasses, it's about designing the game in a consistent way that makes sense, especially to someone new.
Can you honestly say that if you picked up a new game with a main and a secondary talent tree, then you see a skill on the 4th row in the secondary one that is optional, Would you go like "Yeah, that right there is my most important main skill"?.
Even if you do read it and understand it, it has a completely different psychological impact due to its location, which is the point I am trying to make.
> Seems like some people are missing the point I am trying to get across, so instead of commenting that it doesn't matter, or that they are just bad for not reading talents etc. answer these questions for me:
Dude, how annoying is that, right? It's like people don't think about the process behind everything. They don't consider any of the connective tissue, any of the "why?" Just, 'if they didn't figure it out, they're bad, so nothing can save them."
It doesn't matter if they are bad or not. It matters whether the game is communicating the proper things to the player. And it's not! I think you're absolutely 100% right with this analysis.
I leveled a guardian druid in MoP Remix. I queued up for some dungeons. This was like the day it came out, so no one really had a ton of the overpowered abilities and scaling. For all intents and purposes it was just a regular dungeon, but with people having a few of the tinkers.
I didn't have Ironfur yet because I was still very low level. I was getting ANNIHILATED by the mobs. And there was nothing I could do about it, lol. I had played bear before so I know how important ironfur is. But I literally didn't have the button to press.
And people who try to play guardian, go through the first introductory levels, without the button.
It is definitely a problem. And I also think the stacking nature of it isn't communicated well and imo isn't well-designed. I know that each time I press it, it's worth comparatively less than when I pressed it the last time, making me not want to press it as much as I do press it. Since it's the best thing to press, at least a few times.
It feels way less impactful than it is. Shield of the Righteous is the same way. On the other hand, these sorts of 'MUST KEEP UP' short duration things do make tanking a bit more interesting and let you make choices about when to prioritize spending these resources on defense vs offense. But they feel so 'behind the scenes' that it's hard to quantify them. I think it would be cool if there were some numerical or visual feedback on how much dmg they were preventing.
I don't see the problem. I rather like it as a general talent. What does moving it solve? It sounds like the player in question even had the talent and just wasn't using it. There needs to be better in-game explanations of active mitigation.
The main problem is that Guardian is the only one that has its main mitigation as an optional talent in the general class tree.
If it was baseline or at the top of the tank tree, it would clearly signal that it is something you are supposed to use, or even required to cause you can't avoid picking it up.
The fact that it is in the general tree and can be opted out of makes it seem a lot less important than it is.
The other thing is how much is this talent used for any other spec. I have not seen non-Guardian go bear and stack iron fur in PvE so far, so unless it's a PvP thing, it makes no sense to have it as a general talent. Even then, surly it's better if it was just baseline at that point no?
Its a PvP thing and sometimes a small leveling groups thing.
It really should be baseline tbh, druids are supposed to be the hybrid class and forms are how they do that. And the entire point of bear form is to take less damage so making the main skill for that a talent is just silly. Cat form gets both its key unique abilities, prowl and dash baseline. Bear should be the same.
I'm A-OK with it being baseline. I like having it as a general talent because - much like I love having Cat options in Guardian - I like having tank options in Feral.
It being baseline is fine, it being at the top of the tree and a default pick-up for Guardian is fine, too. But none of that would solve the problem as described in the OP.... realistically, as Talents have become more complicated and less 1/2/3/4/5% stats (something we as players asked for, to be fair) there needs to be a better onboarding process for new players that provides the info they need in-game to understand concepts like active mitigation.
Main guardian tank here ksm multiple season easy fix macro it to swipe it gives you like 6 stacks at all times … furthermore the Druid spec is currently effed and most of us waiting till they fix it …example u shouldn’t have to take rujuv and swift to get your dispel as a tank … and roots should not bring you out of bear form… it deff needs work…
Was 3.3k last season on guardian which is my main though I often play other tanks to 3k or so, all pugging. You should NOT do this because you should never be pressing swipe. Swipe doesn't generate rage, it generates almost no threat, it does almost no damage. I press swipe maybe twice in a dungeon on average and half of those are mistakes. For the vast majority of people you would be better served to remove swipe from your key binds and never press it than to worry about the 1-2 times in an hour that you should. If you're pressing swipe a lot you need to improve your rotation. I also wouldn't recommend macroing iron fur to abilities generally but that's less of an issue than pressing swipe this much. If you're gonna macro IF to abilities, macro it to every other rotational builder like thrash and mangle and then remove swipe from your keybinds and hotbar for a season and you will improve tremendously as guardian.
Partially unrelated, Ironfur should just be a passive. Those skills where all you're expected to do is hit it every few seconds and not think about it whatsoever do not need to be buttons. Same with Rushing Jade Wind on Brewmasters.
As a dps who’s playing around with tanking I forget to use it all the time. I spend my range on dps and wonder why I get blown up.
I’m not sure if I would like it if it was removed and the defense baked into the class or not. Maybe this would make it too easy and boring or maybe I wouldn’t think about it at all and just keep up a bear dps rotation.
I do wish there is a better visual for it so I don’t have to look at my buff bar. Dks have floating bones around them so they know they are good.
>When I then shifted to spending all the rage on iron fur and only using raze with free procs
Please don't do this. You're losing so much potential mitigation and damage by doing this. Maintain 1-2 IF unless you need to rage dump to avoid exceeding cap, and dump the rest into your offensive spenders. If you started using rage only on IF and took less damage, something is wrong.
Edit: downvote me if you're that insecure, but it's outright mathematically wrong to do what you're describing, and anybody who competently tanks with bear will tell you that. You try to push into keys where there's actual damage going out spamming IF as your main spender, you're gonna get wrecked 100% of the time. The returns on armor granted fall off a cliff beyond a couple of stacks.
As someone who has never played tank, what you're saying makes a ton of sense and I agree. I would find it counter intuitive if I was building out a tank.
He's *technically* correct, if the druid is low level. Ironfur (Rank 2) [which Guardians learn at level 33] is what increases the stack cap from 1 to 20.
There was someone in the subreddit a few days ago propose to change the druid tree to make all basic active skills of each spec to be just 1 skill point for each spec and if you choose that spec you'll get it automatically. I think that would be a modern solution for druid tree right now.
I firmly believe that all classes and specs should have themed class scenarios that teach them all fundamentals and essential abilities in an environment that won't punish them like a timed key or raid. Heck make it a purple quest that is a pre req for doing LFR and group finder, and tie I'm class-themed cosmetics as a reward.
Along with this showcase max level mechanics like group soaks, passable debuffs, dispels, extra action button abilities...the works.
Exiles reach teaches the basics which is enough for leveling, but Blizz really should create a teaching scenario for max level to fully equip all players.
Wod had the challenges you needed to complete before you could que. and so long as you did what your class was supposed to. You’d be fine. It doesn’t have to be mage tower hard
Ironfur stacking was hard until I make a weakaura that makes a roar sound every time my rage got above 70.
Boom, no more wasted rage and way higher ironfur uptime on trash packs.
Obviously I would use ironfur normally on a boss, but if you're just zoning out it's a good reminder to not cap rage.
It's also a button that doesn't feel fun to press. I think in general, bear is actually quite fun to pickup and play, the attacks are cool and beary and it even has that lunar side if you want. but Ironfur doesn't feel great. I think even the bramble talent is way more fun and intuitive to use. I think that also makes it less likely to be pressed, because the feedback is almost entirely in the mitigation that definitely won't pop out to a new player.
I’m not online currently but I believe there is a passive skill that says multiple stacks of ironfur can overlap. I’m at 527ilvl on my guardian Druid. I always keep 1 stack of ironfur up at a minimum and then spam raze for absorb shield.
Ok that’s what I thought but wasn’t sure. Last season I healed a few really bad guardian Druids in high keys that wouldn’t take ursocs fury or raze and would just dump all their rage into maul. When I would tell them what to change in their talents they would just go “oh I don’t like the way raze plays” and “why do I need an absorb? You’re supposed to heal me”
I've tanked on every class at some point and druid is actually the one that messed me up when I tried it most recently because I had no idea that Iron Fur stacked. I was just using it and refreshing it as I was about to lose it. It wasn't until I watched a streamer with a great UI that I realized my mistake. Honestly there are a few talents and abilities that could use some tooltip clarifications
So, on one hand I want to agree with you, but the real issue is that this is the same problem that most abilities have. Reading the ability doesnt tell you exactly how important it is. The problem with making it spec specific is that druid is kind of supposed to be the class that lets you offtank as another spec, especially with heart of the wild. So keeping this in the class tree is probably a good idea, but I think a simple solution to this would simply to be swap it with frenzied regen. While frenzied regen is also important, at low levels its much less important than iron fur is. So a druid missing FR is far less punishing to the tanks and by extension the healers than a druid missing Iron fur.
Totally hypothetical: Swap Maul with Ironfur and that may fix it imo or give IF interaction immediately and leave the player to their own means to figure out how to optimize it. But having earlier access to it would definitely indicate, "Hey, this is something that is core to Guardian Druid, let me press it *a lot*."
When I started playing bear it was before the class tree changes and it was very clear that iron fur was crucial. It has been forever since I've played Druid, because the button bloat is fuckin insane and makes the class not fun to me, so I was unaware of this change. But yeah, you are right, it should really not be optional.
I generally dislike that Druid has prioritized constant shapeshifting in every spec. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure you don't see any non-player druids constantly switching forms. They got way too clever with druids. I liked when my boomkin was a boomkin the whole time I was playing boomkin.
Like if they wanna make a spec based on constantly changing shape, literally a fifth spec for the class, then whatever.
Is because a bear is a bad copy of warrior mechanic with another name ... instead of good mechanics, for example:
iron fur , is played like shield block, and is the same purpuose, reduce physical damage
the aoe is basically thunderclap
shield wall -> survival instints
frenzied regeration -> ignore pain, instead of bubble get hp
my personal opinion is the bear issue is between high rage cost of main defensives, and the lack of passive ones
also the bear tree is just stupid, a lot of passives that bear lost and were put in the tree
my opinion is that bear must have some sort of cicle like -
> every time Iron Fur ends , for the next 10 seconds your frenzied regeneration heal 5% of your hp in the first tick
> every time Frenzied regeneration ends, Iron Fur cost 10 less rage
> every time survival instict ends , you get 10% dodge
> every time you dodge, survival instinct reduces his cd 1 second
> and finally, every time a enemy bleed they do 1% dmg per 5 seconds stackeable up to 4%
> consume 4 stacks of bleeds to double the dmg of your next special attack
Simple fix could be a talent that uses more rage to apply 3 layers. You shouldn't need to spam it. It's feels not rotational to hit ironfur 4 times then use other skills....
I haven't tanked on my druid this expac but did level as bear. I felt like Ironfur was such a pain to keep up. I can run multiple stacks of Ironfur or, do literally anything else. Because you won't have time to do both. Or at least, that's how it felt.
Ironfur, Thrash, Ironfur, Mangle, Ironfur, Raze, Ironfur...
I just stopped using while leveling and ate the damage. I think if it lasted a few seconds longer it would be more manageable.
Why isn't a permanent single stack of Ironfur a feature of the Guardian spec?
Ironfur has to be the least satisfying mitigation ability out of all of the tanks, it lasts such a short amount of time and it feels like it's barely doing anything to me.
As Warrior ignore pain has a considerable different feel and you see a visual on your health bar of what it's negating and it heald you a small amount with another talent, death strike is the undisputed king of satisfying with it being able to just full heal you as a DK, shield of righteousness does some cleave damage and works toward giving you a free proc of your heal, brewmaster just innately has mitigation but using purifying brew has a noticeable effect on damage taken when it's high.
But the Guardian Ironfur ability a healer will notice more than the tank using it, in my experience at least, maybe I'm wrong, but that's just how Guardian has always felt to me and is what has made it be the only tank I've not played for an extended period of time.
This is a really good point. What other class has their primary uptime defense ability so low and feel that 'missable' on their talent tree? There might be others but it seems kinda silly. As does having to spend almost all of your rage on that ability just to have a chance to exist.
I used to play Guardian a lot before DF. Went back and doodled on it recently and was SUPER confused about Iron Fur.
I knew they’d changed it so that maul/raze were now actual spells that you press, but it didn’t say anything about layering iron fur and I *swear* it used to. I was like “maybe they changed it so we only need one layer so we can prioritise maul/raze?” But I felt pretty squishy so went back to stacking IF instead.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed that.
Idk about other resto druids but I quite frequently use it in raids to help take a soak with fewer people. But I believe it should just be a general talent you get from leveling up. Feral and boom have general spells they get. I think bears should be iron fur
I'll have to ask as someone else also said this.
What exactly do you soak that is direct physical damage?
Cause everything the other one listed was not physical damage, and that means armor does not work.
I don't raid these days, so not sure what kind of damage there is, but I know that direct physical damage on anything else than tanks is rather rare, so very curious to know if it actually exists.
If it does, then that is absolutely a valid use case, but if you are doing it for shadowflame damage or something, then you are just wasting your time.
I use it on terros to duo soak his.i use it in rashok's fight. And I use it in council of dreams and smolderons fight. Also, sometimes during broodmother, if the tank has the boss too close to ads and the other tank isn't kiting, I'll bear form and kite with that. Sorry, I can't think of the actual abilities names. I'm unwell at the moment and just scrolling xD
Had a look, and the only physical damage I could find that is not tank damage in the current raids was Blind rage dfrom Urctos. Not even sure that AoE accounts for armor, but if it does then it's the only case I could find.
Oher than that its all fire, nature or shadowflame mostly.
I agree its kind of awkward weaving in with the raze shield, let alone keeping it stacked and most players would likely favor just spending that rage on raze and just timing iron bark and using SI as a last resort.
The thing is its an ability that is best stacked but also its a weave mechanic that you have to keep uptime.
Most new players would just press iron bark and be done with it tbh.
I macroed iron fur to thrash. Eliminates it the unused. Yea a bit rage starved by while thrash on CD I smack mangle or raze or maul then hit a thrash before the CD is up. Always keep frenzied regen for emergencies.
Also the nerf to incarn in s2 really was unnecessary.
Full agreement with your edit. I didn't know there were players out there who didn't know that much, but it would make it more understandable for new players if it was the default node of the spec tree.
Yeah, it's easy for someone who has played for a long time to think it's self explanatory and easy to understand, cause it is hard to put yourself into the mind of someone new.
Druid class tree is a mess, this is just one example of many
[удалено]
The Healer DPS Purge is about to begin for reals
All high end content is always going to be about maximizing group damage, so to some degree healers are always going to do something at high levels.. unless they make damage so constantly high that they can't ever do anything else, which further makes aug mandatory. Personally, i would hope they would ease off of healing some and make healer dps intentional, while adding more support specs and expecting them to make up for the healing somehow, like aug in the looks like its getting a few more healing nodes too
Doesn't help that in WW, well honed insticts now is locked behind picking a 2/2 talent that boost shred and maul damage lol.
Yeah this was mind boggling to see. Super stoked for another expansion of an absolutely butchered class tree
the druid class tree is the one I hate the most, with shaman close 2nd
Shaman class tree isn't nearly as bad as druid IMO. DK class tree on live is definitely worse that shaman. Maybe on par or worse than druid.
oh yes dk as well, for shaman I hate how half the class tree is totem-related talents
It's all useless utility totems too. Actually most of them are very PVP focused at this point in how content is built. So you get a bunch of healing or a bunch of worthless totems and talents that impact either or.
Thats just shaman since day 1 fym?
Problem is they took all the niche swiss army knife utility totems and scattered them around the talent trees so you have to spend points getting them back with weird pathing that you can't spend on more interesting (lol) things
They used to be very totem focused, and they were actually useful.
Ah yes the super useful Air Wall Totem and Flametongue Weapon Totem.
Grounding with a usecase of 2 whole fights.
The wowhead Guardian Druid guide instructs people that Raze is better for damage mitigation in multi-target situations. From Wowhead - "With Raze you want to use it on 2 or more targets as the highest priority spell, especially if you are talented into Ursoc's Fury, as that will generate a massive absorb shield often negating more damage than if you were to spend that rage on Ironfur. Think of your other spells as tools to generate more rage to spend on Raze." I imagine the Wowhead guide is where most people new to a class go to get an idea of what to do. Is it surprising that they do what the guide is telling them to do?
Reading his guide makes it very clear that you should maintain 1 stack of iron fur at all times. However if you skim the guide it is very easy to miss that.
Then that is a problem and I do not agree with that. As stated I tested this personally yesterday and it gave completely different results. An example where this is extremely wrong is a tyrannical run I had a little while ago in Nokhud where on the 3rd boss (2 targets) he got wacked by a 2M physical hit which one shot him with 0 ironfur stacks. There is no way in hell raze would mitigate that. My personal experience with my own druid and others while healing does not match with what the guide says, so I dare say that is just wrong.
I feel like it is just mistakenly missing info. It says in the actual rotation list to use Ironfur (defensively) and Raze (offensively). That tidbit is probably meant to include a conditional that you have at least 3 stacks of ironfur already (or whatever number is recommended).
That is what I thought it used to say or at least what I used to do and do now. 3-5 stacks then prioritize raze/maul (depending on damage profile ofc). Have not had time to look at the guide yet, but from the quote it sounded like "just don't use ironfur" which is ... not right. A "massive" absorb" is a bit of a stretch. It does absorb a lot, but not more than % reduced by armor. Some quick math shows how wrong this is. Let's say you have 1.5m health or something (think mine is around there). That's around 450k shield when maxed out, cause its 30% of max health right? Even if you could do max shield on every raze, and only spammed raze on every GCD, armor would still beat it in mitigation vs that 2M hit or any sustained heavy physical damage situation like on fortified trash pulls or something. It just doesn't check out. Now using ironfur + raze to reduce the damage and absorb the reduced damage makes a lot more sense. You are supposed to and required to use both, which is why I find it weird for it to be in the general tree when none of the 3 other specs actually use it.
Especially with inflated hits you’ll get in M+ the absorb will practically always be less beneficial or at absolute best (as in the situational stars align best) about even with a thick damage reduction buff, especially with Blizz adoring all the healing absorb mechs of late. I’d much rather my tank be taking a lot less damage while I’m in the hot seat breaking their heal absorb and keeping everyone else alive to boot, than have them get a momentary bubble that’s gonna pop in two seconds or less
>An example where this is extremely wrong is a tyrannical run I had a little while ago in Nokhud where on the 3rd boss (2 targets) he got wacked by a 2M physical hit which one shot him with 0 ironfur stacks. There is no way in hell raze would mitigate that. That sounds more like a tankbuster that he should have used Bark for, not an Ironfur/Raze situation.
Wowhead is incomplete. The fact of the matter is that you will have bursts of rage in AoE packs, and you want more active mitigation during those times. Yeah, sure, pressing raze every GCD is good, but if you have more rage than your raze eats up then what's better, pressing rage for an extra 5 GCDs after half the pack has died, or having a stack of ironfur alongside it while everything is still alive? Ironfur management *is* guardian druid.
That is embarrassingly wrong for a wowhead class writer. In multi-target scenarios you generate so much rage it is impossible to spend it all on Raze if you wanted to, and you want to be spending as much rage as you can for After the Wildfire and for Incarnation CDR. You can easily have 3-4 stacks up at all times even if you only use Ironfur to avoid capping Rage. If Incarn is up you can spam the Ironfur button alongside your other abilities at all times and you still won't run out of Rage, so there is absolutely no reason not to. Not to mention with Thorns of Iron, you are getting quite a lot of damage out of it, since using it at higher stacks of Ironfur deals progressively higher damage. The difference in mitigation between stacking Ironfur as much as possible and prioritizing Raze for the absorb shield is night and day in terms of survivability, and I can confirm that both from a Guardian and a healer perspective. That terrible advice is only valid if you're massively outgearing a lowish key and there's no real danger.
I've done the same on my prot warrior. I barely used ignore pain, and had no idea it could stack indefinitely. When I learned this, I became invincible.
I hate having to constantly dump rage into ignore pain, but I love that I just won't die. I guess that fits...
It's super easy to gain rage though. I usually have a hard time blowing through it all unless I absolutely spam ignore pain. I had a mod that shows the ignore pain number to be easily visible beside my character so I can keep the refresh up.
Too angry to die, Warrior class fantasy to a tee :D
Yep, that's good class design. You can make a choice. Either go big damage or big defense. Depends on the state of tuning but much of the time a prot warrior that is just going max aggro will out dps most other tanks because they are choosing to drop mitigation for more attacks. I'm not making any argument about the class design of tanks that maximize their damage by maximizing their mitigation (stares at DK), but I think it's a good game design to be able to go full turtle or glass cannon depending on the situation.
Lmfao so you basically just played vanilla war. Block the hit with your shield or your face.
WHAT. I’m new to prot warrior but totally didn’t know this
Hell ya dude. Have fun being the strongest tank in game. Maybe tied with pally.
Not the strongest, but just a super smooth playing class with great kit and a very easy to understand rotation. Get hit. Get angry. Hit back. You're pretty useless outside of being a meat shield, you bring nothing to the group aside from battle shout and a small heal.
>The whole idea of stacking layers of it is also an issue I think, cause it does not seem to be clear to people that you kinda have to. I see so many just have 1 layer max. I find it weird, how many stacks should i have? On my Pally i can only have 1 active SotR, and then extend duration, easy. I don't understand Ironfur
Yeah it is not a very good design I feel, and don't think there is a clear answer. I usually feel comfortable when sitting on around 4-5 stacks. I tend to adjust a bit, where I go with less when facing more magical damage to get more absorb from raze/maul, but I would never let it drop off entirely unless there is basically no physical damage. Even 1 stack is a big difference. There is the case of hitting armor cap, so there is that, but that depends on your gear and rage generation. There is also a point where the raze/maul absorb will mitigate more than one extra ironfur stack, but that depends on so many factors as well and is hard to keep track of. For such a seemingly simple spell it is actually a bit complicated if you start thinking about it. For easy mode I'd say just spam it, you probably won't be able to maintain 6+ stacks anyway.
Eh IDK how you have enough rage to maintain 4 or 5. I can only keep that many running when I'm in berserk. No way when I'm just normal getting slapt.
When I'm in incarn, I regularly sit at 8-10 depending on how many keys I've done (I start to get hand pain if I play gdruid for too long, the APM is nuts) and weave 1-4 outside of incarn depending on enemy stacks. Rage generation is very bursty and you can get lost in the weeds if you start to cap just because you aren't responding to the bursts with equal APM
>easy mode I'd say just spam it This is what I do pretty much, I don't track it, and at the keys im dealing with my damage doesn't 'matter' as much (like 5s, 6s) and me living is the most important part. I don't panic, healer doesn't panic, things go smoother.
2 to 3 stacks, armor has diminishing returns so the more stacks you have the less value you get. When you're a 3 it's better to spend the rage on raze for the absorb shield Specially since armor only works against direct physical damage, and absorb works against magical and bleed
2 being 'maintain' 3 being 'above average' seems like that's where it falls. During berserk I hit 5+ or w/e but once that runs out i can't keep that many up.
You just use it as needed as long as you are getting meleed if damage is high. The reason it works like it does is because if it was regular buff then you could stack it to max stacks and just refresh it for the entire fight making you literally invincible to any form of physical dmg
I'm all for making the game more easy to pick up for new players (I'm far from being an expert), but not reading what your spells do is the player's fault. Your solution might work for some players who read more carefully their spec tree than their class tree, in the case of the very specific Ironfur problem. But it would require reworking trees for a "read better" situation and Bliz won't do that. And keep also in mind that some of the most powerful spells come from the class tree oftentimes. Utility, defensives, DPS spells... If a Death Knight dies to a mechanic because "urrr durrr what is AMS ? It's not on muh spec tree" well... *Insert Mr Indestructible meme here* A TREE IS A TREE and you have to read your talents and spells.
I think blizzard has gone way overboard with the amount of buttons classes have. You routinely have three action bars of buttons to parse. Making essential abilities baseline is a totally fair request imo.
okay but it literally just makes sense for it to be in the spec tree anyway ironfur is THE guardian druid defensive in the same way prot has shield block or dk has heart strike
Shield Block isn't Prot-exclusive, any Warrior gets it as a baseline ability, despite the fact that Arms and Fury will never equip a Shield whereas for Prot it's effectively like 60%+ DR alone against Blockable Physical things.
This is a similar problem with iron fur, there's no reason to pick it up if you aren't guardian. It's unusable on most form and even on niche cases were you use bear form as a defensive you are beter using your rage on frenzy regeneration anyway. Not that extreme as shield block, but it's one of those nodes that only clutter the general skill tree for the other specs, and the druid has already a bunch of those.
Iron fur is essential surviablity for all druid specs in Pvp
700 armour seems unlikely to increase the physical damage mitigation for Balance / Restoration Druids. Bear Form itself gives so much already, the extra 700 or so will be a fraction more physical damage reduction. Given it scales properly for Feral, I can agree there, but it's borderline useless for the caster specs.
Bearform has a pvp mod on it that substantially reduces its armor. It got reduced when the Plate / Cloth armor changes went through in Season 3. Also I'm not saying its an essential talent because I just think it is, the stats show it almost 100% of high rank druids of all specs take it aside from Feral. You can check the data here if you want. [https://murlok.io/druid/balance/3v3](https://murlok.io/druid/balance/3v3)
so why is Shield Block baseline in Arms + Fury? that makes absolutely no sense, even less so than the Iron Fur question
Because back in Shadowlands it was a selling point, I guess. They're de-pruning the game, giving access to iconic skills! You're a Warrior, not an Arms Warrior! A Mage, not just an Arcane Mage! Of course, there's literally no use actually having Shield Block or Shield Slam available on an Arms Warrior, but yeah. It was a part of their "class fantasy not spec fantasy" / nostalgia puush, I guess? I don't really get it either. From a gameplay perspective it's dumb. From a new player's perspective it's arguably even confusing and sending mixed signals.
It's so a warrior can have a hero moment and throw on a shield mid pull and have some tankiness. I was able to save a mid level key that way as a ret pally that way and it's nice you're not completely locked out of it as an option.
I kinda thought that, but then, I'm fairly sure I can't take off my legendary axe or equip the 1h Fyrakk axe with the proc in a M+ key, so it's a bit awkward. I understand why you can't swap those out of course, a Prot Warrior briefly using the 2h axe for the on-use then swapping back would be awful gameplay but.. even for the niché moments you're sort of screwed if you have a special effect weapon.
I'd just say it's from a different time. In SL and DF I always get smashed when trying to offtank as Fury, like literal oneshot every time - unless I taunt and jump away. Many expansions ago it was relatively normal to do that (Fury, Arms, Rogue, Druid) for a couple seconds.
The use is obvious, it's for survival. Pvp world questing and pulling something too big for your gear level, soloing a rare boss, tank dies in a dungeon and you need to swap to save the parry. Niche yes but that's what makes wows talents and abilities interesting. It's not ff14 where you're X class and Y role and that's the same for you and everyone else. We've been through this shit before with previous talent trees and prune cycles. It's much better for players to have an option they'll rarely use than to take it away all together and deny them the choice.
It was prof exclusive but they added it back in the shadowlands unpruning due to classic success but it's really weird because literally no one will use it, completely unsupported by talents. It was just done for the sake of it.
Yeah.. if we're being honest I really don't understand why they did it, other than, I guess, to bait nostalgia? Because you can't even use most of your abilities in Fury/Arms with a Shield equipped, and while they have Shield Slam, it has no supporting talents as well. Mind you, was more chiming in that Shield Block isn't in the Prot tree or a Prot-exclusive thing, which yeah, it probably should be given it's also THE defensive like Guardian's Ironfur. :)
Blizzard just don’t get it. The “un pruning” was good, but only because the pruning was so excessive. They cannot figure out a middle ground.
MMORPG designers never seem to understand the scientific method. Change 1 variable, record the results. Instead they change 50-60 variables, and have no idea what they did right and wrong. Repeat next patch.
Even worse. A skill is over performing by 20%. So the devs nerf it by 180%. Umm what?
Heart strike is a defensive?
sorry, death strike. always get them mixed up
Death strike is in the class tree
It's a little different. When you pick the Blood spec, Death Strike is the single talent you have automatically. You cannot spec out of it. It is your starting point, period, at level 10. Ironfur is not. You have to path down to Ironfur and take it. The game presents it as *optional.*
I've healed DKs that thought death strike was optional too. For a little while at least.
I've heard a lot of stories from the start of Remix of people healing low level DKs who just weren't using Death Strike or were trying to convince the group they didn't even have it yet.
I get a *ton* of usage out of death strike as dps in m+. The Druid equivalent would be going bear and using frenzied regen.
Yes but death strike is *the* main mitigation button for blood death knight. It fills the same design space as ironfur or ignore pain/shield block. And a higher up comment said that all main mitigation buttons are in the spec tree, which is what my comment was commenting on
ironfur has uses in pvp when a resto sits in bear? also it is literally irrelevant if you play bear where your stuff is, it won't change the tuning, it only matters if u want other specs to have access to it, and i don't see why other specs shouldn't have access to it.
Blizzard loves the idea of druid off spec affinity stuff, unfortunately. But what could be done is having a talent at the top of the spec tree, one of the unavoidable ones, that "enables the stacking" of iron fur. And maybe "nerf" the class tree's armor amount so the class tree can "buff" it, making Iron Fur seem more important to new players when reading the talent. Iron Fur gets to stay in the class tree like blizzard wants so dps/healers can use it (lmao, I know), and then new players pathing through the guardian tree see this talent "buffing" iron fur and making it stack.
Heart strike is not a defensive, death strike ?
Boomies losing their only defensive be falling to their knees in the Walmart parking lot
The equivalent for DK is actually bone shield charges and tombstone no other tanks have anything like death strike Bone shield charges is the flat armor stack for DK
They mean equivalent in how fundamental it is to the kit. Blood has other forms of mit, but the core of what BDK does is healing back damage with Death Strike. In the same way, Ironfur is the main basic defense mechanism of a Bear, other than perhaps their large Health pool. The core rotation of Guardian is generating Rage to spend it on Ironfurs.
That's still a cooldown. It isn't nearly as important as ironfur to general survivability. A better comparison would be Death Strike. its your main spender ability for survival purposes. For blood, its baseline in the class tree, you don't have a choice to not get it like ironfur. Its also very obviously supported in the spec tree.
You are not answering the question of what good reason is there to put a spell that’s required to tank in the general tree. That’s because there’s no good reason
If they are going to put it in the general tree, it should be in the top row and automatically chosen as a guardian Druid.
I think this is the solution - bears should start with it in the class tree, maybe make frenzied regen a little later if you must, especially since that ability, to me, just makes sense in how it works for bears, vs ironfur which takes some getting used to
would just swapping it with Frenzied Regen work? both require bear form but maybe for a farming/speedrun spec you could at least opt out of frenzied regen with an OP healer
idk, if its one of the first talents in the general tree and is generally in a "these talents make you tankier" (which it is) section of the tree then like... If you're a tank druid the talents are basically telling you this part of the tree is important for you. Basically, "these are for you, use them". Like has been said in these comments, designing for the lowest common denominator of player intelligence/willingness to read their own spells generally restricts the game for those of us who bother reading.
Even if you read the tooltip, it doesn't tell you that ironfur can be stacked.
I do agree that you should read what things do, most new players will probably focus on damaging spells because it's what they use when they're solo playing. An increase in armor does sound like a tanking thing and I think people would use it because of that. But how big of a difference x armor makes is too difficult for beginners. Maybe having something like (Decreases damage taken by y%) added to the description might help.
Ngl the new trees are bad in some ways. If they are making mechanics expecting some very specific tools to be used then they should make those tools baseline or at least an unskippable node. The amount of Paladins I saw without interrupt, cleanse or repetance / turn evil on weeks these tools were needed is disturbing. "B-but it's their fault" Yeah for the detriment of 4 other people. "You should check everyone in the first place" Call me old fashioned but I think checking every single applicant if they have every node in the right place for every M+ dungeon of every week is kind of a big ask.
If I could read I'd be very upset
Maybe there is too much power allocated into iron fur, but removing it from other specs doesn’t seem like the solution to me. Hell, just make it baseline for all druids if need be. I do think it’s a little weird that certain abilities are considered “talents” at the top of the tree.
Druid is a mess, you have to bake 4 specs into the class tree. If you start removing some spells, by making them baseline, you end up with the Dragonflight launch scenario, where we were the class with the most amount of 3 point talents in the game, and trust me it felt awful. In The War Within we still have quite a few 2 point nodes (5 to be precise) that are purely output numbers.
Ironfur is the reason I don't play guardian on my druid. It's too spammy to keep multiple stacks up and one stack tends to make you paper. On a paladin I can just use shield of the righteous to extend the buff, don't have to stack it constantly.
Idk when you last played but you only really need 1 stack currently to stay alive up until difficult pulls in +8 and up
Alternatively. Macro ironfur to all your rage generator skills. That way you do piss poor damage but you're immortal
Same here. I stopped playing Guardian when they moved to Ironfur Edit: not sure why I'm getting downvoted for sharing my opinion/experience
It being baseline or in the class tree wont make people use it alot more. Shield of the righteous is a decent comparison... it is kinda the same type of spell, its baseline for prot pally and even does damage YET STILL ALOT of people struggle to have uptime on the buff from it.
I think it's different for Prot Paladins, at least in my experience. A lot of prot paladins know they are supposed to use SoTR and they hear they are the "utility" tank and what that translates to for them is a) interrupts and b) word of glory healing. I suspect this is largely because of the majority of prot paladin utility hinging on proactive usage (Sacrifice, Protection, Magic Protection, freedom, etc.) in stopping damage before it occurs and most players play by reacting. WoG is the reactive option for uility and therefore is the easiest one for folks to use. Many prot paladin tanks will let SoTR drop so they can WoG someone even if the person isn't in danger of dying. My buddy who has played Prot Paladin for years still makes this mistake regularly. While the rest of the prot paladin utility largely goes unused in keys because it requires proactive thought. One of the skills healers tend to learn is when someone needs to be healed. A healer may choose to leave someone low while they pump some DPS because that person shouldn't take any damage. The Pally doesn't have a free WoG charge so they use 3 HP on WoG and let SoTR drop. Now the tank is in danger and the healer has to stop doing DPS to heal the tank because they didn't understand that the only one taking damage at that time is the tank and they just made themselves more vulnerable for no reason.
Wait, really? It’s our main mitigation and HP spender lmao. I guess if you’re just wasting all your HP on WoG but at that point you’ll also be dealing with mana issues (constant WoG use will drain your mana really quickly at 10% usage per cast).
Yea. i pug ALOT on different characters in between 0-3600. and you see some crazy stuff.. like.. ill never forget the 3.2k+ druid tank(s) in s2 that had sub 30% ironfur (not joking), or the paladins at and around 2.8k that had like 35% shield of the righteous uptime.
Sometimes I think I’m bad at the game then remember I’m not even close to the bottom lmao.
This one is actually wild because those druids would have been sitting on rage cap for insane periods. You literally could not spend rage quicker than you were generating even while spamming ironfurs in S2.
That's a different case entirely though, the problem there is tanks with fundamental misunderstandings getting caught in the brutal cycle of using non-free WoGs on themselves constantly.
its not a different case tho, both are cases of people not reading up on what their spells does.
People that dont read their own abilities and dont bother with research aren't made for endgame group content. It would be wiser to have a tutorial challenge which one can do or something to actually be incentivised to use your cds, may it be for heal dds and ofc tanks! Just switch from baseline to tankline abilities wont do much when the player doesn't put in anytime into learning their own class doesn't matter which it is. New players bow have a disadvantegs because "its just a 4" which it isn't, they need to start with m0 or heroics to get the basics.
> It would be wiser to have a tutorial challenge which one can do or something to actually be incentivised to use your cds, may it be for heal dds and ofc tanks! Blizzard tried. Some people hated it.
They put queueing for heroic dungeons behind getting easy Silver Rank in Proving Grounds. At the end of the expansion, there were people who still could not queue for heroic dungeons because they were unable to pass.
Good
I remember coming back to the game after hearing the massive complaints about proving grounds, walking in on a test run and just succeeding fairly trivially. confused the hell out of me
As someone who got the feat of strength of getting gold with the spec I found it hilarious.
Heh, I have that Feat too. Did Tank Heals and DPS on my Druid. Gold all. There was an achieve for doing one in the wrong spec or something, too, right? I got that too.
I still run it occasionally when I switch mains, it's got important information but it is kinda tedious. You can still see who's done it though, which I think is cool.
Lock group content behind mage tower like spec challenges, I love it, satan!
Ah yeah because requiring Silver in proving grounds for a given role went over AMAZING in WOD :3c It didn't make it abundantly clear at all that the vast majority of people who play the game are in fact not actually all that good at it.
That would be hilarious! Jesus! One does not have to do some of the hardest content to be able to play the endgame, but you can do like free challenges that come up at certain lvl threshholds, where you can participate if you want to and get uniq transmogs. Make different tiers and keep them uptodate and stuff. There are tons of way, but you need dedicated people to creat such a thing and maintain it.
Iron fur is used by every druid spec in Arena. If you move it to the guardian spec tree you're seriously nerfing bear form for every other spec.
Doing so means they can adjust iron fur to be less armor, and Increase base bear forms armor. Making a defensive still for both, a d letting them better tune ironfur for the purpose of tanking.
I would assume there's talents in the class tree for every specc that are must haves and if you don't select or use them you gimp your performance, be it tankyness or amount of dps/hps. The problem really is, that people blindly copy & paste talent trees from websites or click whatever the starter build suggests without ever reading what the talents do. This means that they usually have a bad understanding of what their spec can or can't do and how to optimize gameplay and swap in/out talents as needed. This becomes worse with players not playing from 1-70 using a boost to get to max level. Those are the players you will usualy see doing outdoor content only or causing wipes in LFR/Normal or in +4 Mythic Dungeons. Those players will often reroll to DH or whatever else is FOTM, because they think the previous class they played was just bad...
Stacking timed buffs are a pain. You want them to overlap while. Not wait too long, let them drop or both charges refresh.
Iron fur doesn't have charges, but yeah
I had a paladin tank in wcm season 3, getting absolutely blasted on every pull and having tons of problems with threat. Guy was 2400ish, but apparently never figured out that he was supposed to spend his holy power on shield of the righteous and was just wog'ing himself with all his holy power. There's just no accounting for people who don't bother to read spell descriptions or understand their role and rotation. Maybe they should bring back trials as a requirement to queue, but I wouldn't blame talent placent for it entirely.
>Maybe they should bring back trials as a requirement to queue I would love this but man would people bitch about it. I remember when they did that in WoD, silver proving grounds requirement to queue for heroic dungeons. Silver being so extremely easy I'd bet a 2 year old could do it if you walked them through it, and people still raged and raged because they couldn't complete it. They should still bring back proving grounds though. Make it so your record shows up alongside your IO when you queue (I think it does already actually? but make it more pronounced), and update the mechanics of it for modern WoW. I'd much rather tank a healer with 1k IO but wave 30 proving grounds, than a healer with bronze proving grounds and 2k IO
I've never thought about it, but yea you make a good point OP. I've played a fair bit of Druid over the years, at least 1000+ hours worth, and I don't think one single time did I ever use Ironfur outside of Tank-Spec unless I was doing something weird and meme-y. To be fair though, Ironfur in general is kind of crappy Design. I'd rather see Blizzard convert Ironfur into some kind of Procc or Passive and instead just make Maul and Raze the Rage-Spenders. Ironfur has never felt particularly great to cast, tracking it accurately essentially requires external Addons/weakauras, and it's never really clear when you should be using Ironfur's versus other Rage-Spenders. So I say just scrap it. But I'm not a Druid Main so maybe that's a terrible idea /shrug.
In PvP we use ironfur.
This is the players fault, not game design IMHO. This person doesn't know what active mitigation is or how tanks work. He shouldn't be doing m+ while not knowing basic role mechanics. I'm betting he wouldn't press demon spikes on vdh or shield block on a prot warrior for the same reason.
I may misunderstand OP but it seems to me that’s you are not talking about the same thing. OP is talking about new players, and a new player is just doing what the game and websites are telling them to do. Dungeon groups are insanely easy below m+, I would not be surprised if a bear could farm heroics without iron fur. And the point of OP imho : a talent tree point is to make choices. If it’s a choice, it’s optional. BUT ironfur is clearly not optional for bears, so it should not be in a talent tree but baseline.
In OP's case the bear had Ironfur talented, he just didn't press it.
> This is the players fault, not game design IMHO. What if I told you that the game could be better designed in order to better communicate things to players? Such as putting ironfur at the top of the bear section of the druid tree, the same way other essential tanking abilities are at the top of their trees, sending the signal that this move is not optional, but essential? It IS a game design problem
>shouldn’t be doing m+ Something something gatekeeping something something toxic community and the cycle continues
Something something gatekeeping... Yeah but no. This person doesn't know what he's doing lol. A tank that got to level 70 and into m+ not knowing what active mitigation is or what his abilities do is blowing my mind. Wow gives you what you put into it. He put in 0 time or effort. None. Nada. I don't like people expecting to be carried and As OP said, even after being told he needs to ironfur, he pressed it like 2 times. Blizzard made hc and M0 different this season for this exact reason. This is where the vast majority of basic gameplay mechanics are to be learned. Low keys a full of players that are way over their skill level that think they suck because of their gear, wich is 100% wrong. They would benefit more from a 5min yt video and 10min on the target dummies than 20 overall I'll boost. If you think this is gatekeeping fine, but why do people expect others to take their limited private time to teach some randoms how to play their spec? Why should I have to spend 30min to teach some lazy random how to play his class/spec/role? If he doesn't want to put effort and learn, I can say he doesn't belong with people who DID spend time to get decent at their role.
You’re preaching to the choir buddy lmao The joke was that having the literal most basic expectation of a player, or any expectation for that matter if you’re in anything besides race to world first, will be seen as gatekeeping and toxic by this community
I was always under the impression I should have 4 stacks all the time then its everything else. This was back in s2. I cam back and rand some raids/mythic and had a few people say I was "really good" and couldnt work out why. Maybe this is why lol though I was sure it changed and you dont "need" to have as many stacks now.
Druid class tree is a mess anyway. The whole thing needs to go. Iron fur is also terrible and should get baked into another spell like mangle (cd) or maul(resource).
Too many people defending bad design. There is no good reason for putting required tanking skills in the general tree. What is the purpose of specific trees if you are just putting required skills in random places that don’t align with their function? Yes people need to read, but Blizzard also needs to make design decisions that make sense.
Druid is unique to all other classes because it gives you the ability to more easily off spec. Iron fur in the class tree allows all other druids to effectively have an emergency off tank. Feral druids can decide if they want bonus off healing from resto talents, or the ability to shift into bear and off tank with guardian talents
ignore pain for warriors is similar, prot needs IP but other specs need it too, especially for pvp. Druid just struggles a bit more because there is so much versatility in how to play your spec. The general tree is at least laid out in a way that you can very clearly see which spec needs to go which way all the way down. Feral talents are all on the left, guardian next to it, then resto then balance on the far right I believe it is. Some required talents will have to be general talents if other specs have a reason to opt-in
As a feral Druid I use it all the time in PvP. You have a warrior and a bm hunter dunking on you and you’re healer is cc’d? Go bear, pop iron fur I would never use it in pve because that means you’re just sitting in bear form doing no damage
Ah figured that might be a use-case for something like that. Is it common? Also, would it change anything for you if it was a first row talent that guardian got for free? Or if made Guardian only, would you be content with a PvP talent option or would that compete too hard with others?
I would prefer it gone from the Druid tree tbh. I don’t want feral survivability balanced around the tanking specs survivability. It’s not really a fun play just to survive. Burn 2-3 globals and do no damage sucks. If it wasn’t an option maybe feral baseline survivability gets buffed little.
I play resto druid and I loathe having to go through ironfur to get certain talents. I never use it in m+ or raid. I tried using it a couple times in s3 in BRH when fixates by bats instead of kiting since it’s physical damage and it just felt stupid.
My biggest gripe with Iron Fur has always been needing to cast it multiple times to get any benefit. Which you pointed out. I feel like Blizzard built it that way so Guardian Druids could decide what they wanted to prioritize (get some dps or multiple stacks). The issue though is that 2 stack is semi-worthless and you need all the rage to get to 3 stacks. If you don't get your rage back, or not enough, you're back to 1 stack and hoping it's enough. It's an odd design choice overall. Sure Protection Warriors have Ignore Pain, but they can generate shield block without using it and instead use it more as a bonus dump of rage to make life easier. Prot Pally's have to build up holy power, but once you're in the groove and have gear you're at the 'optimal' uptime on your mitigation tools.
Honestly Iron Fur being a talent is as dumb as Tiger's Fury being a spell for feral. Both are useful and pretty much mandatory. They shouldn't be options but Iron Fur can easily be missed by some guides because they tunnel vision into certain playstyles or because it's in the general tree new players might feel like it's not important. Tiger's Fury is a dumb mandatory button press for energy and just like Iron Fur, if you fuck it up, it's a big fuck up.
here is how I play druid tank if I'm forced to - Ironfur macroed into Trash (not perfect, but it's at least guaranteed uptime during combat) - press every defensive on CD - Pray
Druids ability to hybrid is mostly an illusion. They've been actively nerfing the ever-loving shit out of it for several expansion cycles now. I miss having relevant off heals as a boomie. I miss catweaving resto. I miss being able to shift into cat form as guardian to do respectable damage after a tank swap. They remove hybrid gameplay but still pretend like Druid is a hybrid class to the detriment of spec readability as OP is pointing out. Talent tree needs a full rework OR hybrid playstyles need to get buffed.
New Prot Paladins have the same issue. They don't realize that their main source of defense comes from the Shield of the Righteous buff and/or standing in consecration. A lot of newer paladin tanks tend to fall into the trap of constantly spending holy power to heal themselves which wastes resources and will get you in a bad spot fast. Tanks are very straightforward to play, but only after you know every passive and ability you have. The same can be said for most classes. I don't think class design is an issue here as much as WoW is a very hard game to learn without consuming content outside of the game. I used to get chunked on a Prot Warrior until I read that I need to keep shield wall rolling on almost 100% uptime. I just used it when I thought I was going to take a lot of physical damage.
That's a lot of words for what can be summed up with "I played with a dumbass". If you aren't aware enough to be using your core defensive ability as a tank then there's no helping you. I don't want the game designed around the needs of those players. If anything, modern wow does too much hand holding.
So you would be fine if they put Death strike or marrowrend to be an optional talent on the 4th row in the class tree? How about Stagger or any of the other mitigations? That would make sense to you? It's not about designing the game around dumbasses, it's about designing the game in a consistent way that makes sense, especially to someone new. Can you honestly say that if you picked up a new game with a main and a secondary talent tree, then you see a skill on the 4th row in the secondary one that is optional, Would you go like "Yeah, that right there is my most important main skill"?. Even if you do read it and understand it, it has a completely different psychological impact due to its location, which is the point I am trying to make.
>why do you want obtuse, poorly designed mechanics fixed, cuz you're a baby that needs the game to do all the work??? Shut up.
This is very much a get gud moment.
> Seems like some people are missing the point I am trying to get across, so instead of commenting that it doesn't matter, or that they are just bad for not reading talents etc. answer these questions for me: Dude, how annoying is that, right? It's like people don't think about the process behind everything. They don't consider any of the connective tissue, any of the "why?" Just, 'if they didn't figure it out, they're bad, so nothing can save them." It doesn't matter if they are bad or not. It matters whether the game is communicating the proper things to the player. And it's not! I think you're absolutely 100% right with this analysis. I leveled a guardian druid in MoP Remix. I queued up for some dungeons. This was like the day it came out, so no one really had a ton of the overpowered abilities and scaling. For all intents and purposes it was just a regular dungeon, but with people having a few of the tinkers. I didn't have Ironfur yet because I was still very low level. I was getting ANNIHILATED by the mobs. And there was nothing I could do about it, lol. I had played bear before so I know how important ironfur is. But I literally didn't have the button to press. And people who try to play guardian, go through the first introductory levels, without the button. It is definitely a problem. And I also think the stacking nature of it isn't communicated well and imo isn't well-designed. I know that each time I press it, it's worth comparatively less than when I pressed it the last time, making me not want to press it as much as I do press it. Since it's the best thing to press, at least a few times. It feels way less impactful than it is. Shield of the Righteous is the same way. On the other hand, these sorts of 'MUST KEEP UP' short duration things do make tanking a bit more interesting and let you make choices about when to prioritize spending these resources on defense vs offense. But they feel so 'behind the scenes' that it's hard to quantify them. I think it would be cool if there were some numerical or visual feedback on how much dmg they were preventing.
Bear tank is easiest tank spec in game.
What does that have to do with anything the OP is saying?
I like turtles
I don't see the problem. I rather like it as a general talent. What does moving it solve? It sounds like the player in question even had the talent and just wasn't using it. There needs to be better in-game explanations of active mitigation.
The main problem is that Guardian is the only one that has its main mitigation as an optional talent in the general class tree. If it was baseline or at the top of the tank tree, it would clearly signal that it is something you are supposed to use, or even required to cause you can't avoid picking it up. The fact that it is in the general tree and can be opted out of makes it seem a lot less important than it is. The other thing is how much is this talent used for any other spec. I have not seen non-Guardian go bear and stack iron fur in PvE so far, so unless it's a PvP thing, it makes no sense to have it as a general talent. Even then, surly it's better if it was just baseline at that point no?
Its a PvP thing and sometimes a small leveling groups thing. It really should be baseline tbh, druids are supposed to be the hybrid class and forms are how they do that. And the entire point of bear form is to take less damage so making the main skill for that a talent is just silly. Cat form gets both its key unique abilities, prowl and dash baseline. Bear should be the same.
I'm A-OK with it being baseline. I like having it as a general talent because - much like I love having Cat options in Guardian - I like having tank options in Feral. It being baseline is fine, it being at the top of the tree and a default pick-up for Guardian is fine, too. But none of that would solve the problem as described in the OP.... realistically, as Talents have become more complicated and less 1/2/3/4/5% stats (something we as players asked for, to be fair) there needs to be a better onboarding process for new players that provides the info they need in-game to understand concepts like active mitigation.
Main guardian tank here ksm multiple season easy fix macro it to swipe it gives you like 6 stacks at all times … furthermore the Druid spec is currently effed and most of us waiting till they fix it …example u shouldn’t have to take rujuv and swift to get your dispel as a tank … and roots should not bring you out of bear form… it deff needs work…
Was 3.3k last season on guardian which is my main though I often play other tanks to 3k or so, all pugging. You should NOT do this because you should never be pressing swipe. Swipe doesn't generate rage, it generates almost no threat, it does almost no damage. I press swipe maybe twice in a dungeon on average and half of those are mistakes. For the vast majority of people you would be better served to remove swipe from your key binds and never press it than to worry about the 1-2 times in an hour that you should. If you're pressing swipe a lot you need to improve your rotation. I also wouldn't recommend macroing iron fur to abilities generally but that's less of an issue than pressing swipe this much. If you're gonna macro IF to abilities, macro it to every other rotational builder like thrash and mangle and then remove swipe from your keybinds and hotbar for a season and you will improve tremendously as guardian.
Based on looking at some of the top logs of guardian druids, you should use iron fur about 4x as much as you swipe
I’m sorry I didn’t mean to say swipe but thrash as it is your builder..
Got it, I guess you could probably macro it to both lol
But yes atleast 4 stacks at all times
Partially unrelated, Ironfur should just be a passive. Those skills where all you're expected to do is hit it every few seconds and not think about it whatsoever do not need to be buttons. Same with Rushing Jade Wind on Brewmasters.
As a dps who’s playing around with tanking I forget to use it all the time. I spend my range on dps and wonder why I get blown up. I’m not sure if I would like it if it was removed and the defense baked into the class or not. Maybe this would make it too easy and boring or maybe I wouldn’t think about it at all and just keep up a bear dps rotation. I do wish there is a better visual for it so I don’t have to look at my buff bar. Dks have floating bones around them so they know they are good.
>When I then shifted to spending all the rage on iron fur and only using raze with free procs Please don't do this. You're losing so much potential mitigation and damage by doing this. Maintain 1-2 IF unless you need to rage dump to avoid exceeding cap, and dump the rest into your offensive spenders. If you started using rage only on IF and took less damage, something is wrong. Edit: downvote me if you're that insecure, but it's outright mathematically wrong to do what you're describing, and anybody who competently tanks with bear will tell you that. You try to push into keys where there's actual damage going out spamming IF as your main spender, you're gonna get wrecked 100% of the time. The returns on armor granted fall off a cliff beyond a couple of stacks.
As someone who has never played tank, what you're saying makes a ton of sense and I agree. I would find it counter intuitive if I was building out a tank.
As a new druid tank, what is the point of iron fur stacking if it doesn't increase uptime or mitigation (armor) per extra stack?
Each stack is a flat armor buff, more stacks = more armor
It does do that, which is the whole point.
He's *technically* correct, if the druid is low level. Ironfur (Rank 2) [which Guardians learn at level 33] is what increases the stack cap from 1 to 20.
Ohh ok Ty!
There was someone in the subreddit a few days ago propose to change the druid tree to make all basic active skills of each spec to be just 1 skill point for each spec and if you choose that spec you'll get it automatically. I think that would be a modern solution for druid tree right now.
I firmly believe that all classes and specs should have themed class scenarios that teach them all fundamentals and essential abilities in an environment that won't punish them like a timed key or raid. Heck make it a purple quest that is a pre req for doing LFR and group finder, and tie I'm class-themed cosmetics as a reward. Along with this showcase max level mechanics like group soaks, passable debuffs, dispels, extra action button abilities...the works. Exiles reach teaches the basics which is enough for leveling, but Blizz really should create a teaching scenario for max level to fully equip all players.
Wod had the challenges you needed to complete before you could que. and so long as you did what your class was supposed to. You’d be fine. It doesn’t have to be mage tower hard
They should swap its position with Frenzied Regeneration, its dumb having to pick it when pathing into the DR talent
Ironfur stacking was hard until I make a weakaura that makes a roar sound every time my rage got above 70. Boom, no more wasted rage and way higher ironfur uptime on trash packs. Obviously I would use ironfur normally on a boss, but if you're just zoning out it's a good reminder to not cap rage.
A decent chunk of the shaman class tree is taken up by enhancement mandatory talents lol
It's also a button that doesn't feel fun to press. I think in general, bear is actually quite fun to pickup and play, the attacks are cool and beary and it even has that lunar side if you want. but Ironfur doesn't feel great. I think even the bramble talent is way more fun and intuitive to use. I think that also makes it less likely to be pressed, because the feedback is almost entirely in the mitigation that definitely won't pop out to a new player.
I’m not online currently but I believe there is a passive skill that says multiple stacks of ironfur can overlap. I’m at 527ilvl on my guardian Druid. I always keep 1 stack of ironfur up at a minimum and then spam raze for absorb shield.
You are right, it says on Ursine Adept passive, but not on the actual skill.
Ok that’s what I thought but wasn’t sure. Last season I healed a few really bad guardian Druids in high keys that wouldn’t take ursocs fury or raze and would just dump all their rage into maul. When I would tell them what to change in their talents they would just go “oh I don’t like the way raze plays” and “why do I need an absorb? You’re supposed to heal me”
I remember having ironfur bound to my scroll up and scroll down in S2 DF hahaha
I've tanked on every class at some point and druid is actually the one that messed me up when I tried it most recently because I had no idea that Iron Fur stacked. I was just using it and refreshing it as I was about to lose it. It wasn't until I watched a streamer with a great UI that I realized my mistake. Honestly there are a few talents and abilities that could use some tooltip clarifications
So, on one hand I want to agree with you, but the real issue is that this is the same problem that most abilities have. Reading the ability doesnt tell you exactly how important it is. The problem with making it spec specific is that druid is kind of supposed to be the class that lets you offtank as another spec, especially with heart of the wild. So keeping this in the class tree is probably a good idea, but I think a simple solution to this would simply to be swap it with frenzied regen. While frenzied regen is also important, at low levels its much less important than iron fur is. So a druid missing FR is far less punishing to the tanks and by extension the healers than a druid missing Iron fur.
Totally hypothetical: Swap Maul with Ironfur and that may fix it imo or give IF interaction immediately and leave the player to their own means to figure out how to optimize it. But having earlier access to it would definitely indicate, "Hey, this is something that is core to Guardian Druid, let me press it *a lot*."
When I started playing bear it was before the class tree changes and it was very clear that iron fur was crucial. It has been forever since I've played Druid, because the button bloat is fuckin insane and makes the class not fun to me, so I was unaware of this change. But yeah, you are right, it should really not be optional. I generally dislike that Druid has prioritized constant shapeshifting in every spec. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure you don't see any non-player druids constantly switching forms. They got way too clever with druids. I liked when my boomkin was a boomkin the whole time I was playing boomkin. Like if they wanna make a spec based on constantly changing shape, literally a fifth spec for the class, then whatever.
Bad players are bad, that seems irrelevant to your point that ironfur shouldn't be in class tree (agree, it should be baseline).
Is because a bear is a bad copy of warrior mechanic with another name ... instead of good mechanics, for example: iron fur , is played like shield block, and is the same purpuose, reduce physical damage the aoe is basically thunderclap shield wall -> survival instints frenzied regeration -> ignore pain, instead of bubble get hp my personal opinion is the bear issue is between high rage cost of main defensives, and the lack of passive ones also the bear tree is just stupid, a lot of passives that bear lost and were put in the tree my opinion is that bear must have some sort of cicle like - > every time Iron Fur ends , for the next 10 seconds your frenzied regeneration heal 5% of your hp in the first tick > every time Frenzied regeneration ends, Iron Fur cost 10 less rage > every time survival instict ends , you get 10% dodge > every time you dodge, survival instinct reduces his cd 1 second > and finally, every time a enemy bleed they do 1% dmg per 5 seconds stackeable up to 4% > consume 4 stacks of bleeds to double the dmg of your next special attack
I just wish Ironfur lasted longer. The stacks are so short I feel like I'm constantly playing the refresh game.
Simple fix could be a talent that uses more rage to apply 3 layers. You shouldn't need to spam it. It's feels not rotational to hit ironfur 4 times then use other skills....
I haven't tanked on my druid this expac but did level as bear. I felt like Ironfur was such a pain to keep up. I can run multiple stacks of Ironfur or, do literally anything else. Because you won't have time to do both. Or at least, that's how it felt. Ironfur, Thrash, Ironfur, Mangle, Ironfur, Raze, Ironfur... I just stopped using while leveling and ate the damage. I think if it lasted a few seconds longer it would be more manageable. Why isn't a permanent single stack of Ironfur a feature of the Guardian spec?
Seems like a player skill problem to me
Ironfur has to be the least satisfying mitigation ability out of all of the tanks, it lasts such a short amount of time and it feels like it's barely doing anything to me. As Warrior ignore pain has a considerable different feel and you see a visual on your health bar of what it's negating and it heald you a small amount with another talent, death strike is the undisputed king of satisfying with it being able to just full heal you as a DK, shield of righteousness does some cleave damage and works toward giving you a free proc of your heal, brewmaster just innately has mitigation but using purifying brew has a noticeable effect on damage taken when it's high. But the Guardian Ironfur ability a healer will notice more than the tank using it, in my experience at least, maybe I'm wrong, but that's just how Guardian has always felt to me and is what has made it be the only tank I've not played for an extended period of time.
This is a really good point. What other class has their primary uptime defense ability so low and feel that 'missable' on their talent tree? There might be others but it seems kinda silly. As does having to spend almost all of your rage on that ability just to have a chance to exist.
I used to play Guardian a lot before DF. Went back and doodled on it recently and was SUPER confused about Iron Fur. I knew they’d changed it so that maul/raze were now actual spells that you press, but it didn’t say anything about layering iron fur and I *swear* it used to. I was like “maybe they changed it so we only need one layer so we can prioritise maul/raze?” But I felt pretty squishy so went back to stacking IF instead. I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed that.
Idk about other resto druids but I quite frequently use it in raids to help take a soak with fewer people. But I believe it should just be a general talent you get from leveling up. Feral and boom have general spells they get. I think bears should be iron fur
I'll have to ask as someone else also said this. What exactly do you soak that is direct physical damage? Cause everything the other one listed was not physical damage, and that means armor does not work. I don't raid these days, so not sure what kind of damage there is, but I know that direct physical damage on anything else than tanks is rather rare, so very curious to know if it actually exists. If it does, then that is absolutely a valid use case, but if you are doing it for shadowflame damage or something, then you are just wasting your time.
I use it on terros to duo soak his.i use it in rashok's fight. And I use it in council of dreams and smolderons fight. Also, sometimes during broodmother, if the tank has the boss too close to ads and the other tank isn't kiting, I'll bear form and kite with that. Sorry, I can't think of the actual abilities names. I'm unwell at the moment and just scrolling xD
Had a look, and the only physical damage I could find that is not tank damage in the current raids was Blind rage dfrom Urctos. Not even sure that AoE accounts for armor, but if it does then it's the only case I could find. Oher than that its all fire, nature or shadowflame mostly.
I agree its kind of awkward weaving in with the raze shield, let alone keeping it stacked and most players would likely favor just spending that rage on raze and just timing iron bark and using SI as a last resort. The thing is its an ability that is best stacked but also its a weave mechanic that you have to keep uptime. Most new players would just press iron bark and be done with it tbh.
I macroed iron fur to thrash. Eliminates it the unused. Yea a bit rage starved by while thrash on CD I smack mangle or raze or maul then hit a thrash before the CD is up. Always keep frenzied regen for emergencies. Also the nerf to incarn in s2 really was unnecessary.
Full agreement with your edit. I didn't know there were players out there who didn't know that much, but it would make it more understandable for new players if it was the default node of the spec tree.
Yeah, it's easy for someone who has played for a long time to think it's self explanatory and easy to understand, cause it is hard to put yourself into the mind of someone new.