A Look Back at Vengeance Demon Hunter in Dragonflight & War Within Wishlist – Editorial

With the sun setting on Dragonflight and The War Within on the horizon, our Vengeance Demon Hunter Writer, Itamae, offers a retrospective highlighting Vengeance’s journey in Dragonflight and shares their hopes for the spec’s next evolution with a War Within Wishlist.

Vengeance Retrospective

Hello readers! Dragonflight’s Seeds of Renewal patch 10.2.5 has launched and we’re quickly coming up on the end of the expansion and will soon be seeing the first public builds of The War Within. As such, I’d like to take the time to do a retrospective on this expansion (it’s not quite dead yet!) and point out a few things on my personal wishlist for the upcoming one. Some of you have read past articles I’ve written on the state of Vengeance, and for those of you who took the time to read my (often long) historical digressions, this may be right up your alley. For the newcomers, I hope you find it interesting as well.

New (but Old) Talent Trees

Let’s begin with the biggest change going into Dragonflight: the revised Talent Tree system that takes us back away from the tiered select-one-of-three system that was introduced during Mists of Pandaria, to a modernized version of the classic talent trees. Although Demon Hunters never had a classic version, since we were introduced in Legion long after the MoP system was created, the system itself is recognizable for any long time players. As stated by Blizzard, talents were intended to be the replacement for borrowed power systems that had been the focal point of the preceding expansions. In addition, they were supposed to allow more freedom for choosing talents based on the content you were doing, while being flexible enough to be able to switch without too much friction, yet preventing you from being able to acquire everything you want at once. Early on, it was also intended that most of our Class Trees were utility and/or defensively focused and gave access to some cross-spec abilities that previously had not existed, while specialization trees were for most of our throughput options. In my opinion, I don’t think they managed to quite hit the mark for most specs, but some are certainly closer than others. Looking at it strictly through a design lens, I don’t think a single spec or class hit that ideal across the board. With regards to Vengeance, we ended up with a mix of throughput and utility options in both Class and Spec Trees, while often being locked into a single build due to restrictions on our spells. While it could be said that for casual players there was freedom of choice, for anyone who is remotely competitive, there really aren’t valid alternative options.

To break it down further, let me provide a visual overview of the talents:

In the Class Tree, in Blue I’ve highlighted talents that are primarily throughput increases, while Purple denotes nodes that incidentally provide throughput gains with Spirit Bomb.
In the SpecTree, Red denotes nodes that are primarily utility focused.

While I think Vengeance is currently in a good spot, primarily due to tuning, I do believe that the talent trees could still be improved in design. While I’m not particularly happy about throughput talents like Felblade, Collective Anguish, The Hunt, or Elysian Decree being in the Class Tree, they are placed in fairly good positions that generally force a choice. Similarly, moving the Spec Tree utility talents into the Class Tree isn’t really an option due to providing Havoc with too much utility. That said, both of our trees have talents that have close to 0% pick rate, if not exactly 0% by the collective players. I think these need to be looked at first, while also considering the result of our tree as a whole. Currently, we are effectively locked into the vast majority of our talent points for all content, with only a few minor changes ever really being considered.

I think talents such as Disrupting Fury and Swallowed Anger should be outright removed, replaced, or fully redesigned to make them an interesting option. Similarly, in the Spec Tree, despite multiple buffs, talents like Soul Barrier and Bulk Extraction are never taken, simply because their design is ineffectual. Other talents are also traps, such as Last Resort. In the old talent system, that was taken because it competed against other talents that were even lower value, but in the current design, it isn’t strong enough to be a capstone, especially when gated behind other talents that aren’t particularly strong. There are more talents with these issues, but I won’t bring all of them up because it would take far too much time to discuss. Perhaps if there is interest, I may write a separate article about it.

Compared to the old talent tree, I would say there isn’t much difference in the end. For more casual players, there is more build variety, but realistically most of the points we spend are getting back things we had in the past that were baseline, and we’ve given up some of that because they simply aren’t worth a point when compared to other options. While it’s true that we’ve gained access to new abilities as well, it often feels like we’re being forced to choose what to give up in order to get specific utility for a situation, rather than given the choice of what to take. What I mean by that is that rather than having a pool of utility points to pick from, we have too many throughput talents that have to be given up in order to take some utility and it causes friction, when we previously had access to all of it at once. As an example, given the option, I’d like to take all of Vengeful Retreat for mobility, Imprison for CC, and Consume Magic for removing buffs, but in order to do that, we’d have to give up actual throughput elsewhere. This is also the reason for many so-called “dead” talents, some of which I listed above, because they simply do not provide enough value to ever be worth a point.

Gameplay

While the current gameplay is relatively interesting, with many micro-scale decisions needing to be made at any given moment, there are a number of parts that don’t fit the standard paradigm. This stems partly from our Spec Tree being so locked due to the design of our kit. Currently, since Spirit Bomb is our only uncapped spender, we’re forced to take it in any AoE scenario. This is a restriction which no other tank spec has. Additionally, with our reliance on maintaining multiple short-duration defensives, the developers have been sort of forced into making Metamorphosis a high uptime, low power cooldown. One of the strengths of Vengeance right now is the high amount of control provided in Season 3 dungeons through Illuminated Sigils, in combination with Sigil of Silence, Sigil of Misery, and Sigil of Chains as well as Chaos Nova. This allows for less reliance on the group to stop dangerous casts. Unfortunately, we’re less useful in raid situations, since our only group defensive is Darkness, a niche tool that relies on randomness to prevent damage. It works better against ticking damage than large bursts, and generally isn’t reliable enough on its own. That said, as a baseline spec even without the utility, tuning is good enough for Vengeance to comfortably do any content in the game.

While tuning is good, let’s go over the negatives of Vengeance gameplay. Firstly, we are sort of running on a dual resource system, but it feels like it’s been hashed together without much thought. While we generate both Fury and Souls, the current optimum is to entirely ignore one resource or the other, depending on the situation, rather than it being balanced. This is a result of the original design being changed. In Legion, Fury (then called Pain), was the only real resource, while souls had a chance to be generated from either Shear or Immolation Aura. At the time, Fracture was a talented spender that cost Pain to generate 2 Souls and deal high ST damage as an alternative to the baseline Soul Cleave, which did AoE damage and healed based on Pain spent. In later patches, Spirit Bomb was added as a Soul spender talent, initially being a ranged ability that shot one Soul for an explosion, but later becoming the incarnation we know today. Back then, it only cost Souls and not Pain, so we had two options for damage:

As it turned out, we were able to generate so much Pain from taking damage in multi-target situations, that it was optimal to do nothing but step 2. However, in ST situations, we were forced into spamming Shear which was rather unfun.

As a solution, our entire system was overhauled in BfA. Shear now guaranteed a soul on every cast, while Fracture became a generator that granted 2 Souls and significantly more Fury while on a charge system with a cooldown, replacing Shear if talented. Similarly, Soul Cleave was reworked to spend Souls as well, while Spirit Bomb was changed to require Fury. This now led to significant conflicts, as we had 2 spenders that did nearly the same thing, while also costing both resources. As it turns out, Spirit Bomb performed well enough that we wanted to generate Souls as often as possible, spend them on Spirit Bomb, and then spend excess Fury on Soul Cleave. This continued into Dragonflight, where Soul Cleave was nerfed to be target capped at 5 targets and rebalanced to distinguish it from Spirit Bomb.

I think the core gameplay loop of Vengeance works as of now, but isn’t intuitive. We currently entirely ignore Fury in AoE situations and ignore Souls in Single Target. For the vast majority of, or perhaps all, other specs, overcapping resources is something you want to avoid. Vengeance also is primarily based on debuffing enemies in order to gain survivability, which makes us incredibly weak on pull, but nearly unkillable once everything is running. I’ve previously proposed a few solutions, as well as read suggestions from others, but I don’t think it’s possible to fix the core issues without a full redesign of the spec. While there are dozens of ways to fix it, my preferred solution would be making Shear/Soul Cleave and Fracture/Spirit Bomb essentially upgraded abilities of each other during Metamorphosis, similar to how Havoc has Chaos Strike transform into Annihilation and Blade Dance become Death Sweep. Of course, Soul Cleave would need to be uncapped instead, and perhaps rebalanced to spend more Souls for damage. Then, remove the Fury cost from both spenders, and use Fury as an activator for Metamorphosis, while generating and maintaining Fury being the focus to stay in Metamorphosis for longer, similarly to Frost Death Knight’s Breath of Sindragosa. The core gameplay loop would then be to maintain higher uptime leading to better damage and survivability, while not wasting either resource. We could then replace the talents with a ST spender for priority damage with a similar effect: spend Souls to deal physical damage to one target, upgraded to Fire damage during Metamorphosis, giving us even more interesting gameplay decisions.

Encounter Design and Utility

Vengeance has historically excelled more in dungeon content than in raid due to most of its utility being targeted towards mob control, rather than the group support or immunity cheese prevalent in raids. The one and only tier where it was dominant in raid was during a period when Demonic Wards was bugged to grant us both the Havoc and Vengeance effects at the same time, effectively doubling the value. With the current version, I’d say we’re in a generally good position (always dependent on tuning, of course). While we might not be the first pick of world first guilds, we’re still good enough to complete all content. We’re also currently quite dominant in dungeons, rivaled only by Protection Paladins at high keys, due to the current dungeon pool. With many old dungeons being brought back, and the modernized tech of desynced casts not being implemented, Sigil of Silence is extremely powerful this season. In the Dragonflight dungeons and prior two seasons, we were not nearly as powerful. Similarly, the blanket change to fears, allowing them to apply to undead enemies, has been a major boon for stopping previously unstoppable casts. While many have complained that Illuminated Sigils affecting utility sigils is too strong and that Vengeance has too much control right now, there was a time when Vengeance had the least mob control out of all tanks due to Sigil of Misery not working on multiple mob types, and no access to a stun. I do agree that we’re a bit oppressive at the moment, and think there should be a minor nerf to Illuminated Sigils, perhaps reducing the duration, or extending the cooldown of utility sigils that it affects while maintaining both charges. This would allow for us to still have flexibility in sigil usage, while preventing us from solo-controlling packs for upwards of 20 seconds at a time with all charges on cooldown.

Much of the community reaction to a spec being good at one thing or another often seems to be outcry for a nerf, but it’s really the interaction between the kit and dungeon or encounter design that truly allows this. Consider the following: in Legion, it was common for groups to run 3 ranged DPS because they were able to simply outrange every dangerous mechanic, while melee would die. In order to counteract this, the developers created every dungeon in Battle for Azeroth to require multiple short cooldown kicks, thus enforcing a 2+ melee DPS meta. Similarly, most of the damage on tanks was either melee or able to reflected by Spell Reflection for massive damage, making Protection Warriors absolutely dominant after a few minor changes. In Shadowlands, we were punished during the first patch by tanks having to often run away from pulls until Guardian Druids arose and the dungeons were tuned down. In 10.1.5, Shadow Priests were extremely dominant and their utility was heavily nerfed simply because the dungeon pool had multiple places where both Mass Dispel and Mind Soothe were incredibly powerful. Meanwhile, if they had their previous iteration of the spells now, it would not be nearly as strong. In the current pool, Vengeance is dominant along with Protection Paladin because of the prevalence of casters that either have a short lockout or don’t have one at all.

Rework(?)

While we may be in a good state now, this wasn’t always the case. In what seems to be a repeating pattern every expansion, the first couple of seasons were not promising for Vengeance. We were quite strong during beta, and then got repeated nerfs to our kit, reducing the power and duration of Frailty while still forcing us to balance uptime on multiple defensives, but having no real AoE damage reduction. In 10.1, our tier set carried us quite hard, since the base spec was still quite mediocre. It was only in 10.2, when we got a minor rework to our tree but some major buffs to functionality of some core abilities that our baseline became good. In fact, I’m a bit hesitant to even call it a rework, since what we really got was a very minor shuffling of our Spec Tree and the addition of one new capstone talent, with a larger change to the Class Tree. What really propelled us was a combination of incremental buffs over the course of the expansion; increases to duration of Frailty, buffs to all our core spells, reducing the spread time of Burning Alive by half and uncapping the spread target limit, removing the cap on Charred Flesh extension and adding it to Sigil of Flame, cooldown reduction on Metamorphosis, and making Sigil of Flame actually deal damage as well as generate resources.

As I wrote above, I’d like to see a larger scale rework that focuses on making the rotation flow smoothly and be intuitive. Despite us finally receiving a spec identity as a sigil-based spec, rather than being a mishmash of other tank specs, our core design still feels like an awkward mix of mitigation and healing, but not doing either particularly well, while juggling multiple spinning plates of short duration debuffs. All of these concerns were previously brought up during Beta and on each patch during PTR. Despite our concerns being valid, they made it to live without the necessary changes and needed hotfixes to bring us back in line. Oddly enough, it feels like we’ve gone through this exact same progression ever since Legion. With the exception of Season 1 of Shadowlands with our damage reduction bug and the kite meta, Vengeance tends to start off every expansion relatively weaker than other tank specs, and gets incremental changes that make it into a fun powerhouse by the end.

Support

The introduction of Augmentation Evoker in 10.1.5 was a major shift for the game, bringing the first support spec. It was quite a significant boon for Vengeance, but not to a greater extent than any other tank specs. While we gained quite a bit of survivability and damage from Augmentation, I’d argue that the most unique gain comes from combining Oppressing Roar with Sigil of Silence. Despite Augmentation being one of the most controversial things added to the game, I think it’s a good first step, but it will be difficult to balance until we have many more support specs that do different things. There are also secondary issues outside of the game, such as attribution in the combat log which is currently a mess, so one of the downsides to adding more would be the technical difficulty of calculating contribution. Despite this, I would like to see more support in the game if they choose to fully embrace the system and address the issues, and that is something Vengeance is sorely lacking itself. Our only group support is Darkness, which is unreliable. Something that could be interesting to explore is having some of our applied debuffs work for the group, rather than only ourselves.

Tier (or by another name, Borrowed Power)

Despite Tier Sets really being just borrowed power, the current acquisition is arguably quite fair. Unlike in the past, where we had to raid every week and hope to get the drop, it’s now accessible to all players through the Catalyst system. My only gripe with them now is that they don’t feel quite balanced across specs and since they are our only source of change for a given tier, they’re too restrictive. Essentially, bonuses for some specs often work far better in Mythic+ than Raid, and vice-versa. It’s hard to design a bonus that is good for both sorts of content in PvE, and is exacerbated by having to work in PvP as well.

A better system would be to have unique set bonuses that activate in different sorts of content, or work with feedback more often to improve balance in different content. Sometimes the set bonuses manage to do well, like our Season 2 Tier 30 bonus, which propelled Vengeance from one of the weakest performing tanks overall to one of the top. On the other hand, we have more minor bonuses that don’t change as much, but happen to be tuned well, such as our current Tier bonus, which simply reinforces our core gameplay loop. All in all, I certainly prefer Tier Sets as a source of our borrowed power over the experiments they attempted during BfA and Shadowlands with only Azerite Powers and Covenants. It’s so difficult to design generic bonuses that apply to multiple specs well, and that’s a worry I have for future expansions, like Hero talents in The War Within.

Azerite Powers felt restrictive. With certain powers being available to all specs, some available only to a class, and yet others only for a spec, and only certain combinations available on different pieces of gear. At the end of BfA, Corruption was incredibly fun, but also degenerate due to the amount of power gained. Covenants had the same power problem, with generic abilities having to be balanced across all the specs. Legendaries were interesting, but again a balancing nightmare. On top of that, we had things like Shards of Domination, which were effectively generic tier sets, but near impossible to tune due to interactions with multiple specs. While Vengeance did end up benefiting from powerful interactions with both BfA and Shadowlands systems in the end, and they were a lot of fun, the process of getting there through the expansion wasn’t quite as enjoyable.

Overall, Borrowed Power as a concept is fine, but only when the base specs are complete in and of themselves. Tier Sets are typically a good example of the right amount of power, compared to systems like Legion’s artifact weapons with which Demon Hunters were designed in concert, thus making the baseline class incomplete when they were taken away. I think the game is in a healthier state without those sorts of interactions, though it would be fun to see them at the end of each expansion. Blizzard take note: please give us all 3 tier sets for Season 4 at the same time instead of restricting us to one!

Quality of Life

As of now, most of the Vengeance toolkit seems fairly reasonable. One of the most brought up quality of life changes would be the conversion of Soul Fragments into a better system. The delay on spawning Souls isn’t intuitive, and despite allowing for some interesting tricks, like being able to overcap Souls on a generator and take advantage of the delay to cast a Spirit Bomb before the new Souls become usable with enough haste, many people still want them to work more like Combo Points, which many other specs already use. Other improvements would likely require a full rework, as I had discussed with regards to our dual resource (but not really) system. Similarly, one of the most asked for changes is for Soul Cleave to be uncapped, but that would simply reintroduce the conflict in spender priority without specific niches.

Hero Talents and War Within Wishlist

It’s hard to really decide what I’d like to see from our future Hero Talents, since we will be the only class that shares both trees with Havoc, and the two specs really don’t have very much in common beyond the class name. Given the names, Aldrachi Reaver and Fel-Scarred, I think it’s fairly likely that one will be more physically combat oriented while the other will be magical in nature. Aldrachi Reaver is a reference to the Vengeance Legion Artifact Weapon – Aldrachi Warblades, which reference an ancient warrior race, while Fel-Scarred likely refers to the inner battle with Demons that every Demon Hunter goes through. Personally, I’m hoping for some more group support, but given the class fantasy of Demon Hunters, it seems rather unlikely. If anything, I’d expect the Aldrachi Reaver spec to improve things like dodge and parry, while strengthening our Demon Spikes defensively, while Fel-Scarred would give us buffs to Immolation Aura and Sigil of Flame, while improving survivability against magic, perhaps something in the vein of our PvP talents like Reverse Magic. If that turns out to be true, some interesting additions for Hero Talents could be the return of some past Tier Bonuses or Legendaries as options:

• Fiery Soul was an engaging Legendary, giving us more uptime on Fiery Brand.
• Recrimination was a popular Tier Bonus, converting our primary generator to Fire damage as well as providing similar functionality to Fiery Soul through a different source.
• Our current 4-Set significantly increases uptime on Sigil of Flame, making it more of a core ability to maintain, rather than having gaps like we do on most other abilities.

Baseline, with our current design identity being that of the Sigil tank, we could see some more focus on this; utility sigils like group damage reduction, AoE taunt, perhaps even replacing Demon Muzzle with a separate sigil that simply grants Magic DR when used. Of course, the top of my wishlist would be to get the aforementioned reworks and changes, but it seems rather unlikely that we’ll get something to that extent. Regardless, I’m excited to see what the new expansion will bring.

While I was unable to cover all my thoughts on the spec in a single article, I hope you enjoyed reading this post-mortem analysis and please let me know in the comments if there’s more you’d like expanded upon!

About the Author

This guide is written by Itamae, Vengeance Demon Hunter TheoryCrafter and Moderator from the Fel Hammer Demon Hunter discord.