Are we just not doing active mitigation anymore? Demon Spikes feels almost vestigial now, which is a far cry from how the spec has played since it was created. Instead we have this overpowered mishmash of different abilities applying different defensive benefits without the ability to track anything all that well or tell that it matters.
That feels bad to me, for all that the spec is overpowered. Every other tank for the most part has a defensive scheme that’s reactive, that the player can feel when they’re hitting buttons. VDH by contrast is bloated with parry increase debuffs, frailty debuffs, meta procs, self-healing still for some reason, and then there’s Demon Spikes still on the bars, almost as an afterthought. We can also take two covenant abilities, one of which can get two stacks, AND Felblade AND Darkness AND all the sigils
AND it’s just a mess. An overpowered mess, but a mess.
The spec felt better to me when I was sweating having full mitigation coverage during important trash pulls. That was its own sort of badness, but the spec had an identity, albeit one with quirks both charming and less so, and the fixes were apparent and continually suggested to Blizzard: give vengeance Blur; give vengeance a real major instead of Fiery Brand.
But here we are, everything and the kitchen sink thrown in at once because it’s all deck chair rearranging and buffs buffs buffs"mid-expansion reworks" to cover the designers’ rears for a few more months, so the spec instead gets to be bloated all to fel like some Gorefiend-esque guardian druid rather than an Illidari.
WTB coherent, elegant design for a tank spec that used to be cool.
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I don’t fully disagree, but I DO like the direction they are going with the spec! I Love the identity of sigils being our ‘thing’
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I disagree completely. Demon spikes is there for some active mitigation but we aren’t a bear or prot warrior. We are a leeching class so we are a mix of DK with powerful self and burst healing and monk with stagger. Spikes is there so we don’t immediately die jumping into a pack but it’s not our main form of mitigation.
I play brm, prot war, prot pally, and veng, with Veng being my main. They all play different in how they handle damage. The double sigils build finally feels like Veng after 7 years has an identity.
Kudos to the developer.
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Double sigils is bonkers, and is ludicrously overpowered for a single talent point.
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I’m not a fan of how this season plays with double sigils. Not saying it’s a bad design or whatever but I definitely don’t like having 8-10 sigils to place constantly-even if it is OP. Sucks because I loved the spec so much before. Maining Bear this season.
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I kind of agree. VDH feels very much like the only wow class that plays like a diablo 4 character.
Layering on several thousand Paragon passive procs that stack and multiplicatively keep reducing damage taken with peaks and valleys so you constant fluctuate on this gradient between immortal and one shot.
The damage profile can kind of feel that way with your damage amp layering as well.
I think it’s ok to have a tank themed around consistent streams of sustain and defensive power that flows. VDH just feels like there so much and there’s not much thinking behind fragments compared to death strikes.
You just, keep fragments flowing. As a healer it also makes it harder to track when a VDH is in danger and needs my help or externals, which is rare if they’re good though.
Basically if they have meta up I dont need to help at all, if they don’t it’s sort of a crap shoot.
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i dont really agree, this mechanically is the best vdh has ever been. its interactive and punishes you greatly if you dont interact. all tanks have some form of interaction the closest second being bdk a nd prot paladin. do i think illuminated sigils is a bit op? yes having double misery and silence sigils is nuts. do i think the parry should be removed? no because every spec has a form of this mitigation in other forms. did spikes fall off? no it was always ment to be a filler defensive the bridge the gaps between your major defensives. keep in mind spikes last season was only giga played in fort and dungeons with high mob counts. having flexability between builds is very nice
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Not only is this the most fluid VDH has ever been, but it’s hands down the best this spec has ever been in it’s entire existence. If you can’t keep track of this absurdly simple tank, then you gotta get good.
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I completely disagree with the original post. The tank spec feels like the best it has been since Legion. We finally are not required to have a healer give us an external (think of third boss in Temple where we had to rotate FB and FD). Our demon spikes feel good to use. And sigils are still very much a part of active tanking. I love DH tank this season.
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I wouldn’t agree that we’re bloated in terms of buttons. Brew? Yeah sure Maybe? VDH? Absolutly not. I do however strongly agree that our mitigation design is still a problem. As far as I can tell in a comparison to BDK, the two charges of Spikes is mean to translate into the 90 RP pool that we usually sit at as back up and then SpB/SC translate into the usual rotational DS. The problem is that a) the game doesn’t present them that way nor are they used that way as their used over the top of SpB/SC.
I’ve said this for a while but a complete redesign of the VDH active mitigation is needed. Spikes should be Constant Uptime Active Mitigation (or CUAM) and SpB/SC should be the other part of that. The issue is that the power distribution of Spikes is too concentrated. It would be better to see the CD reduced to 10 seconds, the duration lengthend to 10 seconds, the armour increase reduced to 75% of base armour increase from mastery and the parry chance redueced to 10%. A few things to note here. 1) These numbers are just off the top of my head and would need to be tested to work out what the best balance numbers are. 2) These are just a partle sample of a full class design overhall I’d want to do so feel free to ask questions about that and how this might fit into the wider picture.
I can keep track fine, but my point is that you don’t really have to, and that’s bad.
It is very reliant on being OP. You could do that to any tank spec - you could buff Bone Shield or Blood Shield (as they’ve been in the past) to the point that DKs don’t have to think at all about when to Death Strike; you could buff stagger to better mitigate magic damage and buff Guard all to hell to make BrM completely brainless (or there was that time when someone did the math and proved that there was almost no difference between a player strategically purifying stagger versus one just mindless using it or not using it at all).
This is where VDH is now, to the point that you don’t have to think too hard about it to play. I think that’s bad.
I’m fine with gameplay around fragment generation and consumption. I’m fine with demonic and meta. I think the gameplay of and around Fiery Brand is bad/needless. Frailty is also too mechanically complicated. I do like there being actual reason to use SoF, which for its entire existence was useless until now. I think the covenant abilities and especially the ability to take more than one now remains a big problem.
demon spikes up time gap can be closed with the correct amount of haste. Vengeance defensives are in a good place at the moment. I would hate to see the class turn into a heal-bot tank like BDK. That is what makes blood DK unique.
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i’ve been absolutely loving vengeance after being a mage main this season, i don’t think i can go back to dps’ing after this.
sometimes i feel a bit overwhelmed on which buttons to press, but thats just knowledge i’ll gain over time, i see myself playing veng forever i think, maybe dabble in some havoc raiding…
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If they are using scales trinket then they are fine till that pops. After that, our biggest issue is an initial pull till we get frailty going. If a VDH has fel dev and meta available they are gtg. If they die it’s because they popped scales trinket. Outside of this, you shouldnt really have to worry about a VDH. They should self sustain.
How is the +15% additive parry bonus from spikes vestigial? It’s an incredibly powerful form of mitigation with how much uptime it can have, especially paired with the additional 15% additive parry from Illumitated Sigils. You do realize the overwhelming majority of tank damage in M+ is from melees, right?
While I can agree vengeance could use some slight adjustments to things, the spec with its cycling and managing multiple forms of mitigation at once and finally offering a large amount of dungeon utility feels great. Even Fiery Brand feels significantly better with the faster spread, though I do not think it’s entirely perfect. I love every button they’ve added and will love them even more once they get reskinned next tuesday to actually look like DH abilities. Even felblade, which I used briefly in S1 when it was frankly terrible.
Also blur would be ridiculously strong for Vengeance with how much additive parry/dodge we have. It’d be like having Evasion on a tank.
I wouldn’t give the spec Blur now. It’s more speaking from the standpoint of how things were prior to Dragonflight.
And “vestigial” is hyperbole, but it is the case that Demon Spikes uptime, which used to be essential to the spec’s mitigation kit prior to DF, is far less of a priority now.
The old paradigm had problems without question, but it had a stronger identity, which I think is important, however much the current hodgepodge of overtuned talents reduces the incentive to consider it.
you should still have 70-75% uptime on spikes without majority of its talents tho. so i dont think its less priority
I play can play a guardian druid, Port pally, port warrior and to a degree Brew but I will never get how VDH works.
In high keys that actually showcase how a class matters, if you don’t have Spikes up out of Meta you will die.
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in the current season, it’s all about fiery brand, spikes and sigil of flame uptime.