I really hope for 10.0 they take a look at the vengeance mastery because of all the tanks, it’s the only one with a mastery that doesn’t add something mostly passively to their toolkit that either global affects the tank or at least helps between their active mitigation windows to smooth their damage intake.
Blood - mastery gives them physical absorb shields after deathstriking (some physical damage reduction between deathstrike windows)
Guardian - boost to health and healing received (larger health pool to absorb the damage without absorbing the healer’s mana thanks to increased healing received)
ProtPally - damage reduction while in consecration & increased block chance (scaling damage reduction)
Brewmaster - increasing dodge chance based on being hit or hitting with blackout kick ( scaling avoid)
ProtWarr - increases block chance and critical block chance (scaling damage reduction, physical only)
Vengeance - makes demonspikes stronger (only applies during the active mitigation window, which the active mitigation should in theory be strong enough without any mastery otherwise it’s a rather poorly designed active mitigation)
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This, so much this. It feels really bad to have mastery as a tank demon hunter. The ap you get its like another negative because the healing you get from soul cleave, and fel dev is negligible compared to our soul healing(which scales off health our dmg taken). On top of our active migitgation being the longest in the game.
Needs ideas to make it better heres a few:
Each soul consume has an X% chance to reduce demon spikes by 1 sec(lesser feed the demon).
Shear/fracture has an X% chance to rip out addiotional souls from nearby enemies(essence sever, 1 soul per enemy, cap at 5).
Each soul has an X% chance at becoming a greater soul frag(NOT a demon soul)
Each soul gives a small X% increase to physical reduction for 5 secs(artifact trait)
Fire dmg heals you for X% of the dmg dealt.
Change it to what ever, cause literally anything is better than more armor in demon spikes. It doesnt even have to be good, just not counter productive.
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I completely agree. It woupdnt be bad if there was a decent way to boost uptime of spikes that wasnt a god awful talent. There are so many things you could do with mastery.
Edit* I would love to see something that boosts survivability based on pull size. Nothing feels more flavourful than a DH surrounded by enemies and dashing and dodging. Like a base dodge increase with +% dodge for multiple enemies within balance.
Think adding dodge would be a cool concept, just might be weird balance wise. Numbers would be kinda low if it was enemy based. If it wasnt, i can see degen pulls so you have as close to 100% dodge, and just chill until everything dies.
Plus in dragonflight, there is a good chance we have access blur with the shared trees(not saying we are going to go out of our way to take it, but it would be an option).
Sounds like dodge rating vs defense rating stat options from burning crusade.
Defense rating ended up being better back then because a string of unlucky RNG could global you.
You definitely don’t want to tie a mastery to the number of targets nearby, because most raid bosses are solo targets, so you’d make vengeance worse off versus raid bosses than they are currently (barring being propped up by borrowed powers).
Most tanks have a way to increase either healing received or lower damage taken outside of their active mitigation window. That’s what vengeance needs. Probably something that scales up their healing done by shattered souls or some kind of specific leech like fire done → healing so they can limit it and it’s not just all of our damage aka actual leech. But, I think this wouldn’t work cause vengenace is already strong vs magic and this would make them stronger and the mastery should probably be limited to physical like most tanks’ masteries. Perhaps a % heal to self upon successful parry?
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The thing about fire leech mastery compared to other tank masteries is that it doesn’t scale with damage taken like all other masteries do. Every other tank mastery just gives some form of DR, effective DR (druid), scaling absorb (DK), or just avoids damage through dodge (monk).
You can take 10k or 20k dtps and your dps won’t change, thus mastery will either be tuned to be too strong at low dtps, or useless at high dtps. At least in legion, higher dtps resulted in more pain, thus more fractures->spirit bomb->more leech.
Mastery needs to be something that is effective all the time. I’m personally a fan of the legion trait pain bringer where consuming souls give % DR stacking like iron fur. This could be changed to only physical DR if it would be too strong vs magic.
Just straight healing buffs as a mastery would likely cause us to be tuned so our health becomes even more of a yo-yo. A more boring route would be to make our souls act like bdk and give an absorb. At least absorbs stabilize our hp more and can give effective hp.
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Yea the dk copy would be boring, a slight twist might be too have it instead of an absorb apply a hot add some % of souls consumed that last like 3 seconds with stacks overlapping like the arms mastery bleed. This scales with damage because it’s a % of the healing fine by souls which scales of damage taken. Kind of like a mix between stagger and dk mastery.
I think this is probably one of the more safe bets because it’s not overly broken. starting at 1% per soul(capping at 5) puts it a 5% reduction. Moderate to heavy stacking you would probably have around 2-3%(10-15% total), which puts it closer to vers. Probably still wouldnt go out of my way to stack, but having a couple of pieces, would be fine.
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I generally agree; however, with Feed the Demon + Kyrian, I am keeping Demon Spikes up about 70% of the time which makes Mastery very competitive. So, if they could make combos like that in DF, that could work. -S
Bump. Mastery with DR from souls sounds really fair b/c we first need to generate souls and it’s not just a instantaneous buff. Honestly, I would take anything from the above stated changes - even the physical absorb like blood dk’s. Mastery for vengeance really needs to change…
Please BLIZZ make this change 
Don’t forget us vengeance players! 
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Diving down into vers and mastery. 1 pt of vers > 1 pt of mastery (until the soft cap of 30% vers) in terms of defense. The scaling is tuned terribly because you still get more PHYSICAL damage reduction from having 1 pt of vers, than 1pt of mastery. Mastery further loses value because it doesn’t mitigate magic damage as vers does, and there is no way to have 100% uptime. Mastery only affects fel dev healing and soul cleave healing. Vers affects both, AND our soul healing, which is a large part of our healing.
I personally believe our mastery is just on the back burner of tuning and hasn’t been given much thought after the leech change from legion->BFA. I want it to be good, but it just gets outshined by vers.
In all honesty, Demonspikes real value is the 15% parry it provides. If you want to talent into Feed the Demon and run around with 70% demon spike uptime, I’m not gonna try and stop you. The parry is so cracked. But if you are stacking mastery over vers, I suggest try swapping it. You should see a noticable difference between an equivalent ilvl vers set, and a mastery set
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It can’t just be active mitigation uptime (full uptime on active DR is a maintenance buff and just obnoxious), but I do think a bump to soul potency and frequency would be a good mastery. %chance to “crit” (double) soul generation along with consuming souls grants a low (0-2) % DR (multiplicative).
(A little afraid of any change since some ideas are not good, the Prot pala bonus of “stand in consecrate, with no mobility” is terrible, and it took a long time of mastery rework iterations before they became something decent or fun.)
I agree, I dont think 100% active mitigation is the play. You can’t really achieve that level even with our tier and Feed the Demon. You would need a constant 4/5 souls per sec to achieve 100% uptime. The one change i listed is an even lesser form of that, being a chance to reduce it by 1 sec. It’s not one im sold on, but it would honestly be better than “more armor when you pop active mitigation.” Current mastery feels so lazy and redundant to have more physical reduction on top of your active mitigation. Why bother increasing my armor by 5% physical reduction in demon spikes, when i can get 5% of both physical and magical damage ALL the time?
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