Introduction
Hey everyone, and welcome to the Guardian Druid Guide! My name is Tactyks, and I’ve been playing bear on and off since Wrath of the Lich King. I currently raid with Consequence on Stormrage NA, and have achieved multiple CEs and M+ titles through Shadowlands and Dragonflight on Guardian Druid as well as other tank specs. I’ve also competed in The Great Push as a tank player and create M+, Raid, and Tank guide content over on my YouTube and Twitch channels, so make sure to stop by and say hi!
Socials
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/tactyks
- Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/tactyks
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/tactyks
- Druid Discord: https://discord.gg/dreamgrove
Speaking on the spec itself, Guardians are a shapeshifter with two distinct playstyles, one focused on bleeds and physical damage, with the other focused on raining down arcane lasers on your enemies, exactly what real bears do out in the wild! They have a great utility kit that they share with the other druid specs, on top of bringing the extremely powerful Mark of the Wild raid buff. The main weakness of Guardian is that it lacks unique utility that can’t be brought by other druids, meaning their representation can sometimes be low if the other druid specs are strong, even if the spec itself is performing well.
Guardian Druid Video Guide
What has changed
While the spec hasn’t seen any major changes through patches 11.0.5 and 11.0.7, moving into The War Within from Dragonflight Guardians saw a reshuffling of their class talent tree, including making your dispel much easier to access, as well as the addition of some new powerful tools such as Fluid Form for catweaving and Oakskin to help amp up the power of your defensives. Despite some positives from these adjustments, the talent tree shuffle also comes with some issues, including Stampeding Roar being gated behind niche utility, as well as druid players still being forced to path through multiple abilities for different specs that they will never use, which can be a bit frustrating. We’ll dive into the specifics of these changes and how it affects your builds later on.
With these general tree changes comes the removal of range-increasing talents for melee specs, which in Guardian’s case impacts the Astral Influence node. This talent still exists, however it no longer increases the range of your melee abilities like Thrash or Mangle, so it is now a point you’ll avoid in pretty much all situations.
Outside of the talent tree changes, this expansion is also bringing 2 “Hero” trees to every spec in the game, which double down on providing 2 unique themes of Guardian.
Elune’s Chosen focuses on your Arcane abilities, empowering Lunar Beam, turning Thrash into an arcane spell, and even allowing you to call down Fury of Elune onto your enemies.
Meanwhile, Druid of the Claw focuses more on the physical side of things with the new Ravage ability, increasing the strength of Incarnation, and potentially opening up the opportunity to catweave more with Wildpower Surge, though currently this seems to be only in single target situations and is something players can avoid if they don’t like that playstyle. I’ll provide more details on both these trees in a future section of this guide.