A Look Back at Guardian Druid in Dragonflight & War Within Wishlist – Editorial

With the sun setting on Dragonflight and The War Within on the horizon, our Guardian Druid Writer, Pumps, offers a retrospective highlighting Guardian’s journey in Dragonflight and shares their hopes for the spec’s next evolution with a War Within Wishlist.

A Glance at Guardian Druid in Dragonflight

Guardian druid has had an interesting and mostly positive expansion with Dragonflight. The spec is definitely heading in the right direction with most of the changes and additions we have received. Some of the fun new tools like Tooth and Claw, After the Wildfire and Raze have kept the gameplay relatively consistent and enjoyable.

Although Guardian has kept mostly the same playstyle throughout the expansion, with only minor rotational changes coming and going, for example the fluctuating strength of Thorns of Iron or Raze on multi-target.I n this article we will look over the good, the bad, the hopeful future guardian, playstyle and utility changes.

Guardian has seen some ups and downs throughout Dragonflight. We started off with some frustrating bugs that kept us fairly weak for most of Season 1 until quite late in the patch, which we were then nicely compensated with some fairly huge buffs and a mild tree rework in addition to the bugs being fixed.

Season 2, with these new buffs, saw Guardian soar to the top of the charts both in raid and mythic+ alike. Which was fantastic for the Guardian community.

After a Season, it’s common that Blizzard nerfs the top spec and we did not dodge said nerfs, so we fell back down in power for Season 3. Even though the nerfs were relatively minor, in combination with other tanks getting buffed/changed and the dungeon meta shifting towards needing much more interrupts, this was enough to knock Guardian well out of favor but very playable. Which is where we will likely be for the remainder of Season 3.

Talent Tree and Utility Issues

Talents
The Druid talent tree in general has been a hot topic the entire expansion. It was one of the first talent trees originally revealed and has had barely any changes since, even though there are 4 completely different specs all sharing the same tree. Unlike other classes somehow, our talents do not change depending on specs. In my opinion, this is horrendous design, having to take a bunch of completely filler spells/talents just to reach the end of an extremely mediocre tree is simply just lazy. The general tree needs a massive overhaul. Things like dispel and interrupt should be baseline, not require 3 useless points to reach, in fact useless points in general should not be a thing, every talent you put in should give you something.
With that in mind 3 talents have had large impacts on gameplay, Tooth and Claw, Thorns of Iron and Raze.

Tooth and Claw has been an absolute win of a talent, it made the spec feel much smoother, gave us free uses of our hardest hitting ability and gave us damage reduction. All round fantastically designed talent, need more of these.

Thorns of Iron has been a fairly contentious talent, with the absolutely wild APM required due to your main damage source revolving around spamming Ironfur which is off the GCD. I think this talent needs to be changed, if it’s ever better or close to spamming maul in terms of damage there is a big issue and that has been the case multiple times already this expansion. It’s simply not an enjoyable playstyle for many and i believe it’s not what the talent was intended for when implemented.

Raze is a great ability, allowing us to finally utilize our rage effectively on AoE, it would be perfect if it didnt take up an extra keybind. They could remedy this by making Raze deal Maul damage to the initial target and deal Raze damage to the surrounding targets.

Cleaning up some of the more useless talents in the Guardian tree would also be great and add flexibility and nuance. Things like Guardian of Elune, Scintillating Moonlight, Earthwarden, Layered Mane, Reinforced Fur and Thorns of Iron all could use some sort of rework or replacement.

Utility
Throughout the expansion one thing remained consistently lacking for Guardian and that was Utility. Raid utility more specifically.

These issues became increasingly glaring in Season 2 when even though Guardian was considered the best tank for M+ and the highest DPS tank for raid, that still did not come close to enough to see any top guilds running a Guardian Druid.This is a massive issue currently when it comes to tank balancing. Things like Blessing of Spellwarding, Gorefiend’s Grasp and Abomination Limb massively outclass the minor benefits that Guardian brings with Stampeding Roar or After the Wildfire and it is the main driving reason why BDK/Prot paladin have a player base of over 5x+ Guardian. Anytime there is a gap that large, something needs to be fixed by Blizzard significantly quicker than they currently do in my opinion.

I believe a re-balancing for tanks needs to heavily focus on utility. DPS wise tank balancing has improved every tier so far and is actually decently balanced currently with the exeption of VDH/Prot Paladin being slightly overtuned on AoE.

On a positive note, Guardian has felt extremely tanky all expansion in both M+ and raid alike and our DPS has been consistently good. The Guardian rotation is simple but flows well which makes it an easy spec to pick up and learn while also not being too boring that you fall asleep.

Lack of Borrowed Power and Tier Sets

Dragonflight has had a severe lack of big and interesting borrowed power items, which in one way is good as it keeps a fairly steady power baseline.
However on the flip side, in combination with the low impact and uninteresting tier sets throughout Dragonflight this has led to a rather dull and quite boring playstyle where we are simply stuck in the mundane rut of wherever your spec has been left for the next year or so until the next expansion.

Trinkets doing 5-10% of your damage, tier sets doing 5-10% of your damage, random cantrip item doing 2-5% of your damage. None of these are particularly exciting or engaging, compared to something like end of the previous expansion Shadowlands, where you had insane trinkets doing 20-50% of your damage on pulls, massive Venthyr ramps, great weaving and interesting healing utility. You had variance, some things were OP and a little OP is fun, especially in the final tier of an expansion.
Balance is very important too especially for progression, but fun is extremely important and something which i feel is somewhat lacking from Dragonflight.

Future of Guardian Druid in The War Within

Utility rework would absolutely be at the top of my list for Guardian.
After the Wildfire had great potential but being 5 target capped and a very small range on it made it extremely niche in raid. This being buffed up to 20+ yards and hitting 10 or so players up from 5 would be a massive step in the right direction for useful utility. In addition to buffing Convoke the Spirits similar to how it was in Shadowlands where it could be used as a really valuable healing tool.

The Druid talent tree definitely needs a serious look at, there is so much potential there for useful and fun gameplay that is wasted by the lack of flexibility and intelligent design decisions. Being a first edition talent tree has left it extremely neglected throughout the expansion, as it’s clear blizzard has gradually learnt more and more about the how they want the talent tree system to work as time goes on and each revamp is better in ways than the last.

Personally, I would also love to see the return of weaving in some function or another, whether it be a burst dps/healing cooldown with Convoke the Spirits, which has never been used for Guardian the entirety of Dragonflight even though it was a fantastic covenant in Shadowlands.

With weaving I would say it’s a pretty hard thing to balance perfectly, generally it’s either so strong that you must use it for dps or so weak that it isn’t worth using at all. There is a few ways they could go about this, making more spells usable in bear form potentially, or adding a weaving talent where you retain the stamina/armor of bear form in other forms.

Overall, Guardian has had a comfortable position throughout the expansion but has been missing something to make them really rise in popularity as we have been one of the lowest played tank fairly consistently. In my opinion this can be remedied by the addition of cool and useful utility. Hopefully the Hero talents can attempt to achieve some of these future goals.

About the Author

This guide was written by Pumps! I raid in the guild Honestly on US – Frostmourne.
I am active in the Dreamgrove discord and always happy to answer questions i can.
I came 2nd place in the First World of Warcraft Mythic Dungeon International event. You can catch me streaming on Twitch during progression.