This is a guest post by the venerable Meloree, tankadin of Edge from Garona-US, a world top 100 progression guild and currently 26th in the US. Meloree is a widely respected poster at Maintankadin with years of tanking experience under his belt, and might be best known for trailblazing the Bleeding Edge of TPS movement that has elevated Festergut into the target dummy di tutti target dummies.
We tanks, as a rule, spend our careers locked in a brutal, no-holds-barred cage match with the Random Number Generator. We work to eliminate corner-cases, and make sure that on both short time-windows and long time-windows we can remain healable through whatever a boss dishes out. We find ways to smooth out damage intake, as well as reduce it. We seize control over our own destinies by minimizing the effects of the RNG on our personal survival. We do the same thing with threat – even when hit or expertise weren’t king threat stats, we tended to prefer those as threat stats, for smoothing out threat production and ensuring a nice consistent threat ceiling for DPS to play with.
So Vengeance is a Great Idea, Right? Right.
Vengeance – and I’m sure everyone is familiar with it by now – gives a tank additional attack power based on how much damage s/he is taking. It’s a short-term rolling average with a rapid decay. It’s intended to give tanks an additional scaling mechanism with gear, so as to make threat less of an issue in late-expansion content. It’s worth noting that in actuality, Vengeance has more of an impact in the initial tier than in final tiers – it allows Blizzard to make tank threat somewhat less overpowered in T11, so that it can scale with DPS all the way through T14. Vengeance is attempting to solve a developer problem, even while it’s being packaged as solving a player problem.
Conceptually, this is something I heartily approve of. I miss the threat game, and being able to completely ignore threat for the majority of the Wrath expansion was pretty disappointing. Even in ICC, where people were starting to report threat issues, I personally did almost all of my progression with a 245 weapon, roughly 1% hit, and 26 expertise. Very low threat stats, overall, but it was still enough to stay ahead of the DPS – without Tricks, or Misdirect, or any other hoops to jump through. Paying attention to threat stats, and balancing them against survival stats is one of the things that makes tank gearing interesting, and that was sorely lacking in Wrath. So far, I’m completely on board with Blizzard.
Where It All Goes Horribly Horribly Wrong
I’ve spent a couple of paragraphs on background, so hopefully we’re now all on the same page. Vengeance has a few major implementation issues. The first, and most important, is that while is scales positively with one survival stat – Stamina, it scales negatively with another – avoidance. It’s worth considering that the stat it scales positively with is a short time-window survival stat, and the stat it scales negatively with is a long time-window survival stat. It’s worth noting further that increasing your avoidance reduces the consistency of Vengeance. It reduces time-to-stack, it reduces average stack size, and it increases the variability of the stack size. While Vengeance may well be relatively stable for tanks in T11 content, if Wrath is any indication, it will give fits to tanks in T14 content.
Currently, raiding T10 content, Vengeance causes quite a few headaches that we’ve had to adapt to. First and foremost, avoiding damage in the first couple of seconds of an encounter will basically cause DPS to have to hold off. Sixty seconds in, avoidance streaks are a non-issue, but those first 2-3 swings are critical for the fight. On light hitting bosses, like Marrowgar, we’ve found ourselves searching for ways to take additional damage, so as to keep Vengeance stacked a little bit higher. That’s right – I stand in fire. To me, this indicates a major failure in Vengeances implementation. If it’s causing me to seek out additional (consistent) damage sources in order to give my DPS a threat ceiling that they can rely on, it’s simply not working the way it should.
Given that Vengeance’s variability matters only in the first few swings of a fight, I’m worried that on progression DPS-race bosses – bosses which traditionally are a brutal punishment on tanks, as well – we’ll find ourselves calling wipes if the first couple of swings miss. Typically, on those fights, if DPS has to back off at all, you lose. Early avoidance therefore means, you lose. This is something that we can only weakly influence through gearing – we’ll always have avoidance, and the first few hits will always be extremely variable because of that. Vengeance is RNG that we can’t realistically defeat.
I use a mod called Vengeance Status. It’s simple, lightweight, it’s just a small bar that fills up as your vengeance stacks up, and empties as it decays. It also gives a few useful numbers at the end of the fight (Max value, average value). In ICC last night, my average stack size on most bosses was in the 30% range. I’m hitcapped, very nearly expertise capped, I use a 2.6 speed 284 weapon. I find myself having to call out for DPS to be cautious on a very regular basis, simply because I’ve avoided a few hits, and my threat production feels completely dependant on getting reasonable levels of Vengeance up.
Vengeance contributes roughly 150% more AP than I have natively on gear. That translates, very roughly, to a full stack of Vengeance more than doubling my DPS/TPS output. Especially with the consolidation of raidbuffs, DPS players produce a much larger fraction of their fully-buffed DPS in 5-mans or soloing. Tanks produce a much smaller fraction of their peak TPS in those situations. Generally speaking, with low stacks of Vengeance, tanks can’t hold threat, but with full Vengeance, you leave the DPS so far behind that you might as well WoG instead of ShoR. In other words, in addition to the risks Vengeance presents in progression, it makes threat feel extremely imbalanced (in a bad way) everywhere else. Remember the good old days of taking off your pants for heroics? I miss pants.
Hope?
There is good news, though: Blizzard has some really easy options for fixing Vengeance. If you were to receive some Vengeance on avoidance – remove the negative scalar – it would serve it’s purpose very well. It should have a minimal impact on PVP, it would reduce it’s dependance on RNG, it would remove the counterintuitive reverse scaling, and it would fix the “first 3 swing” dependance. That would also, coincidentally, help tanks with the problem of outgearing old instances. Another option is for Blizzard to simply turn off Vengeance in PVP, and balance it properly for PVE – probably by removing the decay function. Another option is to give some of the benefit of Vengeance statically, reducing the RNG dependance.
Vengeance is broken, Blizzard. It’s counter-intuitive, it’s frustrating, and most importantly – it’s not fun. Fix plz.
