Implementation
One minor note – the blue post regarding our set bonus actually has the two bonuses reversed, so while it says our 2 piece bonus is a proc that provides damage, a bonus Soul, and CDR, that’s actually our 4 piece. Similarly, our 4 piece says we gain up to 5 stacks of 2% increased damage/healing and maximum health for 8 seconds, but that’s our 2 piece on the PTR.
Currently, the 2-piece bonus is a stacking buff that is only applied or refreshed from any of our class abilities with the exception of Immolation Aura. Whenever a stack is gained or refreshed, the entire buff refreshes, so without any extra talents or the 4p taken into consideration, it’ll have roughly 50-60% uptime. There doesn’t seem to be an internal cooldown on stack gain on multiple targets but there is one on Single Target at roughly 900ms, so on multi-target it’s possible to immediately gain all 5 stacks at once. However, it is currently bugged in that multiple Vengeance players putting up Sigil of Flame will cause only the first player to gain stacks, and any other player will not gain stacks until the first player’s Sigil of Flame debuff ends. Once it does, the next player begins to gain stacks until their debuff expires, and so forth.
From current testing, the 4p scales linearly with number of targets, since it appears to be a flat proc rate and not RPPM. In addition, any procs that occur from secondary targets will damage your primary target, instead of the target it procced off, thus funneling all damage from the set into one primary target. While minor, this does give us a bit of extra priority damage. Souls generated are standard Lesser Soul Fragment, so we gain damage from Spirit Bomb as well as healing per proc. The cooldown reduction appears to be a simple counter that just tracks Fury spent and reduces the cooldown once the threshold is passed. Any extra Fury spent is rolled over into the next counter. When fully talented into Sigil extensions and cooldown reduction, we can reach nearly 100% uptime on the 2p when the 4p is also active.
Both set bonuses scale with any Sigil extension talents as well as cooldown reduction, so talents such as Precise Sigils, Extended Sigils, Quickened Sigils, and Cycle of Binding will affect their value. As of now, we don’t know what the Vengeance minor redesign is going to look like in 10.2 so things could change, but as of now, the synergy is minor at best. Our rotation will not change much, with the exception of prioritizing Sigil of Flame more often.
Strength of the Tier Set
For the 2p, it’s worth around 4% damage/healing and health on average by itself, based on the uptime and value of the stacks. However, this does change with the 4p.
The 4-piece bonus is a bit harder to evaluate directly, as it interacts with the 2p and multiple talents, so the gain is variable. With near-100% uptime on the 2p bonus and full associated talents, it’s closer to 10% damage/healing and health at all times, which is a fairly decent bonus. In multi-target, this will go up as well, because we will be able to press Spirit Bomb more often, replacing Soul Cleave, so we will do more damage to more targets in AoE.
Unfortunately, our set bonus really only provides extra health in ST and a bit of extra healing, with no damage reduction. As is typical of Vengeance set bonuses, it’s looking to be fairly decent in ST, but extremely powerful in AoE due to the number of souls gained. I’d consider this much more of a Mythic+ set than one for raid, but it won’t be weak in either situation.
Feedback
I think the set bonus as of now is fine, though a bit wanting in ST. It’s probably a bit too good in large AoE, but those scenarios appear to be somewhat limited next season, looking at the dungeon pool. The most glaring weakness is a lack of any damage reduction whatsoever, which is atypical of tank tier sets. It’s a fair bit less powerful than our current set bonus, both in damage and survivability but due to a 39 item level jump, we’ll likely have to play it regardless. I would like to see what changes Vengeance gets before a final evaluation of the set, as it is somewhat contingent on our talents, but as of now it’s a fairly decent bonus.
