Hey guys, what's up? It's Palwind. Uh, wow, it's been a while since my last guide or video that I've done like this in a presentation style. After a long break, I thought I'd share a little bit about the Nocarn build, as it's called for Guardian Druids, and how to use it. Uh, you know, you're probably aware that Bear is considered D or F tier by major sites like Subcreation, and the general pop. Popular opinion of the community is that they're not great. Uh, you know, I think Bear is fine. Uh, I obviously, when I'm healing, get an opportunity to see other tanks just kind of Olay some mechanics, and they don't even know it existed because their class has the ability to do that. The Bear, if you play it right, I found that I'm capable of doing all those things. Uh, now what does make it challenging for Bears is that you have to know the mechanics, and you have to use a tool for almost all of them, right? Um, so anyway, okay, enough about me. Great to have you back. Let's talk a little bit about the Nocarn build.
So, it does require a defensive heavy build. You give up one big fun toy, uh, Incarnation in the process, and the Incarn, obviously, the Incarn Dr. Talentum, and that doesn't feel great. But you know what does feel great? Staying alive. [Music] Alright, so taking a look at the talent belt here, let's start on the Guardian Druid side. The actual Guardian side, obviously, you take Maul and Gore and Survival Instincts and Mangle, and then you go ahead and take Brambles, all pretty standard picks. Some innate resolve, that's where, uh, it gives you Whatchamacallit, uh, an extra charge of Frenzied Regeneration, and your FR hits a little harder. Um, that's a typically a pretty standard pick, although I've seen some builds that skip it, and then Gory Fur for the extra chance, uh, excuse me, for the chance to reduce the cost of your Iron Fur. Those are all pretty standard picks. But right away, even before you cross that early Talent Point threshold where you have to pick a certain number before you can move on, you're already going to see a big glaring hole, or not hole, but a big change for me, uh, and the way you go with the Nocarn build. You don't pick up Berserk Ravage, or at least I don't. And again, I need to emphasize that there's not one way to do the Nocarn build, and some people are gonna have issues with the way I'm suggesting you do it because they're going to say, "Oh, you're giving up too much." Hey man, that is valid, and this point that I'm giving up for something else, there's a strong case to make that it is overkill in some places. Again, I am just telling you what I have found works for me.
So, we give up Berserk Ravage. So, what are we giving up? We're giving up that the ability for the length of Berserk, which again, remember, we're not taking Incarnation, so we're not getting the extended 32nd version of Berserk. We're getting the short 15 second, and because we're not getting the Dr, we're also getting it only every three minutes.
Controversial, that's probably the biggest, most controversial change here. Looking at the right side of the tree, you see stuff that is fairly standard. We're gonna pick up the cooldown reduction of Survival of the Fittest, and we're gonna get after the Wildfire which allows us to proc big group heals pretty regularly as we consume rage for the forest so that we get more rage and damage from Mangle. 4 And I do pick up this is the only one of the Berserk talents I pick up, and it's mainly because of the talent that's gated behind it, but Berserk Persistence, right? So when I pop Berserk, which is available every three minutes, what I'm getting out of it is cheap iron Furs and infinite frenzied regens. So what this becomes now is an emergency.
I know I'm going to need heals. My healer just died, there's big group damage coming out, and I'm going to need to roll some just frenzied Regens on myself over and over and over again. Or I want to stack iron for a really high because I've got a big pull again. It's nice to have that. That's the only function Berserk serves for me, but it also gates me to scintillating Moonlight. There's an argument to be made as you'll see over here when we get to the left side of the tree that because I'm going kind of the more claw-oriented version, maybe I should get my DR from somewhere else, but I'm going with Rend and Tear, where your thrash spreads DR.
First of all, that only adds up to six percent damage reduction, whereas here I can get 10 with two points, and it spreads more easily and more quickly with Moonfire because I've got twin Moonfire. So every time I press Moonfire, I'm hitting two targets once I'm in combat with them. And then also because I'm taking Galactic Guardians, so every time I proc a Moonfire, it's also procking a copy. So even if I have higher rotational priorities or if I'm just distracted by mechanics, my Moonfire is spreading like a plague if you will, and that is then spreading the 10 DR to basically entire polls and dungeons.
So this is a really critical part, is that a lot of that is passive for me, and that DR is always up and always up immediately, not like the ramp that Rend and Tear takes. And finally, guys, oh, there we go, finally on the other side, Rage the Sleeper. A critical part of the way I use the no-card build and dungeons is alternating Barkskin and Rage the Sleeper on initial pulls of mobs, right? You can get, you know, bears, bears require some ramp as many tanks do, we have to get our stacks of iron fur up. We can sometimes while you're trying to strafe sideways to go pick up lots of mobs for whatever the actual discrete pole is in the dungeon, you can end up in a situation where you accidentally turn your back, and now you've pushed dodges off the table.
You know, obviously, you're focused on other things like rounding up mobs, so you can just get gibbed really easily in those first few seconds when you're vulnerable. Rage the Sleeper, along with Barkskin, alternating those on every pole, is pretty big. The left side, let's look at the left side. So, um, I go with all the Maul talents, vulnerable flesh only because it gets me to the other Maul talents. Tooth and Claw, huge, huge, huge part of what this build is built around.
Right, so now whenever I get a Tooth and Claw proc and I press Raise, which again is Maul, Raise replaces Maul. Now, I spread that 15 damage reduction debuff to all the mobs in front of me, again a huge, huge part of it. So, you know, you've got to make sure you pick this talent up. Now, finally, I pick up Pulverize. Take it or leave it, I know this talent's been cursed for years and has existed in different formats and whatnot, and we rarely ever take it because it's almost always a DPS loss. The primary reason I take it is that I want to get to Ursoc's Fury, which I'm going to talk about in a second. But I will say this, I grumbled the first time I took it because I don't have enough talent points to path to it another way. But it actually pulverizes, so now we've got another DR, a 35 DR on a single target. But you consume a couple of stacks of your Thrash, so you're giving up a little bit of damage on that target in order to take less damage. But I've actually found this can save me quite a bit because it's up all the time. It's got a 45-second cooldown, so it's available all the time. And then finally, Ursoc's Fury, another talent similar to Tooth and Claw and Raze and Rage of the Sleeper. This is another talent that really defines this spec. With this one, Thrash and Maul shield you for 50% of the damage done, so I'm pounding out big Mauls and AOE, and that gives me a shield for 50% of the damage I'm thrashing, which is giving me reduced auto-attack damage with Earthward and giving me a shield because of Ursoc's Fury.
Here on the Druid side of the tree, I'll just point out that I take Nature's Vigil because it's a great group healing tool to help out your healer and pinch points. I take Innervates. I find that only certain healers actually really need it. Basically, everybody other than an evoker really could use the Innervate. I take Heart Of The Wild for the damage increase, and I'll take Well-Honed Instincts, one charge of it for kind of the mini cheat death if you will. All the rest of these are pretty standard picks all the way around.
So, what does this build look like in actual action? Let's try to break it down with some visuals here. What's your goal with that build? How does it all come together? First things first, let's look at here is 100% of the damage that you're gonna take at any given time, and the object of this build is to make this red bar shrink as much as possible with always on or mostly always on passive damage reduction just by executing your rotation. So, we take a look at it. We've got the 48-50, whatever based on your armor, how much damage reduction you're taking from bear form, and then we've got what every bear will have, those one to two stacks of Iron Fur that you try to keep maintained at all times, right? So, this is kind of the baseline, but this spec allows for quite a bit more additional low-maintenance damage reduction right with that Scintillating Moonlight talent plus Twin Moonfire spreading it around and Galactic Guardian passively spreading it around. You've got another 10% damage reduction out there, taking a chunk off that red bar.
It can be quite squishy right at the beginning. I mean, you saw in that graphic how much of our damage reduction comes from getting those Ironfur stacks up. Well, if you weren't fortunate enough to have any rage leftover from the last pull, you can be pretty squishy right off the bat. So a nice thing is, Barkskin has a 44-second cooldown, and Rage of the Sleepers has a one-minute cooldown. And it's not only a DR, but it's also damage, leech, and a damage reflect. So, basically, those are just up all the time in a dungeon. Fire them on the beginning of every pull and use them more or less rotationally on longer pulls as well. When you do encounter damage, the nice thing about this build is that you've got two charges of Frenzied Regeneration as well as Renewal. So you've got your hot that you can use often because we've also got the Cooldown Reduction (CDR) for Frenzied Regen. But then we've also got the emergency "oh crap" instant 30 heal to recover. And finally, you have tons and tons of "oh crap" buttons.
So when you think about damage events that you're not going to be able to avoid with AOE stops and kicks and things like that, when you just got to take the punch, think about Tyrannical cross the Big Bird boss in Algathar Academy. Right when you're going to take hits, if you don't have one of those rotationally available buttons, this is when we're going to go ahead and use Survival Instincts for the 50 DR. We're going to use Pulverize which really shines on bosses because the 35 DR on one target, or the other place it really shines is in pulls where, you know, you might be pulling trash, but there's one kind of priority ad that can really wreck you.
A great example of that would be the late succubus ladies in Court of Stars. They have a Shadow Slash, and if you don't have an AOE stop and you're not convinced somebody else is going to be able to stop it, and you're just going to have to eat that monstrous Shadow Slash, throw out a Pulverize. It's up all the time 45-second CD so it'll be up all the time. And finally, again, the way that Berserk functions in this spec is that it is cheap Iron Furs and infinite heals for 15 seconds.
Having said this, you want to prevent damage from happening in the first place, so use your stops. Obviously, you've got Skull Bash, you've got your kick, then you have in this spec you have a couple of other ways to do some stops too, very powerful ones. You've got Incapacitating Roar, which is great because it's AOE. So don't really ever want to take Mighty Bash. I loved it back in the day when you could have it with Incapacitating Roar in previous expansions, but take Incap. The other thing that's really great about Incapacitating Roar is that because it's an end cap, it's not going to DR with a lot of classes that have very powerful stuns. So you'll be able to use it, and you won't have to go, "Oh crap, I bet my life on that and now I've failed." Similarly, Typhoon, with the last round of Guardian changes, you can get the cooldown reduction on it pretty darn low.
You're already kind of using "On Pull" and "Rotationally" anyway, and it's really great because it's a one-minute cooldown. You can line it up pretty well with any kind of trinkets. For example, I use a WinStar Whetstone from Court of Stars. However, this is the one weak spot of this spec as you are giving up some damage for all the survivability. Alright, that's a pretty good look at the NoCarn build, how it works, why we choose certain talents, and how we do things rotationally for Guardian Druids. If you've got any questions, feedback, want to tell me how much I stink and that my build's terrible, go ahead and leave some comments.
I'll check them out and get back to you. If you want to see any more detailed examples or you just like the kind of content I'm providing, go ahead and check out my channel on Twitch at PalwenTV where I'm streaming most nights, at least after the fam goes to bed. I do post highlights here on YouTube so you can always check those out as well, of dungeons that I complete. So be sure to like and subscribe for more great content. Until then, see you in the next video!
