Introduction
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 Spike Flail on Mal’Ganis NA, and have achieved multiple CEs and M+ titles in Shadowlands and Dragonflight on Guardian Druid and other tank specs. I’ve also competed in The Great Push as a tank player, and create Tank, M+, and Raid guide content on my YouTube and Twitch channels, so make sure to stop by and say hi!
Strengths:
- Very good damage and durability relative to other tanks specs
- Strong off-healing capabilities
- Provides useful general druid utility (Stampeding Roar, Innervate, Mark of the Wild, etc)
Weaknesses:
- Some druid utility and off-healing requires them to leave bear form which isn’t always feasible (cyclone, entangling roots, etc)
- Many “dead” talent points that are never picked or you are forced to path through in both the Class and Spec tree which can limit your flexibility
- Lack of unique raid utility
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
Guardian Druid Patch 10.1.5 Video Guide
What has changed
Patch 10.1.7 didn't have any specific updates that affected the guide.
Despite several nerfs over the past few weeks (before Patch 10.1.7), Guardian druid remains an extremely powerful spec, thanks in part to the significant talent tree rework it got with patch 10.1.5; which addressed a lot of the issues the spec was facing, including bloat in the capstone area, lack of node connections, and buffs to unused talents such as Flashing Claw and Lunar Beam. At the same time Galactic Guardian received a nerf, now no longer consuming itself if it procs when you already have a proc stored, and Raze has been changed to no longer replace Maul when talented, resulting in physical based builds becoming a lot more powerful both offensively and defensively.
That being said, the Class tree remains a bit lacking, both due to underwhelming Capstone talents and an extremely large number of “dead” points due to having to take rotational abilities for other specs in order to path to certain utility spells. Personally I would love to see a lot of these rotational abilities either rolled into a single talent point or made baseline, as well as changes to Convoke similar to what happened with Divine Toll for paladins, where it was moved out of the various spec trees and into the class tree.
The spec tree also still has some unaddressed issues, such as the power level of Pulverize and Convoke, Berserk being split into 3 separate talents, and having to buy “rank 2” talents or utility talents that compete with throughput which feel like they should be either baseline or combined with other nodes.
In general though the changes coming in this patch are nice quality of life improvements and welcome buffs to the Guardian spec. Combine this with the powerful tier set in 10.1 and that puts bears near the top when it comes to both damage and durability compared to other tank specs, though one downside is the lack of unique utility they can bring to a raid team, as pretty much everything they do provide can be brought by any Druid spec.