Every time I go to heal a DH Tank, it feels like the squishiest of the tanks, and I’m about to the point where I almost want to just turn them down for tanking. Before I do something like that though, I need to understand how they work.
So, how do DH mitigate damage? How do you feel it compares to the other tank classes? Is it normal for a DH to go down in 2 to 3 globals? Do I really need to babysit them 100% of the time, or is the tank doing something wrong?
I use demon spikes and immolation on cool down for armour buff, use spirit bomb with 4 souls to heal
The Vengeance Demon Hunter is designed without 100% uptime on their armor buff through Demon Spikes.
What this translates too is that they should be kiting trash for at least a few seconds while that buff comes off of cooldown again. The only reason they wouldn’t kite is that they have Metamorphosis up which is a huge HP and Armor buff together. They have sigels and a ranged interrupt to help reduce damage. They also have the highest passive magic mitigation in the game. I also think either Soul Barrier or the passive mitigation talent is better than the cheat death talent. As that one doesn’t really do anything to help the healer smooth over damage. But, unfortunately a lot of tanks choose the cheat death talent. They do have a single target 8 second duration (10 seconds with the Azerite trait) 1 minute CD 40% mitigation ability. It does a decent amount of damage and gives them good survivability against certain boss abilities on a reliable and short CD.
The final component of their mitigation is leach + self-heals. If they are good they will Spirit Bomb right after a big hit goes out with 5 souls up, that should easily recover a big portion of their HP. Just keep in mind that you will see their HP ping pong for just a second when they do. Because Spirit Bomb gives them a passive leach through the damage done to the marked targets. The souls they absorb also heal 1% of their HP + I believe 8% of the damage they received in the last 5 seconds. There is an Azerite trait which gives a shield on each soul absorb for I believe 3k or 4K at iLevel 430. But since it doesn’t stack it is just good for a single hit to help take a little sting off.
I hope that puts them into perspective for you.
Veng feels squishy until you overgear the content. Like Palthas said, kiting is very helpful to mitigate dtps. You can leap in and get aggro on mobs and have party stun/snare and you will hold aggro for a while. On the plus side, veng does well with necrotic m+ affix 
I just want to clarify, it isn’t squishy when you don’t overgear content as Lama suggested.
With their armor buff up they feel very tanky. You can rotate different abilities and take certain Azerite traits to cover the gaps if necessary, which helps for raids. But in Mythic + they should just utilize their superior ability to kite in dungeons that have the room. The damage they take is pretty predictable on a well played Demon Hunter.
This just seems like too much for a group to even consider taking a DH as a tank. Why take a class where we have to work around their constant weakness when we can take any other tank?
It seems like my guilds on both alliance and horde feel the same, I constantly see complaints about having to heal DH tanks.
Honestly if you got complaints from healers about healing a DH main tank in a raid you might want to look at how the tank is playing.
My guild during Uldir was very happy to have me as the MT during progression. The didn’t want me to switch to any other tank at the time, as I was a lot smoother to heal once they got used to how I smoothed over big spikes with a quick heal. I’ve seen guilds with 2 DH tanks for progression in Uldir Mythic difficulty and they were doing just fine.
It isn’t really based on the class, but rather the skill of the player behind the class.
I’m not saying that Vengeance Tanks don’t have their problems, because they do, but it isn’t like you make it out to be. There are a lot of cover abilities that can smooth over the open spots in their mitigation if people take the time to look into it. Also, since the buff they have been even better to heal and taking smoother damage.
Then why do none of the most skilled players play dh tanks except for very specific situations in MDI where kiting is their strat?
Quit trying to use what the world’s best players do to justify your stance. For everything you do in game, a dh can tank just fine.
We are now no longer comparing the same things. I’m talking about the live game, and the general population and even most of the Mythic/Heroic guilds. I’m not talking about world first Mythic guilds or MDI comps with unreasonable pulls/itemization. Also, if you look there was a team that ran Vengeance for a few dungeons, I believe it was for Underrot and Siege in the MDI. He also didn’t really kite anything that Warriors didn’t kite already, so he was pretty tanky there. But at that point Warriors Avatar just is such a game changer when the only thing separating teams is usually 1 or 2%.
But if you want to argue that everything should be balanced around the MDI (which I think Blizzard has done a bad job of balancing) then everything but Warrior, Rogue, Resto Druid, and maybe Wind Walker is underpowered and needs buffed. I look forward to watching streams of Mythic guilds raiding with only those on their roster.
DH IS the squishiest tank. By far. They make up for it by having larghe health pool and high mobility. Is your DH tank using his leap ability to kite mobs when his demon spikes are down?
The key to being a good hero is knowing when to run away. When the spikes are down don’t stand around
I agree with everything you said that they should be kiting in Mythic + when their spikes are down. But I do disagree that they are squishy. I would say they ping pong, but aren’t squishy. It’s just an unforgiving tank class to play if you don’t know how to play it right
trust me. i played DH for a very long time. over 2 yars. but just recently i made a pally alt. the prot spec is way tougher.
im not saying veng DH is bad. im just saying yeah it is squishy compared to plate tanks.
trust me my prot pal can just sit there and tank 50 mobs forever. my dh would have to jump out of the way
In short, classes are designed differently… Who knew?
I know how Demon Hunters are It was my main for a very long time. I only recently stopped playing it as my main in Season 2 of BFA for this Druid. I do agree that plate tanks with a shield seem to have quite the advantage with block, but whatever I could tank on my Druid or Warrior I could tank on my Demon Hunter. There just isn’t much difference except in the way you approach the pulls.
For example, if I wanted to AoE tank several packs, on any tank you need to be popping CDs to lower the incoming damage in higher Mythic + keys. You can’t just face tank with nothing up, unless you want your healer to deal with the brunt of it.
Also, I know people don’t really think of the armor bonus from the immolation azerite traits. It isn’t as much as our spikes, but it can be used defensively to soften the times when we are between spikes charges. But honestly, any tank worth their salt isn’t going to pull massively without some decent CDs up where having spikes drop would make a difference.
Here’s the thing about VDH: like BDKs, we are largely a self-healing class. It’s not uncommon for me to pull 40-50k hps on pulls in M+. I certainly take larger damage spikes than other tanks, but its made up for with incredibly high self-healing.
Further, on weeks where I expect to take more damage (generally fortified weeks, tyrannical weeks are largely non-threatening to me), I will commit blasphemy and spec out of Spirit Bomb, and pick up Gluttony, pair it with Vision of Perfection, and get very high Meta uptime for large pack pulls. This allows me to keep my DS charges for when my Meta procs are down, giving me very high uptime on either DS or Meta, smoothing out my damage intake.
VDH is obviously not the best tank spec in the game (that falls to Prot Wars for M+, and Brews for raiding), but we are not nearly as bad as some folks here are claiming.
i never meant to say DH is bad tank, of course not. i love tanking on my DH. i can practically just leap all over the place and avoid more damage than i take.
What i meant was pure tank factor (sitting there and actually tanking face to face) i think other classes are much tougher so to say. DH makes up for this by self healing and having mobility to leap out of harm and wait for CDs etc.
I tried Gluttony, and it felt bad. Too many procs were wasted, and I didn’t really see that many of them. Maybe Vision makes it work better.
As much as I like Fracture, Feed the Demon felt like it made a much bigger difference in my tanking.
Sounds to me like the tank isn’t a good one. Unless you’re doing very high level keys, DH tanks are fine.
They are squishier than the mitigation tanks (Dru/War/Monk/Pally) but they make up for it by having higher self healing. So yes, their HP goes down faster, but you should also be seeing their HP go right back up some because player has used SB.
If you’re seeing his HP only go down and you have to constantly heal. That player is bad.