7.2 Notes

[Munkky]

Can you elaborate? I'm a casual veng DH at best, tanking a few m+10 and I'm our 3rd tank on m renferal, so I wont pretend I have done a ton of theorycrafting and know whats what, but I have a few questions.

First, it seems weird to be excited about razor spikes suddenly when it didn't see any changes. The only reason its viable now is because the other talent that was better is now closer to even with it. Couldn't you have been using it before if you preferred that path?

As far as the AF not being that big a nerf, can you help me to understand why that's the case? I felt like ImmoAura was one of my biggest sources of damage and healing in mythic +. I don't keep logs running for mythic +, but looking at other logs, it seems that it averages out to be the highest source of damage in pretty much every log I could find, and it generally averages 10-12% of the total healing DH's receive (charred warglaive). At face value, this seems like a *very* significant nerf both to damage and healing. What am I missing?

Felblade should be a nice QOL improvement, but pretty extremely minor. I can't think of many situations (or any, really) where being rooted and unable to FB has lead to me not generating enough pain and dying. Its a pretty minor and borderline un-noticable buff at best.

I think the soulfrags is the single biggest buff we got, that seems like its going to be very helpful. Pretty confident I'll notice that in both mythic + and when I get suckered into tanking for our raid.

I agree about spirit bomb. Its problem before was the size of the heal and the ability to use FD as an oh shit button made it hard to pass up, because while having more sustained healing is beneficial, healers don't typically go oom trying to keep tanks up, its just those big spikes they worry about. With the 5% buff it should be enough sustained healing that it'll be worth taking over FD in dungeons. Looking forward to playing with that.

As far as soul barrier, yep, its meh. Its on the same tier as last resort, which is insanely fucking good for both surviving oh shit moments and cheesing tank mechanics, and netherlink which is super solid for cheesing mechanics in a very situational setting. It needed a huge buff to its potency, not its duration.

What makes me excited for Razor Spikes is because it adds another level of min/maxing to VDH. Which will make the higher levels of min/maxing incredibly hard outside of easy content. Due to its nature of being a burst window. Where you have to min/max pain gain and damage taken in order to surv and put out as much dps as possible. I'll give a better explanation once things are closer to being finished with that project.

As far as the AF nerf. Doing some quick math over some raid logs, it's roughly ~13% nerf to the ability which equates to an average of 1.5m loss or ~2.7% overall less damage. This includes looking at a tank doing Dragons on Cenarius. In M+it is slightly higher, though with the logs I took numbers from was a 3.4% overall dps nerf. So while on paper the "20% nerf" isn't that huge.

[Killface1]

As far as the AF nerf. Doing some quick math over some raid logs, it's roughly ~13% nerf to the ability which equates to an average of 1.5m loss or ~2.7% overall less damage. This includes looking at a tank doing Dragons on Cenarius. In M+it is slightly higher, though with the logs I took numbers from was a 3.4% overall dps nerf. So while on paper the "20% nerf" isn't that huge.

Can you explain that math?

Heres a random high end mythic log with a Veng DH to use for example.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...-done&source=1

I'm seeing immo aura as 24.7% of his total damage, worth 160.7m damage. I don't really see how it comes out to a 13% nerf to the ability, but again, math isn't my strong suit so I'll take your word for it. I don't see how a 20.89 million damage nerf over the course of a dungeon isn't a gigantic nerf though, when trash tends to be the single most time consuming and difficult part of most mythic dungeons. Can you explain?

There aren't really any true AoE fights in EN, with renferal being the closest. Most of the top veng are around 200k (without doing weird padding shit - my cotank had a few pulls the other day that we stupidly wiped at 1-3% and he was sitting at 200+ without doing any pad strat). They're bursting hard on the spiders, which is right when they happen to be taking a lot of damage, so the self heals are nice not to mention the more damage they can do to the spiders, the more people can stay on boss for a faster kill.

ImmoAura tends to be about 22% of their dps. Its the second highest damaging ability, and a 13% nerf seems like a pretty big deal.

I donno, this nerf to AF seems like kind of a big deal the more I look at it. I welcome our new guardian druid mythic + overlords though.

[Munkky]

@Killface1
Just grabbing a random log.

1.3/1.5 = 0.8666% of the damage as before or 13.4% nerf.

160m Immo damage
650m total damage

160*0.866 = 138.66m
160-138.66 = 21.34m
21.34/650 = 3.28%

So 3.28% less total damage than before. That's in a dung with high aoe.

So it's 13.4% nerf, but only 13.4% of a number, or a % of a %. If you had 24.7% damage with Immo, then now it would be 21.39% damage from Immo. Resulting in 3.31% nerf, which is close to the example from earlier.

So if you had 3.28% reduction on 200k dps. You would drop to 193,440k dps. 6.6k less dps. Which is a drop in the bucket outside of high end min/maxing.

In the example I gave earlier with 2.7% reduction in raid, it goes from 200k to 194.6k or 5.4k less dps.

[Nahela]

For me Soul Barrier still sits in that odd place of competing with a great progression talent while also using resources in what feels like a sub-optimal way. It's slightly better healing as a result of being an Absorb, but not dramatically so and also has no damage component. If we were flooded with Pain and soul fragments maybe I'd feel differently, but right now it sits in a similar place as Fracture for me. Good idea, but not strong enough to beat the alternatives.

[Deleted]

the most hillarious part gonna be once DH:S get shit ton of mastery they will be the best tank period.

lets see how fast they will be to nerf demon spikes.

Since they are very slow on buffing them now.

becuse having a 24/7 buff that reduces damage taken by by shit ton when we get better gear with 0 downtime well, guess what they just made the highest scaling tanking ever.

i dont know what blizzard are thinking with tbh.

[Delimit]

So if you had 3.28% reduction on 200k dps. You would drop to 193,440k dps. 6.6k less dps. Which is a drop in the bucket outside of high end min/maxing.

That's still a significant drop for anyone who cares about DPS. Glancing at one of my own logs, I would have lost nearly 3m damage. That's the value of a neck enchant, or more than a an Old War use in some cases.

Razor Spikes wasn't buffed, the competing talent was nerfed so nothing really changes in the scope of our damage output, which was already low compared to other tanks in EN. Is it going to "destroy" the class? No. Should people be displeased? Absolutely. No matter how you try to spin it, a nerf was 100% unnecessary.

The rest of the changes are meh. Still no base defense buffs, Minor QOL stuff, and talents that were irrelevant to most people. F- patch.

[hairspray]

That's still a significant drop for anyone who cares about DPS. Glancing at one of my own logs, I would have lost nearly 3m damage. That's the value of a neck enchant, or more than a an Old War use in some cases.

Razor Spikes wasn't buffed, the competing talent was nerfed so nothing really changes in the scope of our damage output, which was already low compared to other tanks in EN. Is it going to "destroy" the class? No. Should people be displeased? Absolutely. No matter how you try to spin it, a nerf was 100% unnecessary.

The rest of the changes are meh. Still no base defense buffs, Minor QOL stuff, and talents that were irrelevant to most people. F- patch.

Agreed, at the very least shear should have been buffed to offset the single target dmg loss.

[Munkky]

Oh no, I'm not saying that it isn't unwarranted at all. I totally agree. I just don't get all doom and gloom over a minor dps nerf. Yeah our dps is shit, I know that. I'll be one of the first to say DH are terrible tanks comparatively. I'd rather be optimistic and look at every choice, instead of QQ'ing about one that doesn't change gameplay at all, even if those choices are shit currently.