Hello Guardians!

Sorry this week is a little late. It’ll become clear later in the post, but I had to finish up a bit of content before I could put this up.
 

Thrash Bugged

For 2 days after the patch launched last week Thrash was bugged and not critting on the DoT ticks. This was incredibly frustrating for people and even cost Buraan a rank 1 on Jin’rokh. It’s all fixed now though, so no more worries.
 

Developer Interviews

Icy Veins posted an interview they did with the WoW design team. There isn’t anything really tank-specific “per-se”, but there is some interesting discussion on the “utility arms race” which Guardians are certainly losing at this point. I’ll certainly be keeping an interested eye on what happens in 5.4, and I definitely encourage you to read the entire interview.

WoW Insider also posted an interview with GC regarding a wide range of topics. He also covered the topic of capping Vengeance in 5.4 which I’ll cover below.
 

Vengeance Capping

As I mentioned above GC further explained his tweet about capping Vengeance in 5.4:

Oh you’re talking about that tweet I made the other night! The main problem we’re trying to solve is situations where tanks do silly things in order to get their dps and survivability very high. One example is standing in a fire. Because hey you’re taking more damage, that’s going to increase your Vengeance, and makes your healers mad. We’re actually solving that one in a different way, we’re just going to flag certain types of damage as not causing Vengeance. But another thing players can do is single-tank a boss that was really intended for two tanks, because the Vengeance provided is so massive it can actually help that tank’s survivability.

Sometimes it’s fun to single tank, particularly when you’re outgearing the content a little bit — we’re not trying to remove the fun factor, we’re just trying to remove the pressure to tell the off-tank that hey dude, we really just need to single tank this because it’ll actually be easier for us. So by putting some kind of cap on Vengeance, we hope to keep it from getting out of control that way.

And in retrospect, I realized I didn’t provide any context to my tweet — it’s something we’d been talking a lot about, and I’d kind of assumed players would understand right away what our goal was — but of course that wasn’t a fair assumption on my part. Really the goal was to stop any aberrant or silly behavior to artificially inflate Vengeance. People who are just playing normally shouldn’t notice a big difference — and if the numbers we picked are too low, we can certainly increase them a little bit.

I’ve mentioned in several places that this won’t have a significant impact on our survivability, if any at all. At worse our Frenzied Regeneration will cap out at ~75% max HP for a full FR, and it will still take 2 T&C procs to cover a full melee swing. The change is definitely meant to discourage one tanking by capping the amount of extra DPS you can get as s single tank. That’s perfectly fine. Also don’t rule out additional Guardian-specific changes in 5.4 that will reduce the impact this change will have, even though it’s already pretty much nil.
 

Challenge Mode Guides

I was inspired by Hamlet to do my own series of Guardian-specific Challenge Mode guides. You can see the first two below:

The video source is my Twitch VOD, so it’s only 720p, and there is some stuttering. I’m not sure how I can fix that without using local recording which I can’t really do simultaneously with streaming. This works well enough for me, and I hope it does for you.

That’s all for this week. I hope you all have fun killing new things!

Hello Guardians!

Here’s this week’s pre-5.3 patch roundup. Not really that much to go over but I wanted to cover a few things anyway.
 

5.3 Survival Guide

I wrote a short article to let you know what changes you should be aware of in 5.3. Go ahead and check it out in order to be prepared!
 

Guardian Guide

The Guardian Guide has been updated for 5.3! Go ahead and check it out to make sure you are up to date :)
 

Guardian Resources

I’ve updated the Guardian SS with the changes in 5.3. Not much has changed, but it’s up-to-date now.

I mentioned before that I’m doing QA for Simcraft, helping them get their Guardian module up to snuff. A new version should be out soon with a bunch of bug fixes.
 

Force of Nature

Force of Nature is getting some interesting changes in 5.3 that haven’t yet been documented in the patch notes:

• Health increased to 40% of the Guardian’s Health.
• Armor set to 4x the Guardian’s Armor.
• Stats dynamically update.

This is definitely a welcome change to their ability to stay alive. This will make sure they definitely don’t die in 1 hit anymore. The only problem is their DPS still remains extremely terrible, so it’s not clear if they’re going to be able to hold threat on something after taunting it. In any case, I can certainly see a reason to take these for things like Challenge Mode trash. Whether or not we’ll see them on any boss fights reamins to be seen.
 

Fasc Joins CFT

In case you didn’t catch it before, well-known Guardian theorycrafter Fasc has joined CFT. This means you can tune in to my stream for double-Guardian action in H10 Throne of Thunder!

That’s all for this week. I hope you all have fun killing new things!

Introduction

5.3 is almost upon us! As with every path I’m here to analyze the upcoming changes so you don’t have to. What should you care about? What should you ignore? Let’s find out!
 

Class Changes

We’ll start out with the class changes in the 5.3 patch which affect Guardians:

Mark of the Wild had its mana cost reduced to 5%, down from 10%.

Slightly easier to buff. Ok.

Tranquility now targets 12 raid members (up from 5) each time it heals when used in a 25-player instance. This change also applies to players using the Symbiosis version of Tranquility.

Great change for 25m Guardians, and all Druids really. Long overdue if you ask me, but definitely glad it’s here now.

Force of Nature is no longer on global cooldown and summons a single Treant. The Treant no longer has a control bar, immediately uses its special abilities on the Druid’s current target, and accumulates 1 charge every 20 seconds up to a maximum of 3 charges.

This is a great design change for FoN, but unfortunately it still remains pretty useless. Having to compete against Incarnation makes it incredibly difficult for anything to be as good. It’s a step in the right direction, but you can still safely ignore it.

Mastery: Nature’s Guardian is now 33% stronger (2% per point instead of 1.5%).

This doesn’t really change anything. All it does is decrease the amount of Mastery you need to meet a given EH threshold. The value of Mastery relative to Stamina for EH is still quite terrible. For more information, check out my previous post about EH.
 

General Changes

There’s a few general changes that are happening as well.

Players can now choose to receive loot for specializations other than the one that’s currently active. This feature can be accessed by right-clicking on the character portrait and selecting the option from the drop-down list. Loot specialization is available for bonus rolls, Raid Finder, and Pandarian quest rewards. Please check out the blog: Patch 5.3 Adds Off-Spec Loot and Rewards for an in-depth explanation of how the Loot Specialization system will work.

This is pretty neat for LFR anyways. Simply pick “Feral” instead of “Guardian” for most bosses, as all “Guardian” does is add a bunch of quasi-useless tank trinkets to the loot table.

Protection for bad luck streaks have been added to bonus rolls. Each bonus roll that does not provide loot has a progressively better chance to award loot to the player.

How many times have you used a bonus coin and not gotten anything? The idea behind this is to make those bonus rolls feel more good, and less like a waste of time.

Items upgradable by Valor now require 250 Valor to upgrade per 4 item levels, for a total of 500 Valor for 8 item levels per item. This is retroactive to all items that use Valor.

Item upgrades are back! The question everyone will promptly ask is “What do I upgrade first?” The answer is as always “Whatever you won’t replace any time soon.” If it’s a tie certain slots like weapons, chest, legs, helm, and trinkets go first. After that you obviously pick thunderforged pieces, and then regular pieces.
 

Other Changes

The only thing that I can think of that isn’t covered in the patch notes is that the bug where Rune of Re-Origination wouldn’t give Guardians the correct amount of stats when in Bear form will now be fixed. This doesn’t change anything in terms of what items you want, but it’s still a bug fix.

Thanks everyone! Enjoy patch 5.3!