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!