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
Moving into patch 11.1, Druids as a whole are getting significant changes to the class talent tree, and Guardian specifically saw a couple of minor adjustments to their spec specific tree on top of the Verdant Heart talent being added baseline to the spec.
Starting with the class tree, we’ve seen the removal of a lot of talents that aren’t generally useful across specs, improved pathing, as well as some old talents making a return and new talents being added. Gameplay-wise these changes don’t really impact Guardian at all, however it’s now a lot less frustrating to path through the tree to get utility you want which is a big win in my book. There’s also an interesting new talent called Symbiotic Relationship, which is a buff you can put onto a single player that lasts for 60mins and transfers 10% of your self-healing to them, which is a cool piece of utility to add to Guardian’s kit.
When it comes to the spec tree there are a few smaller changes, starting with the Reinvigoration talent which was reworked from a Frenzied Regeneration CDR talent to a talent that instead increases its potency, adding 1s of duration per talent point spent as well as causing it to apply both Rejuvenation and Regrowth to you, increasing it’s healing power while also allowing it to synergize with a few Restoration talents in the class tree.
On top of this reworked talent, Guardian is also getting a brand new talent in Ursol’s Warding, which grants up to 10% of your armor damage reduction as magic damage reduction, meaning ironfur will also be providing a bit of mitigation against magic damage. The number isn’t super large here, as armor mitigation is capped at 85% meaning this talent is capped at 8.5%, however I think it’s the right direction to be moving in.
Finally we saw some adjustments to Raze, where it once again replaces Maul however it now deals the equivalent of Maul’s damage to the primary target. This means it does the same damage in single target while also giving Guardian some priority target damage in AoE and subtracting a keybind, so positive changes all around here.
Overall the Guardian playstyle, strengths, and weaknesses aren’t really changing moving into patch 11.1, but they’ve seen a lot of small quality of life improvements and minor adjustments to the spec which are nice to see.