We break down all the reasons you should consider playing Guardian Druid in Patch 10.1 and even throw in a few reasons of why you might not. From all the changes since launch to the new tier set bonuses coming in 10.1, join us as we explore Dragonflight Season 2 Guardian Druid!
Why You Should Play a Spec in Dragonflight Season 2 Series
Blood DK
Havoc DH
Feral Druid
Preservation Evoker
Beast Mastery Hunter
Arcane Mage
Fire Mage
Mistweaver Monk
Retribution Paladin
Holy Priest
Shadow Priest
Assassination Rogue
Elemental Shaman
Affliction Warlock
Protection Warrior
Dragonflight Season 2 Druid Tier Set
Why You Should Play Guardian Druid in Dragonflight Season 2 (and Why You Shouldn’t)
Dragonflight’s Guardian Druid is one that blends many aspects of it’s former glory days of Legion/WoD with strengths from more recent expansions like Shadowlands while adding a touch of new spice from Dragonflight. Heavily Moonfire focused builds with fun talents such as Galactic Guardian and Rage of the Sleeper merging with Shadowlands’ Ursoc’s Fury and cool new additions like Raze make for an extremely fast paced and fun playstyle.
Guardian Druid has been a fun and interesting choice so far throughout Season 1 of Dragonflight. A somewhat rare and niche tank pick and currently one of the least played tanks overall. Surely that means we would be likely to see significant buffs going into Season 2 to bring us up to a more competitive level.
However, Guardian suffers from a lack of unique tank identity. Comparatively to other tanks we do not deal the highest damage, mitigate phys/magic damage better or bring significant utility. Our damage intake is so poor and unstable that we have to cycle significant cooldowns on things that other tanks use nothing on. This leads to a situation where you inevitably run out of cooldowns much faster than other tanks and then you just die or require external assistance leaving you feeling weak.
| Why You Should | Why You Shouldn’t |
Why You Should Play Guardian Druid in Dragonflight Season 2
Guardian is more than capable of doing all content available, granted some things like very high keys or certain boss fights in raid are a little more of a challenge but with some out of the box thinking, being able to adapt and overcome these new challenges feels extremely rewarding. It’s easy to breeze through content with flavor the month specs but playing something rare and difficult adds a unique layer of difficulty that many find exciting.
Guardian Druid Utility for Dragonflight
The two big things Guardian brings are great mobility for your group or raid with Stampeding Roar and also a significant amount of healing in close proximity via After the Wildfire.
Stampeding Roar is an extremely useful mobility tool, however in Dragonflight there is a plethora of mobility tools now with Evokers/Shamans/Warlocks and most raids having multiple druids. This greatly lessens the value of Stampeding Roar but it remains generally useful nonetheless.
After the Wildfire is a very powerful group healing tool but it’s limited range and low target count makes it often underwhelming in most raid scenarios. In M+ it has significantly more value and can be tracked and played around to add another intricate layer of playstyle.
In addition to those we can also bring:
- Remove Corruption: Remove both Poison and Curse effects. This will be significantly more impactful in Season 2 of Dragonflight as Season 1 only had 2 curses and no relevant poisons. The Downside to this is taking this talent is still extremely punishing for Guardian and often comes at the cost of losing either CC or utility.
- Rebirth: Quickly combat res any allies that have made fatal errors.
- Mark of the Wild: Standard Versatility buff, every raid should have one and it’s also quite decent in dungeons.
- Incapacitating Roar: Short CD AoE disorient to interrupt adds from casting.
- Innervate: Give a healer unlimited mana for 10 seconds.
Big Damage, Big Healing
While there are a multitude of issues with Guardian and we are desperately in need of buffs, both the damage output of Guardian and group healing are in a pretty balanced place. Our AoE is absolutely at the top end of tank DPS and even our single target is quite competitive. The group healing provided by After the Wildfire can absolutely come in clutch and carry many keys and sometimes even some parts of raid like the platforms on Dathea this tier.
Why You Shouldn’t Play Guardian Druid in Dragonflight Season 2
Guardian was already considered one of the bottom two tanks in Season 1 and received no significant buffs so nothing has really changed yet.
Tuning Issues
The defensive capabilities of Guardian are simply lacking, we don’t have enough tools at our disposal to handle certain damage intakes. What once was considered an excellent “starter” tank is no longer true, as we are so fragile that dying is far too common an occurrence which makes the playstyle feel very at risk permanently. Against physical damage we are handily beaten by the block tanks, even though our only active mitigation (Ironfur) purely increases armor. Against magic damage we remain weaker than every tank.
Making even the smallest mistakes on Guardian is extremely punishing, more so than any other tank, just using a sub-optimal Frenzied Regeneration can set you so far behind on cooldown cycling that you may never be able to stabilize without an external from a healer. Our limited toolkit has nothing like Final Stand where you can simply bubble taunt and be immune while you recover. Frenzied Regeneration has a disgustingly long cooldown for how weak it is when you compare it to things like Death Strike, Word of Glory, Soul Cleave, Expel Harm, Ignore Pain. All of which have little to no cooldowns, we are the only tank without some form of spammable self healing. Using 2 charges of Frenzied Regeneration on basic things like melee swings and then having to wait 25-30s before being able to heal yourself again just does not work in the current state of the game.
A previous iteration of Frenzied Regeneration had no cooldown and utilized rage to instantly heal, going back to something like this could be a potential step in the right direction to fixing Guardian survivability issues, as we are often flooded with rage and spamming more Ironfur‘s doesn’t really help in majority of situations, especially when magic damage is involved. You could also lower the cooldown and increase the duration of the Frenzied Regeneration HoT so it has a much larger uptime. Additionally, remove the GCD on Frenzied Regeneration, the most common Guardian request.
Lackluster Tier Set Bonus
Our tier set is rather mediocre with the healing from the 2P set (Druid Guardian 10.1 Class Set 2pc) being extremely insignificant and the rage generation being essentially net neutral factoring in the loss of our current tier set. The 4P (Druid Guardian 10.1 Class Set 4pc) is a decent amount better, it’s easy to maintain and the extra health is something we sorely need. The damage increase is okay, but the problem is that one of our highest damage builds currently revolves heavily around Thorns of Iron, which is a playstyle where you spam Ironfur instead of Maul for damage. If this build remains the top build that will render our set essentially just a minor health increase with little to no damage increase across the 2 bonuses.
Additionally, the set bonus is completely passive which is incredibly boring and uninteresting.
Missing Identity
Guardian brings nothing unique in the realm of tanks. We don’t excel in any aspect of tanking or bring anything unique to our raid/group which is quite disappointing with the potential from the talent trees. Most tanks either excel in an area or bring some sort of utility, spells like Rallying Cry, Blessing of Spellwarding, Abomination Limb, Anti-Magic Shell can greatly help your raid or even easily see mechanics completely trivialized. We have nothing remotely close to this.
Our raid buff, Mark of the Wild, is easily brought by other druids in raid as generally most raids have multiple druids whereas having multiple Demon Hunters or Monks is much less common for example. In the past we had Leader of the Pack, which granted the party 5% crit and some small healing on crits, this could be a nice group buff to potentially return like Windfury Totem, which would make Guardian at least feel like it’s bringing something to the table.
Weak Talent Trees
Both the Druid general tree and the Guardian talent tree are some of the worst trees in the game. They are poorly plotted out and have no intuitive design when considering the 4 druid specs all play drastically different roles. Why does it cost 3 talent points that give you nothing to take a simple dispel (Remove Corruption) when all other specs only require 1?
Why are there so many talents in the general tree that grant absolutely 0 benefit to us? Primal Fury, , Starfire, Starsurge, Sunfire, Moonkin Form, Rip, Rake, Maim, Protector of the Pack, Rejuvenation, Swiftmend, Wild Growth, Cyclone, Improved Sunfire, Improved Rejuvenation to name a few. The amount of dead talents linked in that list alone is just insanity, no other tree has to deal with this much pollution. Half of our general tree is completely wasted space and the other half isn’t even strong to try make up for that fact.
A very simple fix is to have these talents do different things for different specs, something like Improved Rejuvenation could easily be +3 seconds to Ironfur for bears or Maim be a single target bear stun like the old bear hug or Mighty Bash.
Now to be fair a lot of those talents historically did have use when weaving was a viable option, but weaving in Dragonflight is completely dead for Guardian, especially without a talent that allows us to maintain our stamina and armor at least temporarily after leaving Bear Form. This Shapeshifter’s Fervor actually was shortly implemented for a mechanic on Neltharion, an upcoming boss in the next raid, but then removed as the mechanic got redesigned. This as a talent alongside some buffs to non-bear abilities would be an amazing buff to druid, allowing us to use our mobility tools and non-bear abilities much more flexibly.
This doesn’t even touch on the Guardian specific tree which has it’s own set of issues. Poor pathing making certain talents extremely inaccessible, bloated final section of the tree which makes taking all the talents you need to be competitive impossible, multiple useless talents and overall just a mess.
Incarnation: Guardian of Ursoc is a huge issue. A spell that all druids have yet isn’t in the class tree which bloats our entire spec tree, gate-keeping all options while being a very mediocre cooldown. Moving Incarnation: Guardian of Ursoc to the class tree would be a huge step in the right direction, if we had 5 more talent points to spend in our spec tree that weren’t used on Incarnation: Guardian of Ursoc, we would be in a much better position.
Making talents like Improved Survival Instincts, Innate Resolve and Infected Wounds baseline and replacing them with useful things like cooldown reduction of Survival Instincts based on rage spent for example. Replacing or changing dead talents like Lunar Beam and Front of the Pack with things that are viable, potentially adding our unique tank niche in here. Please no more april fools level Lunar Beam healing buffs. Shuffling weaker talents to different sections of the tree like Dream of Cenarius.
These are the types of changes Guardian would absolutely love to see in the future. Having someone take a real good look at the druid trees and breathe some new life into them would be the dream.
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.
For more information on playing Guardian Druid, please see our class guide updated for Dragonflight:
Guardian Druid Guide
