WoW Guardian Druid Tank Guide

Guardian Druid’s are a leather armor Agility based spec. While gearing, Agility is king, ilvl before secondaries. Agility also directly affects the Armor gain of Ironfur.

• Haste: Like most tanks, Haste decreases the global cooldown of our abilities making the rotation flow quicker, it also increases our melee attack speed. Mangle, Thrash and Frenzied Regeneration’s cooldown is directly reduced by Haste as well, three of our core abilities while speeding up the ticks to our Moonfire DoT and Thrash Bleed. With all that in mind, Haste becomes a very important stat for Bear.
• Critical Strike: It’s rather unfortunate that Critical Strike doesn’t grant us a whole lot in comparison to some other tanks, simply makes healing(Frenzied Regen excluded) and damage deal double damage.
• Mastery: A stronger defensive stat than offensive, Mastery grants bears more maximum health and attack power. Important not to dump, but not focus either.
• Versatility: Increases damage and healing done, and reduces incoming damage(50% value). Stats like this have direct benefits for Bear where everything it does is valuable to us.

Remember to prioritize Agility over secondaries while gearing. Finding a balance between damage and survivability can be tricky for tanks, Critical is common on leather gear, while in that process you’ll be trying to find more ways to gain Haste and Versatility and dumping the high levels of critical strikes you’ll be easily gaining.

Gems:

• Haste Gems are your best options in most cases mostly due to the rarity of Haste gains on gear. Versatility is also a great option to increase tankiness.

Weapon:

• The best weapon enchant is Sophic Devotion. Sophic will provide you with an Agility proc with good uptime, good both defensively and offensively..
• For weapon consumables, the Howling Rune provides a sizable haste bonus for 2 hours, to be used in all content.

Phials:

• Tepid Versatility: This phial is cheap and grats you a chunk of vers, Bears love Versatility, this will provide benefits in all content
• Glacial Fury: Like Frozen Devotion, this is also a damage proc Phial that only has offensive benefits, but can do a lot of damage if you aren’t worried about yourself defensively.

Enchants:

• Cloaks: Regenerative Leech is the better all around enchant. Rage of the Sleeper gives Bears A LOT of Leech on a 1m CD, if you’re worried about healing outside of that window, this is a good play. Bears also have a touch slower base movement speed then some other tanks, HomeBound Speed is also a nice way to gain quicker movement speed.
• Bracers: Speed, Leech or Avoidance are solid options here depending on content.
• Rings: Devotion of Haste and Devotion of Versatility depending on which stat you feel you need most.
• Boots: Watch’s Loam, a nice stamina increase
• Pants: Fierce armor kit, what used to be a consumable is not a permanent enchant gaining our primary stat and stamina.
• Chest: Waking Stats is a simple primary stat buff.

While Bear might not be in the best spot for bleeding edge keys, they are completely capable of getting Keystone Master and Hero. Their tree offers a wide variety of abilities on both the class and spec tree with a couple competitive builds, wanting to go more physical or magical damage is a choice bears have to make, or a sort of hybrid.

With this guide I’ll be including 3 builds, Raze fortified, Maul Tyrannical and Laser Bear. There are other builds that can include Cat weaving or Owl weaving for more damage gains outside of active tanking situations, we’ll be focusing mainly on the bear necessities.

Given that Druid has three other specs, all wildly different from one another, the class tree reflects this and you’ll be having to take talents you will never really play or use in 99% of the time.

Baseline Abilities

• Barkskin: A small damage reduction on a short cooldown. Reliable and customizable for increased Damage reduction, increased duration and reduced CD.
• Mangle: Single Target damaging ability that requires Bear Form