With a vengeance

They beat me to it again. Vengeance. The mechanic I've hated ever since I understood why it was bad. Recently Blizzard has made some really really good adjustments to the mechanic, solving some of the major problems with vengeance. This doesn't fix the spell but it goes a long way.

I'd like to say that I'm not against tanks doing higher damage. I'd also be happy with "you do no damage but only taunts pull threat from you." We already have a 500% threat modifier for help with scaling, and vengeance is a mechanic to help with that scaling. We do need a mechanic to help us scale, it's a problem that comes out of how fast damage dealers scale their dps compared to how fast tanks scale their dps. With the 500% scaling modifier it allows us to scale 1/5th the speed and still keep ahead on threat, which is really all we *need* when it comes to damage.

So why isn't vengeance, in it's current implementation, all that it promises to be? I'm going to go over some of the traditional problems it's had, even the ones that have been fixed. It's important to see them to examine some solutions to the problem.

1 - Inverse scaling with tank gear. As a tank we want to take less damage. If we take less damage we get less vengeance. We want more vengeance. This is a problem. This problem has been FIXED. We now continue to generate vengeance when dodging and the amount gained is calculated before dodge/block/parry/miss etc. This fixes the desire to take more damage to do more damage. Good job blizzard.

2 - Tank AoE in 5m groups, and while levelling in general. Tanks shouldn't be beating dpsers at dps. It just shouldn't happen unless something is really really wrong. Vengeance isn't really the problem but it most certainly doesn't help, removing the cap works against it but in my experience I'm usually not capped anyways but who knows. This problem extends to 10 v 25m raids where more damage is going to be coming out in 25m raids (because there are more people) meaning you have a higher vengeance stack in 25m. Tank damage is more important in 10m than it is in 25 simply due to it being a larger portion of the raid. Vengeance does nothing to help work this problem out, it'd be easier for either the game to be designed with the expectation that tanks do no damage, or take steps for them to have their damage much more reliably.

3 - It is currently half of our ap, and it's going to be more come MoP. We also have no control over it. According to GC it will be nearly 2/3rds of our source of AP. This basically means that we can't control where our damage is coming from gear wise. I'm a little glad that I don't have to worry about dps stats like haste or crit, and I'm ok with hit/expertise so long as we can cap vs parry without going through crazy hoops. I'm also ok with hit/expertise because without them we only have 3 secondary stats.

4 - This is the big one. Ramp up time. This is a huge problem and is basically why this mechanic is doomed to failure. I think I need to set up another list of reasons why ramp up time defeats the purpose of this mechanic and the majority of it is related to early in the fight.

4.1 - Most issues with tank threat is in the first 10-20 seconds of the fight. When a fight starts, most dps burn all their cooldowns. They are doing more damage in the first bit, usually, than they will be doing at any other point in the fight. A lot of the time heroism is best used at the start to coincide with these for maximized dps. Tanks don't benefit a lot from haste, as a prot pally pre-mop I don't get any benefit. Once mop hits I do get some benefit, but it's still pretty lame. This is when we *most* need the benefit of something like vengeance, more than at any other point in the fight we need that extra damage right at the start. Tricks and MisD can only do so much.

4.2 - Early fight tank swaps. I can't tell you how many times I've had the dk I tank with rip mutated tentacles or ragnaros right back after I taunted. A tank that has a full stack of vengeance will be doing ~ 3x dmg compared to the tank that has none and is about to taunt. This is somewhat fixed by the "you gain average any time you would be below it." But this really doesn't solve the problem. It helps by reducing the time lag between taunting and being able to compete with threat. This isn't an issue later in the fight where the "you must exceed the tank by 10% threat" rule comes into it's prime. 10% extra threat from the first 30 seconds in a fight is a *much* smaller value than 10% threat at the 5 minute mark. The same rule applies to picking up new adds in a fight, though usually they don't need to be tank swapped.

4.3 - Tank DPS while not tanking. When you aren't tanking and vengeance has fallen off you are doing 1/3rd your damage. This is again counter to the design of the mechanic though it's less important since if you're not getting attacked you aren't the one generating the threat. It may restrict the encounter design to work around this sort of thing, especially in 10man where you'd be losing a considerable amount of boss damage.

With all those points put out, and I'm sure I'm forgetting something so please feel free to let me know, we come to a point where I feel like I'd just be complaining or "armchair dev"ing as it's been called. I want to state again that the idea of inflating tank dps isn't an issue. What I don't want, at least under the active mitigation model, is to have another thing contending with my rotation. Choices like SotR vs WoG are interesting, however choices like changing our rotation from emphasizing hopo gen for said abilities to other options for increased damage are not interesting choices, especially when our abilities scale different with ap. They're a very good reason for me to stop enjoying tanking.

In summary: Good job on the changes. I think these will go a long way to making tank scaling, which we have to remember is the sole purpose of vengeance as mentioned recently. Despite these changes I think there really has to be a fundamental change in the way tank scaling is dealt with. Vengeance almost causes more problems than it solves. I really think some of the suggestions over at Sacred Duty have a lot of merit and without spending some time and making sure I don't tread on the toes of those suggestions too much I don't have a really good solution just yet.

I really like the idea of giving tanks a %age based increase to damage done in some way. Mostly because it lets the threat modifier double-dip. If we can increase our raw damage by some small amount it lets the threat scale off of it by 5x and an additional 5x the modifier. For example a 5% increase to damage done from the tanks in some way gets the total modifier to 1 * 1.05 * 5 = 5.25. Change that to 20% tank damage modifier and we have effectively changed the 500% threat modifier to a 600% threat modifier without drastically changing the way we deal damage. It also doesn't have any of the crazy side-effects of things like shield barrier/WoG getting out of control.

Seeing big numbers is fun but if I have to see numbers half the size of what I'm seeing right now to fix some of these glaring problems, fine. I'd even be ok, though I really wouldn't enjoy it as much, with doing something like 20% of my actual damage with increased threat if it got the job done better than vengeance.

In any case, I think I'm working myself up so to avoid getting upset about something that isn't even on live yet I'll sign off and remind all of you to keep being awesome. See you folks later.