Vengeance (opinion - changes that need to happen)

Classes Demon Hunter
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Vengeance Demon Hunter -

I’m going to start with something we all know. Vengeance demon hunter upon release in legion wasn’t all that good. We know that. Along with havoc, it was very hard to find actually stats that you need and talent choices. It was an odd tank spec. With having to deal with proc talents, and sustain talents, all of them except a specific spirit bomb build were mediocre.

Spirit bomb is a really nice talent, while it has it’s ups, it also has many, many downs. If there’s something i disagree with about spirit bomb, it’s the damage out put. It brings way more sustain dmg than other tanks (apart from current prot warrior). If there’s something I can agree with, it’s the 10% healing from the Fraility debuff. Through-out legion this spec was kinda meh. And at one point, nearing the ToS tier/Antorus tier, veng was changed to be more compitent raid tanks & mythic+ tanks.

The only thing veng originally brought to the table was m+, and that was it’s
CC potential and aoe healing potential from spirit bomb. The thing about spirit bomb now, is yes it provides a lot of damage. but it’s healing is absolutely garbage single target. And why be forced to take a specific talent in that tier that’s
best for raiding when it’s actually garbo? I don’t entirely mind gluttony, but rng aspect doesn’t help for healing on specific parts of an encounter.

Blizzard. Please. We get it, veng was a little too good with the spirit bomb base heals and damage it provided, along with the 20% healing fraility (in legion). But, legendaries are gone. Soul Carver (Artifact ability) is gone. Why did current vengeance make it to live thinking this was going to be okay? that Spirit bomb was nerfed to 10% from fraility, No base healing, and that your only healing comes from consume soul.

My specific question is who in the world thought it was a good idea to make a game changing ability to a spec’s rotation, have no base heal for tanking? Like it’s a no brainer answer, you have soul cleave with a base heal & spirit bomb w/o a baseheal. All soul cleave used to do was more efficient healing, because instead of having to gain 4-5 frags for spirit bomb you could just use 2 for soul cleave, for more sustain & faster healing, ofc since soul cleave has a base heal.

Why isn’t spirit bomb a replacement talent for soulcleave? instead of implementing this ability as apart of your build with single target as well as AoE.
Like my question is, is there no thought going into this spec at all? Like yeah havoc’s in a really good place right now for both raiding and m+, but how about vengeance… we’re starting to rank with guardian druids at the bottom for m+, and even lower for raiding.

Please, just add a base heal to spirit bomb, and make it replace soulcleave. It doesn’t make the rotation hard, it just makes it dumb. It’s current state Makes no sense for the talent system. While some tiers are correct like Feed the Demon VS Fracture, a lot of other talents just don’t fit it’s current spot, therefor making certain talents (fel devastation, soul rending, burning alive, fel blade) usesless in all forms of AoE/Single target. I’m not asking for each talent to be viable. I’m asking for demonhunters to make more sense when it comes down to tanking. Fix it, please.

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Spirit Bomb is already considered The Only Option, and you want to add a heal to it? Here’s the thing, most of why Soul Cleave is so terrible is because the heal on it is pitiful and, unlike Souls, does not scale with damage intake. Spirit Bomb would be in the same category.

Most of the strength of Spirit Bomb is the fact that it consumes up to 5 Souls in a single GCD, rather than only 2 per GCD like Cleave. It makes it a phenomenally efficient Soul consumer, and since our healing overall is controlled mostly by how many Souls we can generate and consume in a specific time period, increasing the souls generated (Fracture) and consumed (Bomb) per GCD is a significant boon to healing.

VDH’s problem isn’t the healing, it’s the lack of passive mitigation. Buffing Spirit Bomb is the last thing we need right now.

Edit: also, to make Bomb replace Cleave, it’d have to have a baseline heal and damage. That would completely change the dynamic of the ability. And it would still suck to cast without Souls unless you made the damage static instead of scaling by Souls, which would be a massive nerf.

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I don’t think you have a clue what you’re talking about here… dh tanks are fine… in fact I’d say they’re >/= BDK in the current game. I’m pulling close to 12k hps … 12k! That’s a healer’s level of hps! On top of that with sigil of chains and my RIDICULOUS mobility I’m rarely in trouble… oh and if I need a little more… how about the AMAZING 6 second aoe silence or an aoe fear that more often than not acts as a THIRD aoe interrupt! Did I mention the RIDICULOUS mobility. Look you’re probably doing things wrong.

You don’t have a shield
You’re wearing leather

Stop trying to face tank and learn to use your kit properly.

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Are you doing +2 keys and LFR? If so that’s why you aren’t having trouble.

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To add on to what Xaedys said… if you use essence sever (the az trait) you will pull insane amounts of soul fragments out of enemies so it’s really easy to keep a constant stream of heals coming in

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Well you’re more than welcome to check my up on my io… I got into this season a little late but I’m playing catch up now… but no I run 7-10s mostly and if you look at the teams I’ve played with you can see that most my m+ This season has been helping 3 people gear from fresh toons and within a week they’re running 8s so I can boost myself a lot higher if you’d like. Or you can add me and I’ll show you first hand what a good dh tank looks like. Okkoto#1161

Gg gl hf

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Our kit is fine and dandy for M+, but we need a large amount of love when it comes to raiding where our utility becomes essentially useless, which OP touched on.

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That may be true… I wouldn’t know. My new job doesn’t match up with my guilds raid times so I never get to raid with them. It sucks but I’m stuck in m+ and usually am pugging 2-3 of the people in the group which also sucks

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We are fine, a few minor tweaks here and there. Just realize what your class does and you will be fine.

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I would actually like a base armor up because without DS and we do get plenty of long stretches without it, it feels like we’re wearing paper.

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  1. BDKs regularly pull 20k+
  2. VDH is statistically the one of the worst M+ tanks, both in terms of representation and in terms of average raider.io amongst the ones that do run them.
  3. They are also statistically one of the least used raid tanks, ahead of only druids, with a representation in mythic BoD of roughly 1/6th the representation of BDKs and BM monks.
  4. You’ve killed only 4 bosses in normal BoD and the highest instance you’ve tanked in time was an 8. You’ve only tanked one 10, and it took you over an hour to complete it, most likely because you were dying to every Reaping. You aren’t doing difficult content.

Edit: in fact, in Season 1, you never tanked above a 9 either.

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Smh at this thread.

We are just squishy now and self healing was gutted.

We lost charred war blades, painbringer ,our magic mitigation tool, a meaningful 3 min CD which at the same time took our only offensive CD, base DR was neutered, add this to drastically reduced self heals and poor scaling.

Veng excels at world quests, thats about it.

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anything out in the world its just simplier and faster to go havoc. just my opinion here but even in WM havoc far outperforms VDH in WQ’s and general open world play.

I would say that something is needed here to help push them back into the raid meta. I get it they are really powerful (mythic +) if you know the dungeons well and how to play them. and obv as a leather wearer without stagger face tanking is out the question. so its rough on what you give them to help them with raids that wouldn’t push them over the top in M+. but they cant be kiting a raid boss around so the whole kiting tech formula just doesn’t go. im thinking a talent is needed that severly hampers mobility but gives a base defense. something like defensive stance for warriors. only you would lose it once you move so it don’t help with their kiting ability

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I agree that we need baseline mitigation increased. If they accomplish that through armor increase though, that will make DS and meta worse without adjustments.

I wonder if a part of the problem was that the spec’s B active mit ended up too much like Death Strike for their liking, and so to make sure that DKs still felt like their mechanic was distinctive, they adjusted DH self-healing to be less spectacular without compensating us. The big difference of course is that we have way less uptime on our A active mit than DKs do with Bone Shield. There is no way though that we can ever be smoother than DKs with the way we’re set up.

On a separate note, does Pain seem effectively negligible to how the spec operates mechanically? At least in my gameplay, I never am left wishing I had more pain banked than I do. They could eliminate Pain altogether and just give us Soul combo points for all that it matters.

Regarding individual experience, just a reminder that there is a really wide variety out there. It’s understandable that someone who only has time to run normal raids or sub-+10s might not appreciate the experience others are finding in higher content. We all want our spec to be good though.

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Wearing leather in Legion never affected Vengeance ability to tank.
If wearing Leather were a limiting factor now, you wouldn’t see plate wearers with far superior active mitigation and self sustain (BDK).

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It’s not legion. A DH has a hard time going blow for blow with a raid boss. That much is obvious. They need something. I bring up leather because that is one thing that hampers DH.

just messing around I hopped into a buddies normal bod cuz they wanted to 3 tank 1st boss. At 4 stacks my damage was soo spikey it literally was making my heart stop. And my tank spec sits at 380 with decent traits. maybe I’m just not used to it but if that was happening on my brm I’d be freaking out.

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I just lol’d. You’re a fly. I would outclass you tanking VDH any day of the week. Please refrain from coming to these forums posting,

12k HPS … LOL I know healers who pull 40 - 50k HPS. I’m literally crying from laughing so hard.

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I love playing VDH!! if the run goes well and we time it, I can pat myself on the back for how great I am. If it goes to hell I can blame the crap state the spec is in. Win, win bois!

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As i remember it, During Legion my armor provided me with a walking around damage reduction of about 50%, and using Demon spikes jumped it up to 75%.
Here in BfA, walk around reduction is about 35%, and Demon Spikes makes it about 65%. We used to live through our Pain. Now we are Soul Suckers… and squishier . So it goes… Let me buy Demon Spikes with my pain, as often as i can afford them, or have Soul Cleave scale its damage and healing by the amount of pain i invest in it.

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Hi guys, I’d like to chime in on this. I have a 1415 io with my vengeance DH. I was rank #1 for my server for season 1 and was pushing +15 keys. I’ll admit It was harder to get into groups above +15 as a vengeance DH as most groups only wanted a blood DK/BM monk.

Our toolkit in mythic + is fantastic but leads us to play the non-face tank role. We are very talent dependent and soul barrier is a must have talent now to fill in the gap from the lost 3rd demon spikes legendary in legion. Most people don’t recognize but when demon spikes are active, we have the #1 most physical damage mitigation from any tank.

This spec has a distinct duality between extreme mitigation and no mitigation at all. The spikey nature of this leads us to play more of a kiting tank than a face tank. There is much more cognitive demand from this spec than say a blood DK and I find that rewarding. Now that being said, I can face tank a +10 no problem, but when you get to +15s and above even blood dk’s have to kite mobs.

Without completely reworking the spec, vengeance DH’s are suffering from 1 distinct issue.

  • our low armor/passive mitigation

Now there are other issues such as Meta being a weak CD or that the frailty debuff from spirit bomb is now only 10%. But these are smaller issues compared to our passive mitigation issue.

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