Introduction

Vengeance Demon Hunters have gotten a minor rework in 10.2, primarily focusing upon and improving the gameplay around Sigils, one of the unique concepts we bring to the battlefield. Much of our class tree has also changed due to Havoc’s rework, which opens up some new possibilities, but closes off old ones. We’ve gained some baseline buffs, along with changes to current talents and pathing, as well as new talents. It’s all quite exciting and most importantly, fun, but there remain some pain points which we’ll also address here. Unfortunately, there are still a number of bugs on the PTR related to both talents and our set, so we’re unable to fully test the impact of the changes, so some of this analysis will be based on tooltips and how we expect things to work, but they may not be 100% accurate by the time the patch hits live realms.

Current Issues

Vengeance has had a lack of core identity ever since its inception, primarily being a sort of “best hits” of the existing tank specs when added to the game in Legion. It had some of the damage reduction capabilities of Warrior and Paladin, mobility like Monk and Warrior, self-healing like Death Knight, and magic defense like Bears (prior to the removal of Mark of Ursol), all while playing somewhat similar to a DPS spec rather than a traditional Tank spec. However, it was not provided with any of the systems that allowed any of these things to work on their own. With the changes made to bring down the relative power level of Tanks after the end of Legion, as well as the loss of Artifact Weapons, which were designed in concert with the spec and provided much of its power, Vengeance was effectively left with no core identity and felt like a cheap imitation of a jack-of-all-trades.

Some Historical Context

Skip this section if you aren’t interested in how we got to this point as it is a bit of a digression, though related to the subject at hand.

Prior to the start of Battle for Azeroth, systems were changed in the 8.0 prepatch so that tanks were focused more on physical damage reduction, with many Active Mitigations now granting armor instead of flat damage reduction, and magic damage was considered more of a healer mechanic. This severely reduced the power of Metamorphosis, since armor has diminishing returns. Vengeance also had a major change to its resource system. In Legion after the class rework in 7.2, there was effectively a dual resource system with one of the resources being optional, but optimal.

  1. Generate Pain (now known as Fury) from Shear as well as from damage taken
  2. Spend Pain on Soul Cleave or Fracture, the latter of which generated Soul Fragment.
  3. Spend Soul Fragment on Spirit Bomb (Optional, only if using Fracture)

At this time, Fracture was a spender with no cooldown that only generated Souls and dealt damage, while Spirit Bomb did not cost any Fury and only required Souls. Effectively, you could either use a 1-2 system by spending on Soul Cleave or a 1-2-3 system spending on Fracture and then Spirit Bomb with enough Souls. Of course, this system also had its issues in that we generated near-infinite Pain in AoE, to the point that Shear was never pressed but were often starved in Single Target, and Spirit Bomb was strong enough that it outperformed ever spending any of our resources on Soul Cleave, so nearly everyone played the latter option and removed Soul Cleave from their bars.

To rectify this, Pain from damage taken was removed entirely, Fracture was made in a charge-based version of Shear, while generating more resources per global, Soul Cleave was changed to incorporate Soul spending as well as Fury, and vice-versa for Spirit Bomb. This caused a new issue entirely that has carried on to the present – we now have a dual-resource system in which our spenders conflict, both of which spend both our resources, so a precarious balance between the two is paramount to ensure neither spell is ignored. During the Dragonflight prepatch, another attempt was made to alleviate this by differentiating the spells more – a hard cap of 5 targets was placed on Soul Cleave. However, this meant that Vengeance now had a hard time picking up adds without Spirit Bomb.

There are a host of other issues that stem from historical reasons, but I won’t get into all of them as it will likely bring this article to lengths in which most people are not interested. Suffice it to say that many of the current issues come from attempting to slap a bandage on a gaping wound, then ripping off that bandage in the next patch and attempting a new one to see if it works better.

Current Issues in Patch 10.1.5

A preface – Many of these issues are currently mitigated by our Tier 30 Set Bonus (Kinslayer’s Burdens) as it provides extreme amounts of uptime on Fiery Brand as well as converting our primary generator(generally Fracture) to Fire damage, synergizing with Fiery Demise.

Survivability-wise, Vengeance has far fewer cooldowns available for both tankbusters as well as extended duration multitarget fights than any other tank. Baseline, we also have low mitigation uptime and rely on debuffs on enemies to reduce damage, and one of our largest sources of mitigation has ramp time in AoE. The lack of uptime leads to a secondary problem; namely, in AoE or any fight with 100% tank uptime even on Single Target (M+ bosses with heavy melee focus, Council-style Raid encounters), we are unable to consistently mitigate damage and need to decide where the most dangerous portions of the fight lie in order for proper usage. This means that on bosses that hit especially hard with very little downtime or have consistently high damage on short intervals (eg. pre-nerf Jailer in Sepulcher (SL), Fetid Devourer in Uldir (BfA), Lord Waycrest in WCM (BfA), etc), Vengeance requires more external help to survive. Similarly, in AoE, these periods of downtime can be extremely deadly in high Fortified keys. The ramp time required to debuff enemies with our short-duration debuffs also causes problems when first entering a pack, or re-entering if forced to kite away.

Offensively, Vengeance has extremely low Single Target damage, and even in AoE is not particularly high. The Tier 30 set masks this by providing a substantial increase to our damage in both situations, putting us barely on par with the lowest DPS tanks. Without this bonus, we are at enough of a DPS disadvantage in Single Target raid that it’s likely we would consistently lose aggro to our co-tanks if both tanks play correctly. In AoE, it’s somewhat less of a problem, though we can still have issues with DPS pulling off us if we don’t have enough Souls to immediately Spirit Bomb when gathering packs in Mythic+ or picking up new add spawns.

There’s also a minor conflict in some of our spells due to the multi-resource system which I think needs an overhaul entirely. Currently we never use Shear due to the GCD cost, despite having a talent Shear Fury competing with Fracture, and similarly, both our spenders somewhat overlap in functionality due to spending both Fury and Souls.

Looking at the current talent tree, we can see many issues with both pathing and power.

On the class side, much of our utility is locked behind talents that don’t provide any meaningful use, forcing us to spend multiple points to access them. For example, Improved Disrupt can only be accessed through Unrestrained Fury or Imprison, so in many situations it’s a decision between taking a talent that provides no value whatsoever or spending an extra point.

On the spec side, not only have we got a whole corner of talents (amongst others) that are severely underpowered, but we also have other talents that block pathing while not being particularly useful. In addition, while we can spend some points to gain significant power increases to some of our core spells, others such as Fel Devastation get talents that do very little, making it too easy to ignore.

Power-wise, I’ve marked most of the weaker spec nodes that are typically avoided due to lack of power. However, some of the current nodes that we do take are rather expensive for the amount of power they provide, such as Agonizing Flames, Extended Spikes, and Darkglare Boon costing 2 points each.

Much of the issue with the talents isn’t power-related per se, as even a 100% numerical buff to each of them would likely see them still not be taken. They likely need a rework to become talents that we’d consider taking in comparison to the existing talents that we currently prefer spending points on. As an example, Bulk Extraction has a 50% longer cooldown than Soul Carver yet it has significant drawbacks – it provides up to the same number of Souls but only if there are at least 5 targets available, otherwise it generates fewer; it does 14% of the damage; the Souls generated are immediately consumed and cannot be spent on other abilities like Spirit Bomb. While it should be a weaker talent due to its placement in the middle of the tree compared to a capstone, the power difference is unusually high when compared to something like the difference between Extended Spikes and Feed the Demon. Both talents provide increased Active Mitigation uptime in different ways – one through extension and the other cooldown reduction. In this case, Extended Spikes is actually on par or stronger than Feed the Demon until high levels of haste, despite being far easier to access. While it doesn’t need to be strictly the case, I’m of the opinion that in general, talents should grow slightly in power as we traverse the tree, but not excessively so.

Vengeance Changes in 10.2

Now we’ll take a look at the changes and see whether they’ve addressed our issues. Most of the changes we’ve seen this time are positive (for once!), but not all is gravy.

Baseline Changes

The changes to both Metamorphosis and Sigil of Flame are fantastic. With a 3 minute baseline Metamorphosis and still having access to the Rush of Chaos talents (despite it costing more), we can now have a 2 minute cooldown. Similarly, Sigil of Flame hitting 3 times as hard brings its baseline AP conversion to 48.51%, making it roughly equivalent to a Spirit Bomb cast with 1.5 Souls. This is improved further with updated talents relating to it, making it truly a powerhouse which is something we have wanted for quite a long time. Currently Sigil of Flame has a bug with its DoT portion, where it deals double damage on every tick, so instead of dealing 15.18% damage every 2 seconds, it actually deals 30.36%. This is going to be merged in baseline in 10.2, but tuning may occur which may change the value somewhat, but it’s still an overall buff no matter what changes, which is great!

The flat buffs to our baseline spells are nice, but not particularly strong. They appear to be intended to bring our baseline damage up since it’s currently a bit low, but we need a far more significant buff, especially in Single Target, to be competitive. Throw Glaive in particular was already one of the lowest damage spells in the game, so despite the bonus threat and increase, it’s still one of our lowest threat generating abilities. Removing the ability to cancel Demon Spikes is also good, as many people in the current patch were incorrectly using a cancelaura macro to proc Calcified Spikes and often immediately canceling the new cast of Demon Spikes.

Changes to Current Talents

Class

Most of these changes are also fantastic. The removal of many talents that were never taken and had no clear benefits cleans up the tree and allows us to focus on the core talents that we would like to takes. The only exception to this was Extended Sigils, but its effect has been baked into one of our spec talents instead, so it’s a net positive as we no longer have to spend 2 points in the class tree for it.

Reducing many of our 2 rank talents in the upper portion of the tree allows for us to have more selection of other talents rather than restricting us. While we end up getting slightly nerfed magic damage reduction and health, we’re gaining value for the points spent. The only downside is our Metamorphosis now costs more, but due to its new placement in the capstone area and the baseline cooldown of Metamorphosis already being 1 minute lower, this is a fair trade. Similarly, the nerf to Demonic is warranted due to the reduced baseline cooldown on Metamorphosis, which already gives us a significant uptime increase.

Flat buffs to The Hunt and Chaos Nova are nice and the change to Flames of Fury is great, as it synergizes with the baseline increase to Sigil of Flame. We previously had no intention of taking Flames of Fury, but with this change we’ll always want it.

We do lose a bit of power in our sigils with Concentrated Sigils and Precise Sigils no longer increasing duration, but we’ll get some compensation in a new spec talent. Additionally, it’s a great change because such talents which are meant to be quality of life should not have explicit power increases which force us to take them, even if we might not want the other effect of the talent. I’m still of the opinion that Concentrated Sigils should simply be removed from the game, since we can entirely replicate its effect using macros, so if we were ever to take either of the talents, Precise Sigils would always be the choice.

The change to Darkness is unfortunate for raid, because it was already one of the weakest raid cooldowns in the game, due to it being all or nothing on a random portion of the raid rather than being a reliable damage reduction, but it’s a fantastic change for Mythic+ players. A 30% chance to avoid all damage for each member of the group is quite a significant boost.

Moving Elysian Decree to the class tree is also incredible, as we have a few more points to spend, and it frees up a point in the class tree for other talents.
Spec

Again, the damage changes appear to be targeted towards our Single Target damage, but it’s simply not enough to be competitive. Unfortunately, the simple numerical changes to the talents that we consider dead are still not anywhere near enough to incentivize selecting them. They really need to be reworked to make them more attractive. Even minor changes would be enough – for example, if Soul Barrier had a minimum absorb so that it lasted for full duration as it did in Legion, we would consider taking it, but even with the increased absorb values, it will still be immediately consumed in a single global. Sadly, despite looking like a buff, the change to Feast of Souls can be viewed as a nerf in many situations due to the loss of the initial tick, since the buff cannot stack, when it refreshes it will never tick, so pressing Soul Cleave twice in a row would net less value from the talent than it does on live.

Reducing the point cost of many of our required talents is fantastic, as it gives us more talent points to spend, which comes into play with the new talents that have been added to the tree.

Incidentally, some of you may have noticed that despite previously being in the spec tree, the removal of Fodder to the Flame was noted in the class section. This is because it was moved there in a prior build of the PTR, forming a choice node with Collective Anguish before its removal. Considering that it was a talent that we commonly took due to being passive and averaging out to more value than Elysian Decree, it may seem an odd candidate for removal, but we have more control with the new trees being more focused on Sigils.

Finally, there are some flat buffs to talents that we currently use – namely Fiery Demise and Focused Cleave, but may not be playing in the new patch due to new builds being possible. However, I do appreciate that these talents were buffed.

New Talents

Class

Live by the Glaive is a decent addition to our arsenal. While we are likely to proc it on cooldown in AoE, providing us with a decent amount of Fury and actually making it better than any of our other Fury talents in the class tree, the heal portion is negligible and likely often wasted. The extra Fury may be handy this tier with our set bonus, but without it, it’s likely to be unnecessary.
Champion of the Glaive is a great quality of life addition, as one of the most frustrating things about playing tanks other than bear and brew is the lack of ability to pull enemies from 40 yards consistently. Having this as an option is really great.

Spec

Ascending Flame is decently strong. With its placement on the tree and the general power level, it’s likely to see a good amount of play. The damage increase is multiplicative with the reworked Flames of Fury, making it particularly potent. It will get outperformed by Soul Furnace until extremely large target counts. It provides 41.2335% increased AP on the initial hit of Sigil of Flame, since we will always be playing Flames of Fury in contrast to the 51.912% AP gain from a single cast of Spirit Bomb cast with 4 Souls and Soul Furnace. This means that up to ~10 targets, Soul Furnace, as long as we can cast one buffed Spirit Bomb per cooldown of Sigil of Flame (roughly 25 seconds with CDR talents taken), then Soul Furnace comes out ahead. The Tier 31 4-set cooldown reduction means it’s probably closer to 15 seconds for 10.2, but we’re unable to test this as it is currently bugged on the PTR. The overlapping applications is also a nice quality of life change in concert with Illuminated Sigils, but is unlikely to see much use if played properly, since we generally won’t be wanting to stack our sigils.

Illuminated Sigils is incredible in dungeon content, but less powerful in raid. It’s on a choice node with Down in Flames, which makes sense, because that’s likely what we’ll be playing in most Single Target encounters instead. This is probably one of the most overloaded talents in the game. It not only provides us with 2 charges of every single one of our sigils – Sigil of Flame, Sigil of Misery, Elysian Decree, Sigil of Silence, and Sigil of Chains, but also grants us 20% parry against any enemy that currently has the Sigil of Flame DoT effect on them. Having 2 charges means we’re far less likely to waste the cooldowns as well as giving us a buffer when gaining cooldown reduction from sources like Cycle of Binding or our Tier 31 4-set bonus. Being able to lock down multiple enemies or chain silence for 16 seconds is also incredibly strong in Mythic+. The parry gained is additive to our current avoidance, making us able to avoid a significant amount of attacks in multi-target situations, and even the majority of them in Single Target. With the new item levels in 10.2, most players are likely to see upwards of 80% dodge+parry combined when everything is up at once, depending on how much crit is stacked. The current implementation seems to just grant us 20% global parry which shows up on the character sheet, but I expect it will be changed by the time the patch hits live.

There is one drawback to this debuff style of tanking, which is that we now want to be using Sigil of Flame when enemies are all grouped, rather than to pull a pack, since it provides us with so much survivability, but we’re still extremely vulnerable right at the start as everything is grouping up. In addition, we’re looking at roughly 35-40% uptime on the debuff, which adds to our extensive list of short duration debuffs on enemies. If we don’t play Feed the Demon to achieve near-100% uptime on Demon Spikes, we’re going to have fairly complicated decision-making to do with deciding when to use each defensive just to get baseline survivability.

Reworked Pathing

Class

Above, I’ve embedded the current and new talent calculators side by side to make it easier to follow along. As we can see, the pathing of the class tree has gone through a major change and is now significantly improved. Many of the utility talents are no longer blocking pathing to talents that we want to take all the time, but placed off to the side or are mainly optional, with additional paths being created between talents. We’re now able to take Felblade and Aura of Pain at the same time. We’ve had talents like Chaos Nova and Sigil of Misery shifted upwards to make them more accessible. Elysian Decree is our new capstone on the right, and it’s an easy pick. The one drawback is that we can no longer take all 3 of our capstones, but that’s an acceptable sacrifice, as the 4 points we previously spent to get Collective Anguish were hard to swallow in the first place. This is a slight loss to our damage, but hopefully we’ll get some compensation for it other than what we’ve already gotten. In particular, I like that Lost in Darkness and the choice node for Concentrated Sigils and Precise Sigils have been moved entirely out of the way, so we aren’t forced to take either of them for pathing.

Spec

Not too much has changed on our spec tree, however. We’ve gotten a slight shuffle of the talents in the upper right section, making the new Ascending Flame more accessible, as it had taken the place of Sigil of Chains when it was first added. Sigil of Chains has shifted down into the capstone area, replacing what was formerly a choice node between Elysian Decree and Fodder to the Flame. However, we’re likely not to take it in most builds as the utility gain comes at a substantial throughput loss elsewhere on the tree. Illuminated Sigils has been placed on a choice node with Down in Flames, so we can decide between builds that focus on Fiery Brand and Sigil of Flame. Finally, we’ve gained a few connections in the bottom middle, making it easier to access Feed the Demon from the sides. I’d personally prefer Ascending Flame to be swapped with Revel in Pain as it seems to make more sense in the cluster of sigil talents in that area, while Revel in Pain would immediately follow Fiery Brand. Unfortunately, despite the buffs, that whole section of the tree is still dead, but at least all the talents are grouped together in a section that we never need to access.

Luckily, while the pathing hasn’t changed too much, the reduction in points spent on our required talents opens up many possibilities for our builds.

Potential Builds

I’m going to be separating Class and Spec builds for this breakdown, since there are various optional talent choices that can be swapped and used together.

The nodes marked in green will effectively always be taken, whether due to being powerful enough to justify it, or for pathing reasons. This costs us 17 points, with exactly 8 points in the upper tier, and 9 points in the middle. That leaves us 3 points to play with that can vary depending on the situation. Those 3 points will likely be spent on one of the 6 blue nodes, depending on the situation. In raid, we’re most likely going to take Vengeful Retreat along with Champion of the Glaive and Live by the Glaive, unless there are adds that warrant Chaos Fragments or specific fights where we need to CC or purge. Meanwhile, in Mythic+, we’ll probably be taking Live by the Glaive all the time, and most commonly Chaos Fragments and Champion of the Glaive, unless we need to break a snare or again, CC or purge specific enemies in a dungeon.

In the capstone area of the tree, we have 11 points to spend, 10 of which will be spent on the nodes marked in yellow. Unfortunately with the changes, we’re no longer able to justify spending 4 points to access Collective Anguish, so we’ll completely be avoiding that portion of the tree in the future. This leaves us 1 free point, which we can spend on either Internal Struggle (marked in purple) for a very minor damage and survivability boost, or in one of the above blue nodes. Unfortunately, Demon Muzzle still does not apply to enemies which are immune to the effects of a sigil, making it never worth the talent point.

Unlike builds up to 10.1.7, we gain Darkness in all scenarios, as well as having access to both Sigil of Misery as well as Chaos Nova, greatly increasing our utility.

For most people, I expect this to be a fairly standard build since most tanks end up outgearing fights and not needing to go fully defensive, particularly if aiming for damage parses. The point in Stoke the Flames can be swapped over to Burning Alive if there are adds to spread to, and Sigil of Silence or Sigil of Chains can be taken by dropping some of the damage points if needed for add fights. If we’re playing an encounter where we are exclusively focused on adds, we can also swap Down in Flames for Illuminated Sigils. Without the Tier 30 or 31 bonus, it’s possible we may drop Spirit Bomb as well for Single Target fights, freeing up an additional point.

For raiders who are progressing extremely early, most of the damage focused points such as Fiery Demise, Soul Furnace, and Meteoric Strikes can be dropped in favor of defensive talents such as Calcified Spikes, Painbringer, or Feed the Demon and Last Resort. Unfortunately, to access Last Resort, we’d have to give up one of our other two capstones, both of which provide a major survivability increase, but it could be potentially worth it if the risk of dying is high.

With the loss of the Tier 30 bonus, Fiery Brand is no longer particularly attractive, and builds focused around Illuminated Sigils will be the new rage. For tyrannical weeks, we should have enough survivability to where we want to primarily focus on the consistent damage reduction and bonus from Soulcrush. Due to the current set, we’ll want Painbringer in all builds because of all the Souls we’ll generate in AoE. Unfortunately, now that we have to path to Sigil talents, we will be losing access to a powerful DPS increase in Fiery Demise. Darkglare Boon has also lost a bit of value due to the reduction in duration of Demonic, so we’re giving it up here for more consistency. Some damage talents are obviously optional, so swap to defensive talents as needed.

In Fortified weeks, we’ll focus more on maintaining Demon Spikes and Fiery Brand uptime, so we swap over from Soulcrush to Feed the Demon and Burning Alive with the associated required talents. One point in Feed the Demon is likely to be enough with the haste values in 10.2 to have close to 100% uptime. There is a fairly substantial damage loss in playing this build, particularly in Single Target, but our damage is often not what limits timing keystones, so we aim for a balanced profile of damage and survivability here. Again, a few swaps can be made for more defensive talents if necessary.

I would absolutely never recommend playing this build, but it’s here if you want the full pillow build. This takes every single defensive talent possible at the cost of all your damage. Additionally, if you want to take Last Resort, you can drop Soulcrush, but that reduces your overall survivability for the safety net of a Cheat Death.

Tier 31 Set Re-Analysis

Given the context of the new talent trees, we do have to revisit our prior impressions of the tier set, since it has significant implications on the strength of our tree and vice-versa.

  • Fiery Resolve – 2 set: When you attack a target afflicted by Sigil of Flame, your damage and healing are increased by 2% and your Stamina is increased by 2% for 8 sec, stacking up to 5.
  • Demon Hunter Vengeance 10.2 Class Set 4pc – 4 set: Sigil of Flame‘s periodic damage has a chance to flare up, shattering an additional Soul Fragment from a target and dealing (75.9% of Attack power) additional damage. Each 40 Fury you spend reduces its cooldown by 1.0 sec.

Our 2 set doesn’t really change much, and is okay despite the bug where multiple Vengeance players cannot simultaneously get the buff. Our 4-set, though, has many interactions that significantly improve its value with the new tree as well as making our tree look better than it would be without it.

Unfortunately, our baseline damage is bad enough that with the loss of our Tier 30 set Kinslayer’s Burdens (which is one of the strongest sets offensively in the history of WoW in percentage gain), we’re looking to do less damage in patch 10.2 on Single Target than we currently do, even with 39 extra item levels, and barely comparable AoE damage. While I appreciate strong tier sets, Tier 30 was far too extreme and heavily skewed our performance despite the spec itself not being in a great spot. I think Tier 31 is far more reasonable, despite not providing us with any direct damage reduction (small buff please!), but we need some major compensation baseline to bring our numbers up to competitive levels. What we’ve gotten so far is a start, but it’s not nearly enough. Rough estimates put us at more than a 50% blanket buff and we’d still be the lowest damage tank spec, which is problematic for aggro.

The 4-set cooldown reduction is currently not working on PTR, but we can estimate based on logs how much gain we’d get. The bonus Soul and damage proc appears to be scaling down from 30% on Single Target to ~20% at 5 targets and dropping off significantly after that. This boosts our Soul generation in AoE to very high levels, likely giving us 50+% increase in Souls per minute, allowing for significantly more Fury to be spent on Spirit Bomb rather than Soul Cleave. This bumps the value of Shattered Restoration, Painbringer, Soul Furnace, Burning Blood(through conversion of our Fire:Physical damage ratio) and others. In addition, the cooldown reduction is likely to land us at around 15 seconds of cooldown on Sigil of Flame, meaning with Illuminated Sigils, we’re likely to see roughly 60-70% uptime on the increased parry, rather than the 35-40% it would be without the set. The decreased cooldown also boosts the value of Flames of Fury and Ascending Flame, giving us more damage more often.

On Single Target, it’s not looking as good, since we’re not generating as many Souls or spending as much Fury, but it’s still looking to be a decent increase overall.

I still don’t think the power of Tier 31 is going to be strong enough relative to Tier 30 even with the new tree, to the point that we might be forced to wear Tier 30 in raid despite the item level difference. This is a major problem that needs to be fixed. The best solution is probably to nerf our Tier 30 since it’s such an outlier, and then give baseline compensation instead.

Issues Addressed? New Issues

The rework to our tree appears to have addressed some of our current issues – mainly related to talent pathing and node strength relative to cost. We’ve also gained a strong new survivability talent for AoE and much more utility. However, it hasn’t affected our core issues of low damage and lack of cooldowns, while focusing even more heavily on short duration debuffs for defensiveness. While I understand the desire to differentiate Vengeance by making it a debuff-focused tank, the gameplay around it can be incredibly frustrating due to situations out of our control. In theory, debuff maintenance works, but in practice there are often times when damage doesn’t come from an expected source (or a source that can’t be debuffed), or adds spawn at awkward times, and there is nothing we can do pre-pull before our debuffs get rolling. None of these issues have been addressed, and in fact, may have been exacerbated by the focus on Sigil of Flame being yet another defensive debuff. The focus on avoiding damage through dodge, parry, and even Darkness rather than giving us more tools for controlled damage reduction as a tank is also somewhat unfortunate, since even with the incredibly high amounts we can reach, the possibility of getting globaled still exists, no matter how remote.

Similarly, some of our dead talents are currently just shunted off to the side and despite minor buffs, are mainly left to rot, rather than being reworked into more attractive options. Our resource system hasn’t really been looked at ever since we were reworked after Legion into more of a Soul-focused spec and it is still rather clunky. The loss of our Tier 30 set is going to be rough for our throughput, and due to the strength of Sigils, some talents that we commonly took before have been reduced to alternative options as a tradeoff, or possibly not ever taken.

Conclusion

Despite many of our issues not being particularly addressed by this rework, I am greatly anticipating the launch of 10.2 and the new trees. It finally feels like Vengeance is starting to form a bit of an identity and while we can’t expect a full rework at this time and the existence of a variety of bugs on the PTR, what we’ve gotten so far has felt incredibly fun in testing. I don’t think we’re going to be strong enough to take over the meta like other reworks have done, but we’re definitely going to be a contender for the most enjoyable tank spec to play, especially for the more casual players out there.



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