And today I'm going to talk about how to play Guardian Druid in dragonflight beard Druids are still a relatively simple tank although they have gotten a bit more complicated with dragonflight they do a mix of AOE bleed damage with thrash direct physical damage with mangle and tons and tons and tons of spell damage with moon fire, bears do so much damage with Moon fire now in a hill for 30 of all the damage they deal so they have pretty strong self-healing.
You also get a pretty enormous AOE healing proc after you spend 200 rage from after the Wildfire so this makes you a surprisingly good uh group healing tank which isn't really a concept that's ever existed in WoW before you have multiple powerful procs that generate rage and do lots of damage or make your Mall casts free and give you defensive layers in general you use your rotational skills to generate rage and then you spend your rage on iron fur or frenzied regeneration.
Bear Druids have gone through a lot of changes and they're in really strong shape now, they basically teleported from worst to First over the last couple of weeks they're excellent raid tanks excellent Mythic plus tanks they do a ton of damage, they have enormous rage generation they radiate a bunch of group healing thanks to after the Wildfire they have powerful offensive and defensive cooldowns and those cooldowns are surprisingly very very regularly available, Druids also give their groups Mark of the wild a three percent versatility buff this is pretty useful but it's not unique to Guardian spec.
I's a commonly available buff since Druids are the most popular class in the game, bear is an excellent all-around tank it's stunning to me how good that blizzard has made it in such a short span of time it even has good single Target damage now the two-piece bonus adds a couple of extra effects to mangle casts that benefit from Gore Gora is the talent that gives your non-mingle skills a chance to reset mangle’s cooldown and make it generate for extra rage yeah four what a random number so here's what the tier set adds if you use mangle with Gore it deals 30 of its damage as an AOE and gives you ASIX second five percent damage and damage reduction buff.
This is a really good bonus that greatly increases the power of your core rotational skill particularly in AOE and it just makes you five percent stronger on top of that very simple but very good the four-piece bonus increases your chance of triggering Gore by an extra five percent this bonus boosts the value of the two-piece, it gives you more rage generation more damage and higher up time on that two-piece buff but wait there’s more.
The four piece also makes musing mangle with Gore active give you heal over time effect you can have pretty high uptime on both this heel and the two-piece buff so this is a pair of bonuses that do like four different things they all synergize with each other and the rest of your kit and they just add a ton of value you know we're talking damage reduction uh damage again rage generation healing incredible and the best thing about all of it is that they do in a way that's really simple the tier set doesn't require a huge adjustment to make it work, it doesn't require like growing a new part of your brain to manage all the new key bind interactions you just play the same way that you basically were and now you do more damage and you have more resources and you're stronger that’s great.
Talents
Now let's talk about talents and I have two Talent setups I want to look at here a dungeon one useful for you know normal heroic but also Mythic plus and a raid set up, right now I have my bear Druid Talent setups pulled up I have two talents here basically or two Talent setups here uh an AOE setup and a single Target setup they are relatively similar you basically just shave off a couple of really useful talents that are great only against multiple Targets in the AOE setup and then you put up just wherever else and there is your single Target setup so just to talk about the left side of the tree here I want to start in on one of the talents that I get asked about the most which is heart of the Wild.
The way heart of the wild works now is quite a bit different from the way it worked in Shadow Lansing before in shadowlands and before you had to actually choose which of the off specs for Druid that you were sort of specializing in you know feral Affinity balance Affinity whatever and so that would give you a lot more skills you would be able to have moonkin form or like have some of the cat form abilities, now you're just picking those up piece by piece so your heart of the wild in that older system would automatically shift you into that form and make you do more stuff while you were in that form and it would change based on what your offs form you know you had selected was now the way it works is it's on the global cooldown you press it and then all the stuff that's not associated with your main spec just does more.
So right now I'm in Bear form and I'm in heart of the wild I could also be in cat form Imean whatever but I'm in heart of the wild and I'm Guardian so all of my magic damage that's balance specs stuff is going to do more damage that's basically just Moonfire uh any cat form damage I'm doing would do more physical damage and any cast a reform healing that I do would do more healing and cost less that's what heart of the wild does it doesn't shift you around you can use it and then stay in Bear form and cast Moonfire and you will do more damage that's basically all that you take heart of the wild for but because so much of your damage is Moon fire and it lasts for 45 seconds.
It is somewhat of a decent offensive cooldown not a huge deal, certainly the weakest offensive cooldown you have but you know it's it’s something so this is more or less what I'm running on my left hand at talent tree this is sort of the quote is super selfish, selfish Talent setup that I'm going with there is a bit more of a utility oriented setup that you could go for instead I mean technically speaking for a selfish Talent setup this is still pretty like helpful you're getting improved stampeding Roar you're taking typhoon you're taking incapacitating Roar you know you have some AOE CC value you have this group move speed increase you have well-honed Instinct so like a personal defensive cooldown you have renewal this personal self-heal that's basically just a health stone on a 90 second cool down and then you know you do have some Mobility increases like wild charge.
You have a damage increase and healing increase in the form of nurturing Instinct and you have astral influence which increases the range of all of your abilities by three yards which this has recently been changed to effect after the Wildfire which was buffed from a little bit ago being eight yards up to 12 and then now because of your Synergy with astral influence it does go all the way out to 15 yards which is pretty good considering it is a big old AOE heel[Music] there are a lot of talents that are just non-negotiable in this uh left half of the tree as well you know all this bear stuff swipe thick hide you got to take thick hide you got to take iron fur you know damage reduction stuff.
Got to Have It Like hara's teachings you you're gonna take six percent versatility you’re not gonna even think twice about that the sort of alternative setup that you could run which is what I have pulled up in my other tree so I'll just show that off is it for more raid oriented stuff I would say more single Target stuff I would drop like typhoon maybe drop a point nurturing Instinct and drop that point in Wild charge to come down here and pick up Sunfire which really isn't very useful at all mass entanglement or ursul's for text depending on what your group needs but then mainly innovate so that you can give your healers a sort of free healing, you know no Mana cost.
This will shift you out of bear form so you don't want to use this while you’re actively tanking enemies but if you're able to say if you wanted to be really clever with it you could use like ursul's Vortex or mass entanglement to lock enemies down for a second move out of melee range cast innervate on your healer then shift back into bear form and keep tanking.
I think more realistically you'll just use this in raids when the other tank is at got threat on the boss somebody says innervate me you shift out throw innovate on them shift right back in and pretend you know nothing ever changed this also gives you access to Nature's vigil which is a talent you can use uh it’s off the global cooldown you can use it while you're in Bear Farm like I'll do it right now I'm in Bear form hitting Nature's vigil wow no Global cooldown isn’t that nice.
That is pretty much that you do have to give up improved Stampede and grow to get the points to come down here and pick this up there is one other little Talent over here for personal utility that I would kind of like to pick up it is a little difficult to do just because getting over to it is so expensive and that would be feline swiftness you know you have to give up something to get over there but being able to have an extra 15 move speed all the time is kind of nice like I might run a talent setup like this just for like leveling.
I might drop the point at a heart of the wild maybe some of these defensive and crowd control-oriented talents just to pick this up while I'm leveling just to have a little bit more extra movement speed.
All right now let's take a look at the AOE Talent setup, I’m technically not allowed to change those talents while nature is visual so on cooldown but I can still look at them over here on the right side you have a pretty hard locked in set of these talents right here like these first four rows are pretty much locked into all of these talents that I have selected you can't really get away with not taking any of them and you have some really really powerful talents over here in this bottom right section of the tree sort of the two bottom branches.
The bottom middle one and bottom right one are incredibly powerful and then this little cluster over here on the right side is also really really strong and that mainly comes from after the Wildfire which causes you to do a massive burst of group healing every time you spend 200 rage and ursoc guidance which causes every 20 rage you spend to reduce the cooldown of incarnation guardian of Versa by one second so this basically means that every five times you cast iron fur you do a huge Supernova of healing pretty strong it is capped at five targets so it's not quite like super massive uh raid you know Mist Weaver spamming renewal or whatever it’s called but it's pretty good and it's really quite good in Mythic Plus.
Ursoc guidance basically makes it so that like if you're able to generate uh 20 rage a second you can cut the Incarnation cooldown in half you can cut it from three minutes down to a minute and a half you are able to generate 20 rage per second during Incarnation or during just any old non-incarnation AOE and you're able to do that because of these three talents over here on this bottom right.
Cluster Galactic Guardian gives you a lot of free Moon fire procs and when those Moonfire procs occur they make the next Moonfire deal quadruple direct damage and generate eight rage the way that this works is that uh if you have the buff active and you trigger it again the next spell will consume the previous proc and actually give you the rage and the extra damage it basically just counts as though you cast Bonfire hand uh but it does so freely it basically piggybacks onto whatever the skill was that you used to Prock it including Moon fire ticks or thrash ticks twin.
My twin Moon fire also interacts with that it causes it to hit two times, you know one for each uh Target that it's hitting and generate page for each of those targets so you're getting 16rage out of each Rock when you're in multi-target situations instead of only the base of eight blood frenzy is a really simple Talent it just makes it so that your thrash dot ticks generate to rage each it doesn't apply to the initial hit of thrash which is why some of these thrash talents that historically have been pretty well regarded like flashing claws Earth Warden and Earth Sox Fury these are like designs that people really like and they were big in shadowlands.
These are all more or less dead thrash is actually kind of dead now for Bear Druid mangle is uh King again and you are able to very easily pick up soul of the forest to increase its age generation and its damage output as well which you know that’s great it's way more uh effective and cheap to pick up than these things that boost the value of thrash but this one Talent down here makes it so that when you're adding more and more targets you’re getting more and more rage per second just by bringing them in because of circle of life and death causing your dots to tick 25 faster thrash basically ticks every two seconds but that makes it worth one rage per second per enemy nearby as long as you're maintaining thrash on all your enemies that's pretty easy to do you know you just have to hit it every six seconds pretty easy and that.
This means that if you're tanking like 10 enemies at a time this one Talent is giving you 10 rage a second that’s Buck Wild that's crazy especially when you consider that like you know all the rage that you're generating out of after the Wildfire is turning into healing All the Rage that you’re generating out of earth sox guidance or whatever throwing into our socks guidance is turning into more cooldown up time and Incarnation is still a humongous cooldown even though you're not running the thrash spam set of talents to give you like earthward and giving you Auto attack damage reduction.
Ursoc Fury giving you self-shielding even though you're not running those and you're more usually hitting mangle and getting more like direct hits out of mangle and just basically rage generation and iron for up time and less focus on that shielding from thrash, it’s still a really really really strong cool down.
Finally I think I kind of have saved the best lab best for last year, elune's favored gives you a pretty substantial amount of healing intake based on all of your moon fire damage dealt you get 10Moon fire damage from Elune’s favored 20 from Fury of nature 10 from Twin Moon fire and it's a little bit difficult to pin down exactly how much of a damage increase you get from Galactic Guardian but it is quite substantial and so all of that adds up to give you a lot of self-healing for Moon fire spam uh and all that that occurs passively too which is pretty nice you also get a lot of damage reduction for Moon fire being active on enemies thanks to scintillating moonlight.
Finally again I think I said finally before but actually finally tooth and Claw gives you a pretty interesting rotation in your uh Wrinkle In Your rotation this makes it so that your auto attacks have a chance to empower your mall and it Stacks up to two times so you're not required to like use it immediately or run the risk of of wasting process you Auto attack about once every two seconds so this means you basically get a proc about once every 10 seconds and the procs make your empowered Maul uh cost no Rage which is really important so it lets you use Maul instead of one of your more generic rotational fillers like swiper Moon fire while still being able to use your main you know rage generating skills like uh mangle and thrash.
It does a ton of damage and it makes the enemy do 15 less damage to you for the next six seconds so because you're able to maintain you know basically 60-ishpercent uptime on this buff that's a pretty substantial overall damage reduction four bears and even though this is clearly more single Target oriented that's still really useful in Mythic plus it's still really useful in AOE tanking you're usually not tanking a bunch of identical mobs and even if you are I mean getting more priority Target priority damage and damage reduction is still good but generally you're not you generally you're tanking some sort of Lieutenant mob and being able to throw kind of a targeted damage reduction effect onto that main guy that's like superdangerous is really valuable.
All right now let's take a look at the single Target build, here as you can see very little has changed the main thing that changes is you want to drop blood frenzy because getting too rage every two seconds per Target so one range per second per Target is great even against like two or three targets but against a single Target you can do better in terms of Rage generation or just defensive value similarly to when Moonfire is literally not going to do anything against uh two Targets I mean technically it gives you10 more Moon fire damage which is okay but you can do a lot better than that for damage and for defensive value and I really think that there are three talents of note you can take improved survival instincts just for a second charge of your Shield wall you know not the best talent in the world but it's okay.
You could take ursoc endurance this reduces the cost of well technically it doesn’t reduce the cost of anything it increases the duration of Iron Fur by two seconds so if you think about it in terms of the cost of maintaining iron fur it's about 5.7 rage per second to maintain iron fur uh per stack this would cut that down to about four and a half so it's worth about one and a quarter worth of Rage of iron for uptime I realize that's a little bit of a weird way to think about it.
It basically gives you a little bit more iron for up time like actually a meaningful amount more iron for up time you can maintain in the amount of Ridge that you would generate in raid you can maintain about two and a quarter stacks of iron fur with her socks endurance and it would be maybe like one and three quarters without I'm pretty deep in the Weeds on this one.
I admit I also just like vicious cycle it just makes your mangle and your mold make the other one do more damage very simple Talent you're gonna be hitting Maul quite a bit thanks to tooth and Claw you're going to be hitting mangle all quite a bit due to it being the best skills that you have in your rotation so you’re kind of alternating back and forth between these a lot and it just adds a lot of single Target damage and that's pretty tight very simple I would not be wanting to or willing to give up our sex guidance or rage the sleeper or incarn or any of these talents down here you could give up circle of life and death that is an option but it really does add a lot of damage and it adds a lot of Galactic Guardian procs so I would prefer not to ever one.
Other notable Talent change here is bristling fur this is not something that I considered when I was doing any of my like kind of worst case Talent or rage generation calculations but it is a talent that you can take and in single Target it will make you take uh generate rage based on the damage you take it is kind of a long cooldown 40 seconds and it's only up for eight seconds at a time so it's not like super super valuable but brambles is Avery low impact talent in single Target you know it can add up to be a decent amount of damage reduction and defensive and slight offensive value in larger scale AOE but in single Target it's not that great and bristling fur just adds more rage to throw onto the like enormous Tire fires that are after the wildfire and ursoc guidance so I would recommend taking this talent and using it in any sort of pure single Target situation.
I didn't talk about leveling over here on the right side of the talent tree so I suppose I should do that now just before I finish up one of the things that I don't really care for about bear Druid is that they have they have really great talents that's not what I don't care for what I don't care for is that their talents are not available right now at level 60.
Your talent setup is gonna look something along these lines I think where you're taking Galactic guardian and rage of the sleeper and elune's favored but you can’t afford incarn and uh Rage of the sleeper at the same time um that is actually kind of tough like right you really want to have twin Moon fire and Galactic Guardian at the same time so I would say the very first points that you want to get in are twin Moon fire and incarn and then it or socks guidance like it’s a pretty high value ad to be able to get twin twin Moon fire and be able to hit multiple enemies at once and then from there I would then finally focus on circle of life and death and blood frenzy as my last couple of points.
I mean it's great that all five of the points that you're picking up on the way from 60 to 70 in the bare tree are super super super high value but it's also kind of unfortunate to be like oh man like I'm starting out missing all of these talents that feel really really great to have and I don't have them yet but that's okay it's something to look forward to and even without them the class does feel pretty fun and pretty strong while leveling.
Abilities
All right I think that's enough now let's talk about abilities, mangle thrash and Moonfire are your most important rotational skills you want to use mangle whenever possible and maintain the thrash in Moonfire debuffs on enemies at all times then you want to fill any spots in between those with swipe if you have an empowered Mall cast available thanks to tooth and Claw you should use it instead of swipe the 15 damage reduction debuff from tooth and Claw doesn't stack with itself and it doesn't extend its duration so usually you want to wait until it falls off to use a wall again.
In terms of how you use Galactic Guardian procs you don't actually want to use them manually most of the time if Galactic Guardian perox while the galactic Guardian buff is active it triggers the buff just the same as if you had cast Moonfire yourself it actually counts as a manual Moon Fire cast in combat logs it's just piggybacked onto whatever skill you actually used that caused the proc so you can cast Moonfire and use the proc if you're out of range or you desperately need the Rage or the damage you know to burst some enemy down specifically but otherwise you're better off hitting mangle thrash swipe and Mauland then just letting the moon fire proc trigger on top of that and give you the free damage bundled into whatever other non-moon fire skill you used The Only Exception is if Galactic Guardian is about to expire you are better off manually casting it then letting it wear off without getting any value out of it.
At all bears cooldowns are very strong but they're also really straightforward and simple unless you're holding on to Incarnation and rage of the sleeper for a very specific purpose like an ad spawn or an intermission is about to happen so you know they wouldn't be useful or you're about to end a pull and you won’t hold it for the start of the next one, you basically should just be using them as soon as they're available whenever possible you should try to overlap the two of them as they will give you a lot more value when you use them together during Incarnation mangle is actually a higher damage ability than thrash until you're over at least six targets and mangle is always better for rage generation a billion targets.
I think you know spamming mangle is still better than spamming thrash for rage maintaining the debuff is important so the approach of spamming thrash for 30 seconds is not always the go-to way to play anymore if you're doing you know eight ten more targets and you're really more interested in maximizing your damage output spam and thrash is still fine really large scale pulls like that you're good but once you have the tierset bonus you always want to use your Gore procs with mangle immediately no matter what.
Now let's go over your main defensive skills you have iron Furs your main defensive rage spender and that is the vast majority of what you're going to spend your rage on forensic region is your main self-heal it’s kind of self-explanatory but it is a good self-heal and it increases your healing taken while it's active too so you get a lot of Health back when you use it you have renewal as an off-gcd self-heal it’s very simple but good to have whenever you need it thank you.
Now let's talk about defensive cooldowns Incarnation and rage of the sleeper are both sort of defensive cooldowns they’re very clearly offensive cooldowns as well for sure but they had a ton of defensive value while they're active which is great you don't have to use them on top of each other that is obviously the best way to go if you're trying to do damage and why wouldn't you want to do damage but if you really need the defensive value that you get out of each of them you can split them apart they are defensive cooldowns bark skin and survival instincts are your two other main defensive cooldowns and they're both very basic but you know if you know you're about to take a bunch of damage you use one of those to reduce it and then you live that's pretty much it.
Now let me cover the classes utility pretty quickly you can take a lot of AOE CC abilities in your talent tree and those can be really useful when dealing with some of the weekly effects in Mythic plus ursoc grasp is really good for spiteful ads that's one of the first things that comes to mind innovate can be really good for healing like helping out your healers and raid it does cause you to shift out of bear form when you cast it so it's not useful if you're actively tanking but during a taunt swap or during uh intermission phase or whatever some situation where you're not actively being punched in the face shifting out and giving them innovate and then immediately shifting back into bear form good to go.
Nature's vigil gives you a sort of passive group healing buff that copies 20 of your single Target damage as healing to nearby allies most of your damage counts as single Target even things like dot ticks from thrash will count as single Target damage hits so this is not actually as bad as it might seem it's a 30 second buff on a 90second cooldown so the direct throughput may not be huge but the uptime is really good the utility of a tank who can passively put out group healing is really great after the Wildfire is a perfect example of this it causes you to put out an absurd amount of group healing to the five targets that you hit with it uh in testing it in normal gear I think I was getting 75k hits for each Target that I was hitting so that is quite substantial.
It triggers every time you spend 200 rage so every five iron forecasts basically you trigger a giant AOE heel you also reduce the cooldown of incarnation whenever you spend rage so you always have this pair of huge incentives to generate as much rage as you possibly can you know on the one hand you're fueling a cooldown reduction on a major offensive and defensive cooldown for yourself and on the other you’re fueling this incredible self-healing that also doubles as group healing just just really good stuff.
Now I want to talk about how to pull on a bear Druid it's probably the easiest thing in the world really if you have Incarnation available you run in thrash three times or thrash once pop incarn and rage the sleeper since they're both off the global cooldown then thrash a couple more times and then once everything's stacked up to three stacks of thrash you start spamming mangle that's if it's a regular size pole if it's like a super duper huge ball which considering you have incarnate rage as a sleeper up in this example probably will be you could just keep spamming thrash and then you want to use iron fur as quickly as you possibly can if it is like 10 or more mobs, you're jackhammering that iron for key bind dig burn through all the rage that you're generating.
You may need to use fringed Regen to get stabilized or if it's a particularly nasty pull you might hit bark skin like right at the beginning of the poll just to keep your damage intake under control if you don't have the Incarnation available.
You're still in good shape, now this isn't shadowlands you can run in thrash first thing probably use bark skin hit mangle swipe it up get some Galactic guardian and moon fire process until you either get mangle or thrash Back available and then just keep doing that same thing mangling and thrashing when they're available and then just swiping it up raining Moon fires down on everybody's head and holding threat no problem.
Stats
All right now let's cover stats, bear Druids want to enchant and gym for haste and then versatility as your top two secondary stats agility is super valuable so whenever possible you really just want to maximize your item level that’s the main thing to keep in mind when gearing up item level first haste versatility you know if you're comparing pieces that are of the same item level, alright that's it thanks for watching!
