Hello Guardians!

Here’s your news and updates for the last week.
 

Feline Swiftness & PvP Set

One of the posts GC made in the past week was about how the PvP bonus interacts the talent Feline Swiftness:

However, to address your main concern, a different option would be to prevent Feline Swiftness and the PvP set bonus from stacking. Feline Swiftness would just remain a dead talent at least among knowledgeable PvP players.

So this means once we get to 5.2 you’ll either take Displacer Beast or Wild Charge. I don’t really know which one is better or anything, but there it is.
 

Changes to Dodge & Parry?

There’s been a lot of discussion both on the offical tanking forums, and on Twitter about how passive mitigation stats (such as Dodge and Parry) are pretty boring compared to AM stats. You can toss Mastery into the “passive” pile for Druids as well.

GC made a post on Twitter about the subject:

You succeeded at Active mitigation – avoidance is by definition passive mitigation – regretting the change?

Nope. We think active mitigation is more fun. Just need to decide what to do about dodge and parry long term.

This is actually very interesting to me. It suggests that some changes could be incoming for how Dodge interacts with other stats. This is even more interesting for Druids because of Savage Defense. So we’ll have to wait and see what happens.
 

Stats and Variation

Something I found particularly interesting was this tidbit:

Ever feel like there’s too much focus on math in WoW? Reforging, DPS, HPS… numbers are too important. Not sure how to fix.

Players are really scared of being wrong, even if the delta is trivial. Much more likely to experiment in a single player game.

Totally agree with this. The reality is that the actual variance between going for Haste over Crit is incredibly tiny for Guardians. However everyone is now in a mentatlity where they have to give themselves every possible advantage from gear. The reality is (as Hamlet has said many times) good play will far outweigh any possible advantage you could gain from reforging or regemming differently.
 

PTR Build 16503

There was a new PTR build deployed last week. Only change was to revert Cyclone back to the way it worked on live.

I had originally intended to write three articles a week, but it’s become clear to me that isn’t something I’m capable of doing. I’ll definitely keep doing two a week though. Keep your eyes open for an article discussing how to evaluate Guardian logs later this week.

Hello Guardians!

Here’s your news and updates for the last week.
 

“Traditional Tank Stats”?

GC made a curious post in the PTR Class Analysis thread talking about “traditional” tank stats vs offensive tank stats. I know this is Paladin specific, but it’s curious to wonder if this is going to get extended to Guardians as well. With RPS stats being overwhelmingly better than traditional defensive stats you have to wonder if they’re going to make a similar move with Dodge and Mastery for Guardians.

I hope they don’t decide to add Dodge to more tier pieces >.<

A clarification was later made stating that they don’t want players to essentially ignore “traditional” stats. That probably explains the buff to Guardian’s Mastery, but it’s going to take a lot for us to care about Dodge again.
 

Cyclone DR Removed

I was one of those people that said the Cyclone nerfs wouldn’t actually make it to live. Turns out I was right. GC posted some changes including a removal of the Cyclone DR. This definitely helps Guardian PvP. Makes me even more excited to try out Guardian PvP in 5.2.
 

5.2 Item Levels & Thunderforged Items

Blizzard made a post detailing what the item levels will be in the new raid instance, and what the “Thunderforged” tag will mean. It turns out I 100% accurately predicted that normal mode would end up being 522, with heroic at 535.

The wrench comes from the new “Thunderforged” tag. Essentially non-tier pieces have a random chance to drop 6 item levels higher than normal. But since this is a small chance (and even smaller on 10m), it’s not worth being concerned about.

When item upgrades come back in 5.3 (?) you’ll want to spend your points on upgrading tier pieces first, then pieces which you won’t be replacing. The last thing you want to do is waste VP on upgrading a piece, only to have its TF replacement drop right afterwards.
 

PTR Build 16486

We also had a new PTR build with a couple of changes.

Cyclone now has a 25 yd range, down from 30.
Growl no longer activates Bear Form, now requires it.

The Cyclone change was referred to in the PTR Class Analysis thread. Growl no longer activiting Bear Form is to prevent PvP abuses by Resto. It doesn’t really mean much for PvE.

•Tooth and Claw damage was reduced by ~12%

You may remember early in the PTR there was an update that actually buffed T&C by 10%. Now they have reversed course and subsequently nerfed T&C down to 88% Vengeance, which is below the 100% we’re at right now. Not a big deal, especially since we can always spend Rage on Frenzied Regen instead.
 

Guardian RBG Guide

A poster on the MMO-Champ forums did a quick guide to RBG’ing as a Guardian. He’s ~2500 rating in RBGs, so chances are pretty good he knows what he’s talking about. Go take a look!
 

Wenselaas Retires

On more of a sad note, Wenselaas has unfortunately had some RL changes which mean he won’t be raiding anymore. As a result he didn’t feel comfortable continuing to write about 25m Guardians. I wish him all the best.

Unfortunately I don’t have anyone lined up to replace his content. So I’m going to try and do 3 articles a week. We’ll see how it goes.

Catch you on Wednesday for a new “Off-Topic” article.

Hello Guardians!

Not really much to report today. I know I said I’d do a post talking about soloing on the weekend, but let’s be honest – Baldur’s Gate Enhanced just devours free time.
 

FFF Resets Melee Swing timer

So last week I reported that FFF resets the melee swing timer. Once the PTR was up I went ahead and checked out the new builds to see if the bug was fixed. Turns out it is. So come 5.2 this is no longer a problem.

Score 1 for GC gettin’ shit done.
 

PvP Set Bonuses

Something that showed up late last week was new PvP set bonuses for Guardians. New, and really fucking good. Check this out:

Feral PvP gloves – increases the duration of Bear Hug by 1 sec. (I originally typed Bear Huge, which would also be an awesome ability.)
Feral PvP 2pc – Thick Hide now reduces the chance to be crit by 20%. This is in addition to the Savage Roar effect.
Feral PvP 4 pc – Now also causes successful interrupts with Skull Bash to reset the cooldown of Enrage.

Now these by themselves are pretty sweet. But both are missing a crucial contextual change:

Thick Hide – now also reduces crits from spells.

You may remember that I mentioned that while Guardians would be able to hold our own against melee classes pretty easily, we would get lit up by casters. Turns out I was right. It remains to be seen whether or not this is a flat 20% bonus (6 + 20 = 26) or a percentage increase (6 * 1.2 = 7.2). The latter is pretty worthless, so I suspect it’s the former. The bonuses and the change to Thick Hide give us some great additional survivability against spellcasters.

Actually these changes are so cool that I’m interested in trying Guardian PvP in 5.2. We’ll see what happens.
 

Cat Movement Speed

Now this isn’t strictly a Guardian problem, but it will affect us in PvP. So here it is:

Here is our logic on cat movement in PvP. Stacking Feline Swiftness, the PvP set bonus, boot enchants and things like Stampeding Roar and Dash all stacked to be ridiculously fast. We could go back to having all of these things not stacking, but we thought that felt arbitrary and confusing. We didn’t want to nerf the talent, so we thought the PvP set bonus made the most sense to hit. Long term, we could consider the movement bonuses stacking additively instead of multiplicatively, but that would do some odd things to snares without further adjustments. We also feel like giving cats Infected Wounds helped a lot with their old problem of not being able to stay on targets.

Keep in mind that some of these changes are attempts to be proactive. We don’t necessarily believe that Feral and perhaps Shadow are overpowered in PvP today. However if we’re successful in getting mages and warriors down to a more balanced spot, we’re concerned Feral and Shadow may be the next two specs that feel broken. We are also mindful that if you knock off the top thing on any list that the next item on that list becomes the new top thing.

The big problem here is that nobody fucking takes Feline Swiftness in PvP. Like literally nobody. Wild charge is about 500 times better. So this change doesn’t make any sense. Now this is posted in the PTR thread, so it’s obviously open to change. But still.

At least he partially made up for it with a funny:

Feral / Guardian PvP Glove: Increases the damage of Maim and increases the duration of Bear Huge.

Hello Guardians!

We’ve had a few “announcements” – I dunno what you’d call GC saying things on Twitter – and some hotfixes in the last week. Nothing major though.

T15 Set Bonuses

Wens posted about the new bonuses already but I wanted to add my $0.02 as it were. I actually really like the 2pc bonus. There will always be time where Savage Defense isn’t up and can’t be used – but your Rage income remains constant. Now you can use that Rage to buy yourself some time to let the charges recover, in an incredibly efficient manner. If you time it right it’s totally possible to get a full charge in the first 20 seconds of a fight.

The key will be communicating with your healers about what you’re doing because they’ll probably panic if they see you purposely going low. But the point is being able to handle tank damage over an even bigger constant window than we can now. The downside is that most Guardians won’t be able to take advantage of it to a big extent. However those at the top end of the skill curve will abuse the hell out of this.

GC actually just posted an hour ago what the percentage is for the 4pc Guardian bonus:

The Guardian 4pc is currently a 50% increase to rage generation while Enraged.

Holy. Shitballs.

That makes Enrage now generate 35 Rage instead of 30. It also means you would pop it after Incarnation in order to generate the maximum amount of RPS. It’s not a problem for Berserk since it is off the GCD. That makes it incredibly powerful for swaps and the start of encounter where Rage is the most important.

My gut reaction is that is incredibly overpowered. But without having done any actual raid testing of the new content I can’t really say one way or the other.
 

Gear Upgrades Removed

It was announced this morning by Bashiok that the gear upgrade vendor will be removed in 5.2. That means there won’t be any additional gear inflation beyond what we already knew. However that doesn’t change the prospect of Guardians potentially capping Mastery sometime in T16.
 

Vengeance Capped

In the middle of last week there were unconfirmed reports that Vengeance had been capped at max HP. Hotfix notes later confirmed these reports.

My initial gut reaction was that this was a bad thing, since the whole purpose of Vengeance to begin with was that it had a floating cap based on damage intake. After thinking about it for a couple of days and some discussions on the official forums, it’s not a big deal at all. It’ll affect Monks and Warriors long before it will ever effect Guardians (if ever – which is extremely unlikely).

The cap was introduced to prevent a gimmick with how Vengeance calculations interacted with high value absorbs. The only thing it will affect at max level is challenge modes, where I have seen anecdotal reports of tanks pulling huge amounts of trash to stack Vengeance super high and kill them extremely fast. All in all, a nothing change really.
 

FFF Resets Melee Swing Timer

A week and a half ago reports on MMO-Champ surfaced about FFF resetting the melee swing timer. This was fairly easy to confirm without even looking at a combat log.

The funny thing is, this exact bug was fixed a long time ago (Wrath I think). Basically it’s a total RPS loss to ever use FFF over Thrash right now. Took me a few tries but I finally got GC to respond. It’s on their radar now so I hope it’ll be fixed relatively quickly.

That’s all the news for the past week! I’ve been getting heavily into soloing old raid content in the last couple of weeks, and I’ll be talking about my adventures in this weekend’s article.

Goodnight.