Vengeance Mastery compared with the other tanks'

Hello! I thought we could just put this out here to look at, because when you look at all of them in one place, it becomes clear how terrible Vengeance’s Mastery is. Here they are, with a summary of what they’re accomplishing (note that all tank Mastery stats increase AP by a baseline 8%):

Mastery: Divine Bulwark
Requires Paladin (Protection)
Requires level 78
Reduces all damage taken while inside your Consecration by (-- 3)%. Increases your chance to block melee attacks by 8.0%.

This Mastery to me seems to be the gold standard for tanks. It provides percentage-based DR when standing in an AoE ability that is effectively never down and used rotationally, AND it also increases mitigation by increasing the percentage chance to block an attack. Passive DR and an increased chance of mitigating damage from physical attacks is really great.

Mastery: Critical Block
Requires Warrior (Protection)
Requires level 78
Increases your chance to block by 4.0% and your chance to critically block (blocking twice the amount) by 12.0%.

Warriors here get an increased chance to mitigate physical damage, as well as an increased chance to reduce that damage even further. Stronger than the paladin’s increased block chance, but warriors also have much weaker self-healing. This Mastery is almost always useful because it reduces the chance of receiving a “normal” hit at all times.

Mastery: Elusive Brawler
Requires Monk (Brewmaster)
Requires level 78
Each time you are hit by a melee attack, or hit with Blackout Strike, you gain stacking 8.0% increased Dodge chance until your next successful Dodge.

This one is a little more creative, but the net effect is similar to the warrior and paladin - the chance of avoiding an attack is increased, with the bonus that you can continue accruing this chance while you aren’t actively tanking through the Blackout Strike mechanic, which also guarantees that you will almost always have an 8% Dodge buff.

Mastery: Nature’s Guardian
Requires Druid (Guardian)
Requires level 78
Increases your maximum health and healing received by 4.0%.

What it looks like: I am a big mana sponge. What it actually is: increased effective health at no cost to healers, because healing received is proportionately increased. Always on, and damage type-neutral, because more HP and healing is as valuable for magic damage as it is for physical hits.

Mastery: Blood Shield
Requires Death Knight (Blood)
Requires level 78
Each time you heal yourself with Death Strike, you gain 16.0% of the base amount healed as a Physical damage absorption shield.

This used to be monstrously good, generating giant shields, but then it got toned down to the point that it doesn’t offer benefits as significant as other stats. The absorb is always useful though, because it will always get consumed as long as you’re taking damage and Death Striking, which is a frequent and required part of BDK gameplay.

Last and least, we have VDH:

Mastery: Fel Blood
Requires Demon Hunter (Vengeance)
Requires level 1
Increases the Armor bonus of Demon Spikes by an additional 20.0% of your Agility.

This Mastery makes our active mitigation ability stronger when it is being employed. That’s it.

It’s kind of like if the Protection Warrior Mastery only consisted of the Critical Block chance increase portion. This is problematic, because our Active Mitigation ability baseline should be as strong as any other tank’s, or we are baseline too squishy. While other tanks are getting an increased chance to mitigate damage, avoid damage altogether, or generally gain effective health through general damage reduction, absorb creation, or HP/healing scaling, our Active Mitigation ability gives us more armor when we should need it least.

Tanks cannot be too soft when they are correctly employing their Active Mitigation abilities, or they are not strong enough to be tanks.

And the fact of the matter is, Demon Spikes has been plenty strong enough with the baseline Mastery passive since the Vengeance Demon Hunter has existed. Meanwhile, we have been notoriously squishy when we don’t have active mitigation or Meta or (sometimes!) Fiery Brand up. VDH’s current strength on live has been entirely due to the temporary Essence and Corruption systems by an enormous degree, as well as the happy accident that they’ve buffed our stam and our big cooldown to provide us with a proportionately higher baseline health pool.

Fel Blood as a Mastery stat is the appendix of WoW Mastery stats, right up there with WoD MW healing spheres.

There are many alternatives that would be preferable. Instead of making it a talent, Infernal Armor could become a mastery with a base DR or armor increase. It could be a mastery that increases fire damage as well as giving a percentage leech of that fire damage. It could be just a baseline armor increase (think “Fel Scales” or something) to thematically go with gradually being transformed into a tough demon. All sorts of things that could provide a benefit at times other than when we need that benefit least, like every other tank in the game enjoys.

I would be delighted if Blizzard could provide the hypothetical use case for stacking this Mastery. I get that there might be some design goal in making some specs value the other stats more, but this feels downright unfair. No stat should be useless, and Fel Blood is. Please fix this!

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Actually arent you incrasing attack power with vdh as well?

As I noted, all tanks get 8% attack power that then scales up with rating, but that benefit is pretty tame when it comes to DPS.

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All tank masteries increase their attack power on top of the previously cited benefits.

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A mastery built from Void Reaver would also be cool, and be in keeping with the Consecration half of the prot pally mastery. :frowning:

So many other, better possibilities than only making our strong active mitigation stronger. Like, it could do that still, and ALSO increase duration. That would be legit.

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It also mitigates damage from many magical attacks (a surprising number of magical effects are classified as “blockable”) via the ubiquitous Holy Shield talent.

Warrior mastery is also interesting due to the mechanics of their AM. Since Shield Block guarantees every attack is blocked, that means you get your full chance of critical blocks on every single attack, and critical blocks scale at triple the rate of the base block chance. This can easily turn Shield Block (or Last Stand via Bolster) into incredibly powerful DR. Mastery isn’t a stack stat for them (they like haste just like VDH), but they can still hit some pretty strong numbers.

As an example, my warrior (who is 447 itemlevel, but only has a 415 shield, so my block DR is quite a bit lower than it might otherwise be). Against a normal Ny’alotha boss, I have 28.47% block chance, and 30.74% DR from blocks. I have a 35.9% chance to critically block. Critical blocks are a percentage chance of a normal block becoming a critical block, so 10.22% of the time I critically block and 18.25% of the time I regular block. I also have a total of 33% avoidance from dodge and parry.

Net is that baseline, and ignoring armor, I see a total of ~44.9% DR from avoidance and block, passively.

During Shield Block, I retain the 33% avoidance, but gain 100% block chance on the remaining 67% of swings, and 35.9% of those blocks are critical. Net is a ~29% reduction in damage taken, 3/4ths the strength of Fiery Brand. And remember, this is on a relatively mid-itemlevel warrior, with a severely underleveled shield, meaning my block DR is substantially lower than it otherwise would be).

One other benefit is that it flat out hard caps the amount of unmitigated attacks in a row that you can receive. As an example, my 435 itemlevel monk has 27.14% mastery, which means it is impossible for me to take more than 4 unmitigated melee hits in a row. This simply further contributes to BM’s incredible damage smoothing.

It’s not even just effective health. Guardian mastery is literally damage reduction. Mechanically, mathematically, X% Guardian mastery has the exact same impact on tanking as 1 - 1 / (1+X%) % DR. For example, 25% mastery (way more than they can easily reach, but a nice round number for use as an example) has the exact same impact, in both increasing one-shot threshold and reducing required healing, as 1 - 1 / (1 + 0.25) -> 1 - 1/1.25 -> 1 - 0.8 -> 20% DR.

If you had, for example, 1,000,000 HP and were taking, say, 100,000 incoming DPS, it would take 100k HPS to keep you up, and 10 seconds without healing (or 1,000,000 damage) to kill you.

If you had the same, but with 20% DR, that 100,000 incoming DPS is reduced to 80k, so it’d take 80k HPS to keep you up, and 1,000,000 / 80,000 = 12.5 seconds without healing (or 1,250,000 damage) to kill you.

If you had 25% Guardian mastery, you now have 1,250,000 HP. You’re still taking 100k incoming DPS, but each point of HPS heals you for 1.25 HP instead of 1, meaning it only takes 100,000 / 1.25 = 80k HPS to keep you up. It of course takes 1,250,000 total damage, or 12.5 seconds without healing, to kill you.

Mechanically, the two are identical. Guardian druid mastery is literally just creative global percentage DR. It even increases their own self heal, Frenzied Regen, because while % HP heals don’t scale with healing increases, their mastery also increases their max HP.

This is the part that rankles me. Blizzard specifically changed the Prot paladin mastery in BfA because the Legion iteration, which improved the damage reduction provided by Shield of the Righteous, was a “more better” mastery. They specifically said they were changing it because its net effect was creating a larger and larger gap, as the paladin geared up, between their durability without AM and their durability with AM.

And yet they did not apply that logic to a literally identical mastery on VDHs, and still haven’t despite having done the DH pass in the alpha already. It’s like they literally just don’t care one wit if Vengeance is completely and utterly useless for an entire 'nother expansion.

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Woes is me for my massive amount of mastery lol

Someone on the Discord pointed out that, in boosting armor during Demon Spikes and AP, our Mastery is functionally identical to Agility. That’s pretty lame.

I would take WoD Bonus Armor as Mastery if I could.

Sadly they seem to think we are fine as is so far , seems like there is so few of us that care on the forums too :frowning:

Ion Hazzikostas himself said going from Alpha to Beta doesn’t mean class design is done. Tuning is one of the last things they do supposedly.

Now I will say, playing Alpha myself, Vengeance Demon Hunter FEELS better than live currently, because we are going back to spirit bomb and having access to fel dev. HOWEVER active mitigation has not be addressed.

Let me explain why.

Currently: Gluttony is ~3 RPPM and Visions is ~1RPPM. That means on average you get 4 meta procs per minute. 20 seconds of Meta in 60 seconds or about 33.33% meta uptime. This is average, of course we know that you can get lucky streaks of meta and have it last longer but we want to stick to averages.

Demon Spikes has about 66% up-time only if you play Essence Sever/Feed the demon.

If you play fracture, I think it’s pretty low around 35% to 40% because you lose feed the demon and you have a crappy 20 second recharge system.

In essence, if you play perfectly you can get 100% up-time on active mitigation.

However in shadowlands, you lose all that. Fel devastation is a huge need for the class, with aggro, damage, and control. However, it is a 45 second cool down and you must talent into demonic to get 8 seconds of Meta.

Going back to basic math earlier, you can fel dev once a minute with nothing to reduce that. This gives you 13% uptime on fel dev once a minute. Comparing that to gluttony at ~25% to ~33% it’s really bad.

Fel dev would need to be a 30 second cooldown to move it towards gluttony levels of balance. I personally believe 30 second cooldown on fel dev is the right spot considering that eye beam for meta has been 30 seconds forever and their intentions are to get havoc players to try out tanking most likely.

If you play shear/feed the demon on shadowlands, it is a 100%+ dps loss for the class.

Sadly, as much as half the community hates spirit bomb, you will be 100% required to play spirit bomb to not only hold aggro, but to do relative damage. You have aggro issues if you play shear/feed the demon as we do now.

The bad thing about spirit bomb and fracture is you lose feed the demon going back down to 35% or so uptime on active mitigation.

At this point blizzard needs to lower the cooldown on demon spikes from 20 seconds to 16 seconds, keeping it in line with shield block but also that’s how it was in legion and more than likely making FtD and/or Fracture baseline. The class has severe issues generating souls without fracture and even the kyrian sigil doesn’t help enough in that department.

If Blizzard gives us feed the demon and/or lowers the cooldown on Spikes it will finally fix this class.

Basically Shadowlands has only ~48% uptime on active mitigation but feels better with more buttons to press but doesn’t help the class much. The class will be weak if no tuning happens. Speak up loudly if you get beta. Other tanks have 100% uptime on active mitigation while also being able to have self-healing, control, and damage in their base kit.

Oh btw, the new warrior protection talent? They heal as crazy as we do. There’s literally no excuse to have VDH be a self-heal monster now that warriors can too.

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Fel Dev is actually a 45s CD in SL, not a 60s CD.

yeah but still 13% uptime in 60 seconds since it is impossible to use twice in 60 :wink: that’s what i was getting at. i mean yeah sure you can use it 2x in 90 seconds but no one cares about that :stuck_out_tongue:

That’s…not how that works. Uptime is an average, not a snapshot of a given 60s period. Your argument would imply that an effect with a 31s CD and a 60s CD have the same uptime, and that an effect with a 61s CD has zero uptime, since it cannot consistently be used every minute.

8s out of 45 is 17.8% uptime.

Also, I don’t have alpha to test it, but Demonic for Vengeance may work like it does for Havoc, where you’re also considered to be “in Meta” for the duration of the channel (despite the talent not noting that). If that’s the case, the uptime would be 22.2%, reduced slightly by haste.

Actually, on the note of haste, last I checked, Gluttony is 2 RPPM, not 3. RPPM just scales with haste, which is something noteworthy here, since Fel Devastation’s CD does not, as far as I’m aware. That means that Meta uptime (and Spikes uptime, for that matter) improve as your haste improves in BfA, while Demonic’s uptime will not improve, and may actually decrease slightly if the Meta applies to the channel duration as well, due to the channel duration getting shorter with haste.

Edit: I mean, by your argument, you’d get 13.3% uptime one minute, and then 26.7% uptime the next minute due to be able to Fel Dev twice in that minute. That’s why we use averages, not snapshots.

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Praying Xaedys gets beta.

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You and me both. I got alpha the last two expansions, but I’m no longer in a guild with a Blizz employee, so I don’t get the F&F alpha invites no more =/

Who cares what Ion says.

Look at the recent adjustments they made…
Soul Cleave buff is their answer?

You just got done saying we need spirit bomb to even hold threat, the devs speciffically stated they dont want us spamming spirit bomb and we should be using soul cleave.

Everything in the latest adjustments points to them being as usual concreted to an idea that no one suggested or thinks will help us.

The devs literally said Soul Cleave should be our main spender, which hapoens to also consume souls and may as well be the exact same damn thing as using spirit bomb. The only difference is it isnt a talent.

We still have to use the same tools to generate souls and have the exact same problems as a spirit bomb build mechanically only we push button a instead of button b. Still reliant on 5 souls for either skill, still stuck with 2 resources that dont make sense.

They have been receiving detailed, repetitive feedback on Vdh for YEARS and they pretty much completely ignore it.

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The devs are really disconnected from the community and it shows in their class design.

Rather than thinking “We should make changes based on what they wish for”, their philosophy is now “They are supposed to like what we tell them to like!”

Thats why theyre pushing Momentum and non-SB for the 2 DH specs.

I’m on record as pro-Momentum. Demonic for Havoc is way too easy for as strong as it’s been.

And I’m all set to drop Spirit Bomb, but it does way too much damage, especially compared with what it’s competing against on the row.

If they wanted to make it spicier, they would make the fragments consumed by Spirit Bomb do no or significantly reduced healing. Otherwise, it’s competing against a 20% boost to armor (which is still really low outside of meta and Demon Spikes) with decently high uptime or expanding the duration of Fiery Brand. That’s it.

The mastery though remains a problem. Pieces featuring it on loot tables are more like penalties for VDH than possibilities.