Mastery currently adds AP (as it does for all tanks) and it makes our strong active mitigation ability stronger, when we least need the strength. I can recall no occasion when playing over the course of Legion or BfA where I wished that Demon Spikes was stronger. It’s okay for different classes to value secondary stats differently, but it doesn’t feel good when one is so comparatively useless that we try to avoid it at all costs.
It would be awesome to get some sort of explanation for why this Mastery design has persisted for VDH and why it’s okay or worth using over haste and versatility. There are lots of other options related to artifact or azerite traits that would be good candidates for a Mastery that would seem desirable and be improvements over the current paradigm.
Well there was that one time DS was really strong and it felt good but was nerfed fast.
It also felt better when we had acess to 3 charges of DS
The mastery idk… Ive always felt like they see our mobility as a trade off and it was kinda useful in some legion encounters but in BFA they hard countered that , especially in dungeons and rarely is it of any benefit in raids.
I dunno if the talent nerf to leap distance is confirmed or not but that gives them even less to hold against us.
It may be also that our only mitigation outside meta is DS… Yet over 2 expansions of being mid/bottom tier they cant see its just not working.
Vengeance’s Mastery is as useless as Havoc’s. Both need to be redesigned or Havoc’s needs to be tuned better at least.
Maybe the AP contribution could increase when Demon Spikes is up as well? 
Havoc’s is fine, mechanically. The issue is the tuning of it. And really, most of the reason Havoc has hated mastery throughout BfA is because of the dominance of First Blood, which shifts a lot of our damage away from Chaos. While Havoc’s mastery isn’t exactly the most interesting (like, say, Windwalker, Frost mage, or Elemental), it matches a number of other masteries out there by specifically and passively buffing a portion of our abilities:
- Unholy - increases all shadow damage.
- Frost DK - Increases all frost damage.
- Feral - Increases all bleed and finisher damage.
- Marksmanship - Increases all damage period.
- BM - Increases pet damage.
- Survival - Increases focus-spender damage.
- Retribution - Increases all holy damage.
- Shadow - Increases primary rotational spell damage.
- Assassination - Increases poison and bleed damage.
- Subtlety - Increases finisher damage.
- Affliction - Increases all DoT damage.
- Demonology - Increases pet/summon damage.
None of those really have any interaction at all with the rotation. They all bias it towards certain sources the more mastery you have, but that’s kinda the intent. Certain abilities and talents become more important the more of it you have, at least in theory.
Vengeance’s mastery, on the other hand, has core mechanical issues. It’s increasing our durability when we least need the increase, making it mechanically useless. This would be like the Outlaw mastery increasing their energy regen during Adrenaline Rush, or Fire’s mastery reducing the cast time of Fireball while Combustion is active, or Arcane’s increasing the damage of Arcane Barrage while Arcane Power is active.
Literally every other tank mastery provides a global durability increase, and in fact the Paladin mastery was specifically changed from increasing the potency of the SotR buff to providing general mitigation in BfA. The Devs even said that it was causing issues with how large of a disparity there was between SotR being up and not. So why the hell was VDH ignored during that change? And what hasn’t it been changed since then, given the struggles VDH has been plagued with when their AM is down?
Honestly, I think Vengeta is correct here, that the Dev concept of VDH is using our mobility to offset our weaker mitigation. But the problem is, that’s a really crappy playstyle, constantly kiting all the time, especially since we are one lack any form of reliable snare while kiting. And in raids? That playstyle is simply impossible. You can’t be constantly dragging the boss all over the place, it literally doesn’t work.
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That’s why I say redesign it or tune it better. Mastery used to be good in Legion at some point, but now we just avoid it like the plague. I’ve scrapped so many 475 pieces of gear because they were completely unsalvageable with having crappy corruption on top of having Mastery.
Vengeance’s is just plain and dumb on top of being useless. A redesign in long overdue here.
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While I personally think ALL mastery stats that increase X type damage should be changed to something interesting, like how survival in legion increased reset chance on flanking strike instead of % focus damage, vengeance definitely is an outlier in terms of tanks compared to havoc which is just as boring as other classes in terms of mastery (even if the stat is also more useless).
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