I have neglected this so badly the last 6 months or so. I just got back on it last weekend and feel so bad i ever left. I allowed the outcries for needed ranged dps to cloud my judgement and stepped aside for new tanks so I could fill ranged needs. Then when the ability to make a hairy fat human came around I was offered a chance to tank and did it as… a warrior (perhaps the most shameful of my mistresses).
While it was all fun… and while elves are my least favorite races in the game… I am so glad to be shaking the spikes out and tanking again. This spec fits like a good glove. And it’s so satisfying to do it right and shine.
Does it have its downfalls? Sure. But if you can avoid the glaring issue of only having like 40% uptime on demon spikes through a prolonged fight it is the bombdotcom.
Jumping around and leaving mobs in the dust while having 3 great big circles of “you cant fo that right now” to fill those breaks in our mitigation is enough for me to do most everything I want. Plus being my guilds off tank I just think DH fills that role so well compared to my warrior. It makes me sad to be in full plate with a big shield and told that my job is to take 1 or 2 big hits every 30 seconds while the DK tries to outheal the guilds healer. I’d rather jump circles around the raid waiting for my turn to get hit than pushing devistate waiting for it to proc a new shield slam.
VDH is just too much fun to sit on my shelf any longer.
I agree with this so much! People have been telling me nonstop lately that VHD is bad and one of the worst tank specs in the game right now save for Guardian Druid and its just not true, I’ve started tanking mythic BoD and I have so much survivability and in some fights I’m beating healers with my self heal. With mythic plus its the same story, and the added mobility makes chain pulling and blowing through trash so easy and the healer for the most part depending on affixes doesn’t even have to worry about me its great! VDH imo is one of the strongest tank classes right now!
According to your warcraft logs (which are public)… you are getting absolutely destroyed by your healers.
Let’s look at your Mythic Champions.
Your “beating healers with my self heal” = 8k HPS
Your real healers averaging = 20k to 38k HPS
You almost actually got out-healed by a Protection Warrior?? Lol?
Your warcraft armory says the following: “This character has not completed any Season 2 Mythic Keystone.”
However maybe you transferred. Looking at your raider io you haven’t done a single 10 key with a 692 io… that’s pretty low and any tank in the world can AFK through a 10 key. How can a person who hasn’t even timed a 10 key tell other players the class is broken?
Your Jadefire kill you got a 100% healing parse but your damage was in the lowest 10% percentile.
You’re really confusing. It’s great you’re having fun but the first couple bosses in mythic raid are pretty trivial and very puggable on my server and I haven’t seen anyone fail a 10 key in literally months… Good luck though.
You are the kind of person who ruins this game…I don’t even know what to say about this, go somewhere else, seriously you and people like you are the biggest problem plaguing WoW right now… I was sharing my opinion and what I’ve found and my experience with VDH and you come in here with some sense of righteousness and feel the need to unnecessarily call me out, seriously screw off
Edit: Also did you even read my post or the beginning post of this thread? No one here is calling the class broken or bad or whatever you brain preserved that as. Maybe actually read or just don’t comment at all?
Sure bud, you’re clearly better than all of us lowly scubs (especially me) who don’t know how to play the game, thank you for setting me straight and calling me out when I was so obviously incorrect. Gotta stay humble
(Was that enough ego padding or should I do some more?)
to be fair. when you say I don’t understand what everyone is complaining about?you kind of call out the VDH who take their spec seriously and have been unable to perform due to its drawbacks. You force them to first look at your profile to see if your opinion has merit. then you force them to respond since you are essentially telling them to git gud when you say its beast and one of the best tank specs. this isn’t opinion anymore. its pretty much the worst tank spec. Im happy you are enjoying it though
It’s not even an argument that our gaps in defensive uptimes are a huge issue. I do think 99% of vengeances issues could be solved with either a few seconds cut back from demon spikes CD, feed the demon or fracture being made baseline. Any of those 3 changes would easily bring us inline with the other tanks.
That said. It is a fine line. And with monster vengeance tanks who are already main tanking every fight in mythic even a small change could potentially break us.
I personally would rather play a lower tier spec and surprise folks with how it performs than be 1 of 1000000 playing the top tier fotm spec. The MDI is pretty much the final nail in prots coffin. Warriors get a tier of God mode each expansion and then they get gutted. I would rather be the underdog and be allowed to surprise my group mates with the fact that DH can survive plenty and dont have to be squishy.
In preperation for uldir we had a resto sham who gquit after I announced I was going to play the DH instead of a bear. The shaman absolutely refused to heal DHs. I tanked for that guild through heroic for weeks until my job forced me to step away from the game. Never had one of the healers complain a single time. (At me anyways. The healers weren’t super pleased with that groups dps).
I am pumped to be back on this toon though. Long winded post but I do think it’s worth noting that it can be done. There are people out there that make every spec shine. And there are people out there that are cringeworthy on even the best specs. My warrior play is not up to snuff. And frankly I dont dig the procy play style. I know I can survive plenty well on the DH all while putting out better over all results. This baby is my class. Good bad or ugly (mostly ugly).
Prot warriors have a ton of “self-healing”, because Ignore Pain counts as an absorb and thus shows up on the healing charts.
But ya, VDH is very not good. If you’re having success with it, you’re either being carried to an extent, or doing content at a difficulty level where the difference isn’t really relevant.
Lmao you got called out on your lie of outhealing healers, next time don’t lie about it and you won’t have that person checking you. I bet that person wasn’t even checking just to see if you were lying I bet he/she was looking because he/she was genuinely curious and thought “damn is VDH on the come up? Should I dust mine off? Oh wait, this guy/gal got out healed by a prot warrior…” then proceeded to call you out on it.
Control what you can (not lying) and don’t worry about what you can’t (someone calling you out)
Don’t feel bad that your doing content where you can get carried and assume you are at the same skill level of those that actually push the high end of difficult content.
Liaka is one of the Top vengeance demon hunters in the world. What Liaka says about VDH, I’d listen, I might not agree with, but I sure as heck would want to make sure I have a well thought out argument before responding.
I’ve been pushing into upper teens lately in dungeons. There are times when I have to say to my healer “hey, I have no mitigation right now.” It’s pretty bad, and I rely heavily on treants and earth elemental.
Rework Hour Of Reaping. Instead of giving us a soul barrier, have it increase the healing on our globes along with 3% haste for each soul we consume (capped at 15%). Or keep it the same but change the talent we have called “Feast of Souls” to give us haste like how monks/bdk/warriors already innately get for free.
Reduce the max cooldown from demon spikes recharge from 20 seconds to 16 seconds like how shield block is for warriors.
Make Sigil of Chains baseline and put in the following as a talent in that same row: " Soul Cleave reduces the remaining cooldown on a random Sigil by 8 sec."
Rework Meta. Make it feel good to press. Let yourself explode on being pressed with fire damage similarly to immolation aura where you immolate while meta is up. Also empowers yourself giving yourself 25% versatility while meta is active. Our meta should be terrifying to the enemy similarly to how Diablo is scary AF in HotS and the diablo series. We should be a hulking demon ready to devour everything instead of a fragile paper tissue.
Rework Gluttony and move it to the final talent row to replace either void reaver or soul barrier. Have it do the following: Consuming a soul fragment reduces the cooldown of Metamorphosis by 0.5 seconds Additionally increases the duration of Metamorphosis by 0.5 seconds for each soul consumed and leech is increased by 25% while Metamorphosis is active.
Long term our mastery needs to be completely reworked and we should heal ourselves based on fire damage we do to enemies. Similarly to a leech tank or an anti-stagger tank.
What would you say to a demonic type of talent? Offering 10 seconds of meta after each immolation aura?
I totally agree that meta needs to feel more impactful. I actually had one of my guilded healers complain this week when I used it saying that my hp goes up so high that it made grievous worse to deal with from a healing perspective than better. If blizzard is going to truly settle for this 4 minute CD as our shield wall type of ability it needs to feel a lot better. As it stands meta just doesnt fit that category of CD.
I totally agree we need more passove armor or a way to keep demon spikes up more frequently. Even if mastery instead increased duration of demon spikes at least we could close that gap.
I try not to use this as a main tank. My biggest push to bringing it off the shelf was that I was being used primarily as my guilds off tank. I figured I would rather play a more exciting and mobile spec than the warrior if all I am going to do is soak large hits or pick up the easier boss.
I do have a more pointed question for you about the mythic fights as my warrior will be replaced by this for the first 2 or 3 at least this week…
Being a guild that follows the basic strat on champions and does all of the tank swaps should I start with the boss and then take the adds when she is in her mini enrage?
I have always been the combo tank and get thrown everytime so long as we dont get rocked with 3x smash. Is barrier worth taking on this due to the perfect 30 CD timer for it?
again I was thinking of taking barrier for when I have no healer and the guild is floating around but almost think a flat 6% damage reduction would out weigh it?
When it comes time to take the DH against conclave were you using a bunch of externals to bridge the gap with your demon spikes or were you on specific bosses just to avoid getting slapped to hard? Honestly conclave is the one that worries me the most and very likely the furthest this guild will get to before 8.2.
I couldn’t agree more with your meta suggestion. All meta feels like right now is an instant heal for a small amount if needed. Ide like to see (from a visual POV) something like the LoL champ Aatrox where he begins to fly around when he pops his ult. That’s a scary sight and that’s what we need. A feels good looks good powerful defensive/offensive ability.
That would probably be a bit overpowered considering my immolation aura is 12 second cooldown. I would be 100% in meta form. While I would absolutely love being at 8400 base armor the free 30% hp would be kinda redic. I sit at almost 600k hp with meta up and full raid buffs. I also use stamina flasks and stamina potions during raid.
Our guild has always just face rolled Champions of Light. We one tank it and I stay as tank we just faceroll her so I’m not sure.
I do roll barrier for grong but since I roll with a monk and stagger is pretty broken I taunt right before and take 2 smash hits, then the monk taunts. takes the 3rd hit + the throw and i taunt back immediately. I pretty much only taunt specifically at that point and don’t do much on grong.
Void Reaver would be fine for grong, it doesn’t really matter much. Just don’t take 3 combo hits + the throw. Even a monk with 1.6 million effective health would die from that.
I actually never need an external. On any fight, besides Mythic Jaina and Mythic Blockades.
On conclave I get 2 dots of kimbul then I’ll tank Paku. This is the most intense part of the fight, for any tank. I will instantly pop Meta. That 100% extra armor helps quite a bit there. I’ll stagger out both demon spikes charges. When Paku stacks stacking up and Meta falls off, I instantly press Fiery Brand for 10 seconds of 40% damage reduction. By this point ~25 seconds have gone by. The other tank will have most likely taunted off you by this time. I do keep soul barrier on that fight just to keep myself topped up and only use soul barrier with 4-5 globes.
If you need an external on that part because for some reason the other tank hasn’t taunted off you, absolutely use guardian spirit but it shouldn’t be needed.