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.

Note: I will be updating this section as further testing occurs after the tuning passes has finished. New embellishments have arrived in 10.1, perhaps changing our Best in Slot embellishment items. Its best to use caution in the first couple of weeks of a new patch to wait on tuning passes before crafting some items. Be aware. 

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 grants 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.

The class tree for Guardian Druid has a lot of utility to be able to opt into or out, unfortunately the amount of points you have to spend to commit to one piece of utility can feel costly. At the end of the day we have far more access to great utility than we did in Shadowlands.

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

In the spec tree you automatically begin with points in Frenzied Regeneration and Thrash, two core abilities of bear with varying talents that you can customize what these two talents can do for you.

• Frenzied Regeneration (baseline): A large portion of your max HP is healed back over 3 seconds.
• Thrash (baseline): AoE ability that places a stacking bleed (x3) on the enemies hit.
• Improved Swipe (default): Now I’ve been saying #MakeSwipeDoSomething for some time and this talent doesn’t change that. Swipe is an AoE talent that does damage, that’s it, doesn’t generate rage, spend rage or offer any utility at all, hence is on the lowest priority of abilities to press. When everything else is on CD, press swipe.
• Killer Instinct (default): Gain 6% Physical damage reduction and a 6% armor gain as a passive.
• Improved Barkskin (default): Increased the duration of Barkskin by 4s.
• Verdant Heart (default): Frenzied Regeneration and Barkskin increase all healing received by 20%. This effects Frenzied Regen but also all other healing, this includes the healing received by your healers.
• Ironfur (baseline): Your main active mitigation, although as active mitigation goes, it is admittedly on the weaker side. This mitigation is stackable and will be your main rage spender. Ironfur will give you a sizable armor stack for a baseline 7s. Unfortunately armor does nothing magical damage but will increase your tankiness in physical damage scenarios.
• Starfire (pathing, flex): Can’t be used in Bear form, can be used in Owl Weaving.
• Sunfire (pathing, flex): Can’t be used in Bear form, can be used in Owl Weaving. This ability however does have a 40 yard range and has an 8 yard range from your primary target putting an 18s DoT on them. Can be used in pulling multiple mobs from range before quickly entering back into Bear form to tank them where you like.
• Moonkin Form (pathing, flex): Gives you access to Balance druids “chicken” form,