I’m a main spec Havoc looking to start tanking. Everyone tells me that as a new tank, I should go farm the Visions essence from Operation Mechagon, then use the Gluttony + Feed the Demon spec because it is more forgiving and gives significantly more uptime on my defensive abilities. They are telling me this is really important because my gear ilvl is comparatively low.
Okay, so I don’t have visions yet, but I tried Gluttony + Feed the Demon, and it feels like I’m hitting things with a limp, wet noodle. My damage meters are telling me I’m doing sheeeit damage. I haven’t had a lot of trouble with holding aggro, but it just feels… weak. Are there any other options, or is the Gluttony + Visions + Feed the Demon the go-to until I just flat outgear content I’m running?
You could also run spirit bomb and fracture it’s a lot more of an aggressive play style. Though you do take alot more damage but usually it’s not a problem unless your really looking at doing high end content.
i play gluttony and visions. i do not play feed the demon, i play fracture. it’s super smooth. so i don’t know what your issue is. maybe low rank visions?
your rotation is literally fracture, soul cleave. thats it. demon spikes when your meta procs arent up, keep sigil of flames on cd and leap into a pack and proc a free sigil
dont have aggro issues and i tank 18+ keys regularly.
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Thanks for the advice, I’ll try it with fracture. I suppose my biggest issue is that I’m under-geared, and I don’t have visions yet. Additionally, my dps is really low, which feels bad coming from such a strong dps spec. I suppose it’s hard to adjust to the lower dps that comes with giving up spirit bomb. My inner Goku cries every time I try to press the button where spirit bomb used to be.
All that said, the only point I need clarification on now is - because I am so under-geared, would the extra survivability from taking Feed the Demon be necessary for me to comfortably tank a +10 without the healer dropping deuce every time I pull more than 3?
Last week under-geared I ran Feed the Demon to cope with Fortified / Teeming / Quaking on a couple of the melee heavy dungeons like FH, KR, etc. It made a noticable difference. I even threw in Demon Spikes and spammed a Galecaller’s Boon about 8sec into each pull. It definitely made up the disparity of ilvl vs those affix, and the Galecaller haste wound those spikes charges and the other lengthy cd’s back around quick.
This week is muuch easier to cheese, and I’m back to cookie cutter visions + gluttony, with 20 iLvl higher gear and it all feels fantastic.
Only been at this Vengeance thing a couple weeks but there’s a lil something… =D
The main thing that makes FtD so insane defensively isn’t just because of the CD reduction on spikes, it’s actually the amount of self heals you pump out simply by spamming shear. If you shear when you already have 5 soul fragments out you will start auto consuming the oldest ones so as to not go over 5, doing this heals you in the process (what a surprise wow). However the true strength of FtD goes even further than that if you have Soulmonger, as that trait gives you a stacking shield for each soul fragment consumed.
FtD is by far much more safer to play than fracture however your threat will definitely take a hit as you essentially spam shear over and over and just heal through any kind of damage, in m+ and on big pulls on keys above 18+ you need to coordinate with your rogue or potentially hunter to use threat redirecting abilities on pulls with multiple packs or people gon get slapped.
I believe if you have to have another class to make yours work, that’s a design issue.
I don’t see how FtD is “much more safer” to play than fracture. I sit at 85% self healing in 18+ keys that I’ve done this week pulling entire rooms of trash.
Seems like a L2P issue? I’ll mess around with it but I don’t think you’re right in this situation.
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Yeah the loss in threat with FtD is real for sure. With Fallout proc’s I was weaving in glaive for threat lol!.. the whole thing was very crab.
Side note, how are Ya’ll are pulling entire rooms of trash this week and not getting slaughtered by Bursting? 
/jelly of your healer
unholy dk doing 600k dps (quadratic scaling) and a mistweaver for throughput, mistweaver can do some impressive stuff that resto druid cant.
You don’t need resto druid kit if the entire room dies in 20 seconds. 
200 IQ.
I think we got to 26 bursting stacks at one point. But he was able to heal us through 14 bursting stacks with way of the crane. Died but it saved 3-4 minutes killing the whole room in one pull.
Also went into another key with resto shaman and he spirit linked when we did huge pulls and healed through… idk 16 stacks of bursting?
Of course it’s impossible to keep threat off the unholy dk since he is doing high hundreds of thousands of dps… but double rogue or rogue/hunter or rogue/boomy can be a huge help to keep that unholy dk alive.
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L2P? Have you ever played FtD with triple Soulmonger, or are you just talking out of your behind because you’re so used to VoP+Gluttony playstyle? FtD with soulmonger is without a doubt the highest healing build for vdh, as you are not relying on total rng for procs on Gluttony, Visions. or the terrible healing from soul cleave itself. It’s simply constant healing on every single global with shear spam and only ever hit soul cleave to keep VR up.
The main issue with the build is threat on aoe, but double rogue makes it more than viable.
Do you have logs or proof where people are using that in difficult content?
Heroic raid doesn’t count. I’m not trying to discount what you say but this is the wow forums. I’m not gonna search warcraft logs for you.
Link logs in mythic raid
Link high mythic plus runs using said build
then we will talk
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First off, I don’t have to link anything because it’s not a debate, if you ever played the build you would know how overpowered it is defensively. Based on your responses I’m going to say you haven’t and that’s fine, but don’t come at me when I initially posted in here in regards to FtD, and just wanted to add why it’s so strong. Secondly who actually logs m+ runs when parsing is irrelevant outside of raid, and probably even more-so lopsided with assumably so few parses per spec per keystone level.
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how overpowered it is defensively? I can’t see a single run on raider io with that build at a high mythic plus run.
Are you talking about 10 keys? I’m pretty sure you can also just run fel devestation on 10 keys and easily win.
I don’t even think talents matter on a 10 key tbh.
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The problem I found with triple Soulmonger with FtD was that you only get soulmonger by consuming a soul, it does not matter if you consume 5 souls or 1. So with FtD or Fracture I was getting a similar amount of Soulmonger’s.
This was in a heroic raid though, and I only tried this once. I think it might work better in mythic plus by walking over souls while also consuming them with soul cleave.
That’s the reason that Soulmonger is only viable for the FtD build. Soulmonger doesn’t stack when consuming multiple souls, and consuming a soul while it is still active simply resets the duration and refreshes the absorb to the normal maximum (no rolling). The most effective way to benefit from Soulmonger is consuming single souls at a regular interval (ideally one soul between every damage event).
And that’s exactly how the FtD build functions. You spam Shear ad nauseum, only using Soul Cleave to refresh the debuff, so the vast majority of the time, you’re generating and consuming a single soul on each GCD, refreshing the absorb back up to maximum. It’s massively more effective this way than it is for, say, Spirit Bomb builds (where you’re consuming 5 souls at once every ~6 GCDs), or even for a Fracture/Gluttony build, where you’re generating and consuming 2 souls at once every 3rd GCD. The FtD rotation is essentially the most optimal rotation for Soulmonger already, which is why that’s really the only build that ever uses Soulmonger.
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With the Soulmonger build, what numbers are you seeing? Or in other words how worth it is playing with Soulmonger and FtD+Vision+Gluttony?
Edit: So looking at the top Vengeance healing on Mythic Sivara, the VDH has Soulmonger and it is only healing for 3,400 hps. Lets say that was optimized, even doubled to 6,800 hps that is still basically soul cleave level of healing. The vast majority of our healing is still going to come from consuming souls.
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Thanks everybody for commenting. This has been incredibly instructive. I finally got around to getting Vision, and I’m using the build Liaka recommended with fracture + gluttony. I haven’t tried tanking any keys yet, but I just want to make sure I have this right:
Fracture for pain and soul frags
Soul cleave whenever I have pain to cast it
Fiery brand
Immo aura on cooldown
Infernal strike
DS keep at least one charge on cooldown all the time when tanking, but don’t cast it when meta procs are up
… and that’s it? Seems super simple. Is there something more that I’m not thinking about besides things like pathing, mob placement, pulling w/misery, etc.?
This combo (+ soulmonger) is probably the easiest tank in the game to heal in mythic+ tbh. I find it even easier than Brew which itself is OP. AFAIK the strategy for super survival is literally to do nothing but spam shear while in Meta. Soul Cleave to maintain debuff if you take Void Reaver or need a lil extra aoe threat. Shear spam gives you an insane amount of souls for healing and spikes uptime, you are effectively unkillable during meta with this which has pretty good uptime with visions and gluttony. They almost don’t need healing.
Only issue as you noticed is the damage is quite low and threat can be an issue too especially this week with skittish. Also… it’s gonna be pretty boring obviously… literally spam 1 ability.
I mean go to raider io, go to the top veng DHs twitch streams and you will sometimes see them running this build in super high keys where they need the survivability. Ofc fracture is quite popular and the go to most of the time as the damage is higher and it’s less soulsuckingly boring than spamming shear nonstop. Afaik io just uses the build it last saw you log out in before the run, sweeping the armory. It has no way to capture the actual build people did the run with if they are changing dungeon to dungeon.
tank damage matters in high keys… i sit between 18k and 20k overall. Even Avade, arguably one of the best VDH in the world does 21k overall in his keys.
I mean… 20s and 21s might not be “super high” to some of you guys apparently but survivability is just fine, only borderline sketchy on certain combinations of trash pulls where you just prepot, call for externals, chains, kite etc. Not to flex but since you bring up raider io and “goto the top vdh tanks streams”… I say this as a 2600+ VDH tank… who is apparently according to raider io #7 in the USA horde side.
I see no situation I would want to drop fracture for feed the demon. I already run two soul mongers, yes I would love a third but meh.