Raid and Dungeon Tuning - March 2, Patch 9.0.5 PTR - Build 37774

[gallon]

I'm no tank so I don't know the specifics, but in my experience of healing pug tanks in ~15-16s, DHs can facetank much MUCH better than paladins or DKs. They don't feel squishy to me at all...


/edit: What Gasparde said is more like my experience as well. Except for the fact that he said palas are good at kiting... I don't think pala tanks are good at anything right now unfortunately (except dealing damage). I've had some pala tanks who were good at kiting and even facetanking some packs, but about 90% of pug pala tanks are worthless unfortunately and I try to avoid them in 15+ keys if I can but yeah, the 50% slow on consecration and 45 sec CD horse does not mean palas are good kiters.

Damn, you must have had some bad luck with pally tanks. I main a pally tank, though I'm decently geared at 223 ilevel, but walking into random pug 15s I don't feel squishy at all. Ya I'll spike some times, but most of the time I have a tool in the bag to deal with that, like a free word of glory or a LoH if it gets real bad, but it's not too often that I feel like I'm in danger. Then again it could be that Im pretty familiar with the pulls and what and how much I can take. Though you can definetly feel it when you have a weak healer. You will see the group and yourself taking forever to get topped off.

Unfortunately I don't have a DH tank to compare it to, only a dk, so I don't really know exactly how much a DH can take. But I don't really think pallys are that squishy and I normally just face tank most things and just pump that damage. You know the 500 IQ play of if it dies faster it does less damage. Lol.

[Phala]

DHs are meta because they are more tanky than anyone else (bar Druids)

just as others i want to second this (as a healer). DHs need less attention and are less prone to spike deaths. That may sound counterintuitive (low uptime of demon spikes) but for some reason thats the case. Obviously it does help that they have great damage and a proper toolkit (imprison, 5% magic debuff) but movement is really not that much of a factor as people think it is.

[Gasparde]

You're joking, right? Perma means our 10 yard cons? The point is not to kite forever, but get the fuck away fast and keep a large distance. 10 yards is so small, they'll be on your ass faster than the 4s needed to place it down again unless you already have a large enough gap inbetween. Our speed is every 45s and some of the bigger mobs don't get slowed. So I would rather have a leap thank you very much, so I can actually be safe and give the healer actual time to heal me when things go south.

You're talking about absolute fringe cases. There's only a handful (rarely more than like 2) mobs per dungeon that can't be CC'd and just murder you to death with AAs if you can't get away from them within like 0.2 seconds. For these very specific examples, yes, a VDHs kiting ability is better than that of a Paladin. For absolutely everything else, having a self-sufficient slow on basically 0 CD and a horse is just as good (if not better) than just being able to leap 20yds away - again, none of that matters though, because if mobs are CC'able, you have 4 other people hard AoE CC'ing them for you at all times anyways. So the only time a VDH is truly better at kiting is when you unkitable tank busters where a VDHs leap means 0.5s of not being attacked because of their quasi blink instead of a huge ass speed boost.

Looking at the last MDI, that shit just doesn't matter. VDHs don't jump around like crazy. They go in, pull 10 packs... and they fucking tank that shit. Forever. And then there's some packs where they do indeed kite - but they're not doing so by jumping around like crazy, they go in, use all CDs, shit out 5 bajillion threats, and then just pretty much walk away after ANYONE in their groups has used a single stun... and at that point every mob is forever slowed and the DH just walks in circles... which is something any tank can do.

DHs are crazy because they have crazy good burst AoE and crazy good survivability. Their AoE damaged is only surpassed by Paladins, but sadly those have the survivability of a fucking Survival Hunter. Their leap is just about the most insignificant contributor to why they are popular right now. It's not nothing, but it's not fucking something to make a big deal out of either.

[chiddie]

I just don’t think i’m good enough no matter what gear i have.

So even the thought of going M+ 10 before high gear scares me.

Good that you can get invited to +16 PuGs as ilvl 209 tho.

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I just don’t think i’m good enough no matter what gear i have.

So even the thought of going M+ 10 before high gear scares me.

So maby it’s my own mindset that messes up my world view.

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I hope to hit 220 with vault this week if i’m lucky.

But as i said to the other guys, It’s probably just my own insecurities that add an extra 10 ilvl to what the ilvl is actually needed for the content.

I had that mindset too, but after 60 M+ you know what? I learned that knowing what to do (and what NOT to do) is more important than ilvl.

Yes, there will be weeks in which due to affixes combo you’ll be able to bruteforce them but there will also be many times in which it you don’t know mechanics you’ll die to them regardless the ilvl and probably fail the key too.

Gear gives only a little more room for errors. That’s a nice plus but it won’t always be a lifesaver. You can easily see this when you are healer, it’s far easier to heal decent ilvl ppl that take only unavoidable damage than the ilvl 220 dps that takes more damage than the tank. Last week with grievous I ran this ToP 9 where we disbanded after first boss because dps took 7484994 stacks of grievous at every pull and I was oom every two pulls, with me at 4.2k HPs and the dps warrior saying “do we have a healer?”. 10 minutes later I ran another ToP 9 and we timed it even with 10-15 total deaths.

[Tyrilion]

Not sure why people are assuming we are getting Blur? It says Vengeance initial? that's the spec we are before we can pick one, i will disappear when you spec into vengeance?

[GnomeEU]

I only do the weekly 14 15 keys.

DHs are usually bad, if they're bad they're very squishy.
If they're bad they also love to jump out of heal range without hots while you're drinking xD

Dks and paladin give me the easiest time.
Dks with bonestorm and all the other cooldowns give you lots of time to heal the group. Same for paladin with big self heals.

Warriors have horrible self heal, but they're decently tanky.
Monks are usually good.

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Gear gives only a little more room for errors. That’s a nice plus but it won’t always be a lifesaver. You can easily see this when you are healer, it’s far easier to heal decent ilvl ppl that take only unavoidable damage than the ilvl 220 dps that takes more damage than the tank. Last week with grievous I ran this ToP 9 where we disbanded after first boss because dps took 7484994 stacks of grievous at every pull and I was oom every two pulls, with me at 4.2k HPs and the dps warrior saying “do we have a healer?”. 10 minutes later I ran another ToP 9 and we timed it even with 10-15 total deaths.

I have 10k HPs with some idiot groups. You kinda get used to it that everyone stands in the fire. I finished my 14 so long ago that I really don't care anymore if we should fail a run.

A decent group on +16 usually doesnt need more that 4k HPs tho. Some bosses I can dps for a minute without healing the group once.

[Logwyn]

The drop chance from M+ is too low for people to actully run it for the loot, so i personally only do M+ for the vault slot, which gives 220-226 depending on key.

I got ya. Yeah that drop chance... Is why I stopped doing them. Not worth the time.

[Senen]

Absolute fucking bullshit.

This fucking meme that DHs are gods at kiting because they can leap like twice per pack is so fucking hilarious.
If we're looking at things in a vacuum then Paladins are way better kiters than DHs, simply due to the fact that they have a permanent aoe slow on everything and 6s horses are arguably even better than a DHs jump.
But we're not even looking at stuff in a vacuum. Tanks usually come with teams that support them with their kiting. It doesn't matter if you're the most immobile class in the game if you have a Mage, Druid, Hunter and Rogue permanently stunning, slowing and kicking shit away from you - even a DK can kite under those circumstances.

DHs are meta because they are more tanky than anyone else (bar Druids) AND they have more damage than most other tanks... AND because they have pretty solid kiting tools on their own. The idea that DHs are only popular because of their kiting comes a) from people who know fuck all about VDH and b) from people who know fuck all about anything but have heard someone talk some random bullshit in their +7 key once and have since then started to regurgitate that nonsense at any given opportunity.

DHs are good tanks because they're good tanks, not because they're good runners.

Honestly, VDH is overall overrated in this tier. It is the best tank for M+ right now, but not anywhere as OP as people make it sound. The biggest thing in their favor is the current meta: boomkin+mage means the +5% magic damage is huge and DH Havoc has a low-ish single target dps which makes it less desirable and push VDH even more. So on top of being pretty decent dps wise in a vacuum (probably behind Paladin, but that's pretty much it), chaos brand alone brings a huge dps boost to the table. [Side note: this is also the main reason VDH is meta for raiding right now.]
For damage intake, they can have big defensive burst, followed by "kiting", which is barely kiting in a meta with Boomkin having low cd treants and mage/hunter/rogues to assist. (Though hunter is fading out of meta currently.)
Even their utility lines up really well with the current meta: they have one of the only CC that doesn't put in combat, which is not a huge deal for comp with rogues but can be valuable otherwise, especially in a meta where you mostly use your invis pot for Pride.
And of course they have an extra cheat death, which is already bonkers in general but with also "easy" access to a cheat death trinket makes it really hard for them to die.

In summary, their toolkit is really well suited for the current meta. But the current tank balance is overall pretty decent this expansion and people are way overhyping VDH for bad reasons. TBH for pugging +15s, outside of the whole "you have to find a group", I'd say Druid is a way safer and more consistent class right now, because DPS is a non-issue for +15s but you won't have coordinate CCs to help you kite properly, so might as well take a tank that's actually unkillable and barely needs any kiting at all.

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Not sure why people are assuming we are getting Blur? It says Vengeance initial? that's the spec we are before we can pick one, i will disappear when you spec into vengeance?

Because this kind of datamining format is confusing for people, it's not obvious that "Vengeance initial" is like the first 5 level before you chose a spec.
But yeah, giving Blur to VDH would have been absolutely insane.

[Kuja]

There wouldn't be a need to continuously nerf raids if they would intially design them to be easier. Keep normal and heroic easy, and mythic the difficult one.

[Gleem]

I'm a mythic and KSM+ tank who plays both prot pal and VDH.

VDH is absolutely one of the most tanky specs. There's zero need to kite anything at a +15 level at all, save maybe if all the mobs enrage like can happen in Sanguine Depths or Halls of Atonement.

VDH works by constantly rolling CDs with low CD time. Fiery Brand is 40% DR on a 1 minute CD reduced by both a conduit and legendary and duration increased by a talent. Your other CDs (Fel Devastation 1 min CD that works as a CD by granting 8 seconds of meta, and Demon Spikes a 20 second recharge reduced by haste) act as fillers between your Fiery Brands while you're resetting the CD. A decently geared and competent DH can easily maintain > 50% uptime on Brand, and 80-90% uptime on some form of defensive.

This is on top of the fact that we have solid self-healing that works similar to a BDK, sigils that are fantastic for control (moving mobs, stunning them for a split second to interrupt, silencing casts), provide a big magic damage buff, have a great damage profile. We run Kyrian, which is a big damage boost, which also grants us the ability to clear debuffs on our own with phial, and even gain temporary immunity, meaning on affixes like Grievous and Necrotic we can pop our stacks off without healer intervention/kiting (both of which add to how tanky we can be). Then you get to throw the free cheat death into the mix too.

That is why VHD is so good. Adding blur in to the VDH toolkit is absurd to me. Melee hits are typically the biggest source of incoming damage in Shadowlands, and giving us a 1 minute CD that lasts 10 seconds that cuts out half of our top damage source is pretty crazy. Defensive uptime of 100% will likely be possible with this with haste levels attainable during this patch. It makes us even more tanky.

Side note, to the people that are talking about their experiences with grouping with pug VDH tanks, they're a FotM tank. Many people jumped on the VDH bandwagon hearing about how they do X or Y, most info either outdated or outright wrong. VDH can best be described as "aggressively defensive". Some tanks hold their defensives or focus on other things. VDH is go go go on defensives all the time. You never panic hit buttons as VDH, because you're always rolling those buttons anyway. Most people that are bad at the spec don't roll their CDs at all, or if they do, they do it incredibly poorly. The difference between 20% and 50% Fiery Brand uptime is massive in and of itself. And I've seen a lot of VDH just... sit on their Spikes charges.

[Tesshin83]

Insane that no one mention the chain lightning buff which is the most important buff in the entire article.

Interesting to say the least. I wonder what their philosophy behind this change is.