Not understanding Vengeance

Imagine the tooltip for Vengeance read "Your damage scales with the rest of your raid as if you wore dps gear instead of tanking gear." That's pretty much it.

Q: Why not just make it +threat?
A: Tanks tell us *constantly* that damage is fun and threat without damage is not fun. Devastate is a much more fun button than Sunder Armor.

Q: Why make me have to worry about threat?
A: Because it's part of your job. A fight where there is no real danger of losing threat means half those buttons on your bar don't do much.

Q: Why not make tanks wear dps gear?
A: A few reasons. The big one is that tanks care about survival so they want to gear for survival. The bear solution works okay, but I suspect if they had the choice, the druids would rather see us itemize bear leather (if we could solve all the skewed distribution problems that led us to the current goal in the first place).

Now, it would be awesome if tanks did consider dps stats more seriously, and maybe outside of the instagib environment of Lich King, they will. Back in the day, tanks at least have say swords and rings for +threat fights even if they didn't use them all the time.

Q: Why does Vengeance needs to fall off at all?
A: Because we want you to care about actually hitting your buttons. You should be good at threat because you know when to use a Shield Slam for burst threat, not because of a nearly-passive aura that makes stuff stick to you like glue. If we wanted Vengeance to solve every problem of tanking, we would just make Defensive Stance et al. give you a 1000% threat modifier such that you'd never have problems.

Q: But if Vengeance falls off, we'll wipe.
A: That's not the intent. You have Shield Slam and similar abilities. You have a lot of threat generating tools. Heck, you have Taunt much of the time.

Q: What is the role of Vengeance in PvP?
A: Hopefully irrelevant. If making it dispellable isn't sufficient, we'll simply turn it off.

Q: Why can't tanks do competitive damage in PvP?
A: Because they chose the tank role instead of the dps role. Tanking comes with enormous advantages that are helpful in PvP, such as being hard to kill, hard to control and having good control of your own. That will be even more useful in the Rated BGs of Cataclysm.

Q: [I don't like that design. I prefer a different design.]
A: Feedback like that is useful to a point, but understand that your feedback will be more valuable if it does align with our goals. Saying "I think tanks should do the same damage as dps specs," is fine feedback, but it's something we're unlikely to change.

Q u o t e:
Oh, so the goal is to make things fun?

In fact, yes. :)

It's subjective so not every tank will agree, but we believe it is more fun to hold threat because of dealing damage than to hold threat through other mechanics. Granted there are probably tanks who would be content to do 20 dps, so long as they could hold aggro. When you're dealing with an audience this large, you can't limit yourself to "Would *someone* like it this way?" You have to do what is right for the game overall.

Vengeance's RNG nature shouldn't have big impacts in short time scales. It's designed to be more of a long term mechanic such that it slowly builds and slowly falls off.

For example, Ret paladins (especially pre-Cataclysm) have a lot of damage that is based on slow stacks caused by white swings. Paladins don't worry that their damage will be very random, because over long time slices the RNG will generally work in their favor.

Don't think of Vengeance in terms of burst threat or Shield Slams. Think of it in terms of autoattacks over the long haul. In a fight like Yogg, Vengeance isn't what it going to make the difference between grabbing an add quickly. That's what Shield Slam is for. Vengeance is for a long fight, like those boss fights where the lock or the Fury warrior starts to creep up on your threat (particularly in the absence of Tricks of the Trade and Misdirect).

Q u o t e:
But ignoring that, you've said that this is the ability that's supposed to scale us in terms of threat and damage with DPSers who get more dps stats and gem for damage while our budgets and gemming are "wasted" on avoidance/EH.

How does that work in your example? What's the long term damage increase that's going to allow a fury warrior or a warlock to "creep up" on us? They're doing mostly the same amount of damage from about 5 seconds in as they are 3-5 minutes later, as soon as their various debuffs are up. Some classes don't even need to wait for debuffs to be up and just launch straight into their rotation.

It depends on the encounter, but dps need to generally give the tank a moment to get solid aggro. That's not changing. It should feel like it does today. What we're trying to fix is the problem where tanks playing 100% optimally (or even much less optimally) can stay ahead of the rest of the group early in content, but have trouble the more patches come out because the dps are scaling. If you've ever seen the dps start to creep up on you, that's the problem we're trying to solve. If you don't see that phenomenon today, which it sounds like from your post, then don't worry about it.

Vengeance diminishes at half the rate if you avoid the attack. Furthermore, absorbs don't count at all -- if you absorb an attack, it counts as if you were hit. Again though, I think this concern is over too short a time slice. You're not often going to face the situation where if you dodge 10 times in a row that Vengeance falls off, and even if it does, you should be able to get it back up again before dps start to pull off of you. If you manage to hold threat fine in Icecrown today without Vengeance, then you should be fine with Vengeance. If you're very dependent on Tricks today to keep yourself ahead of the dps, then you're going to be more dependent on Vengeance (but given that there are a lot of tanks who aren't operating at the razor's edge of threat generation today, you might also want to look at what they are doing differently).

That said, if avoidance becomes this huge albatross, it would be easy for us to change it and let it count fully for Vengeance duration. The reason we implemented it the way we did was because we didn't want to encourage weird exploits, such as dragging the crappy trash mob to beat on you through the entire instance. But there are other ways to solve that problem too.

Q u o t e:
The real issue is that Vengance doesn't do a thing when you're hitting your buttons. Vengance, in its current form, has nothing to do with what you do. It only happens when you get hit, counterintuitive, reactive mechanic instead of an active one.

Vengeance is an attack power boost. If you aren't maximizing that attack power by hitting the right buttons, then you aren't making effective use of the mechanic. Your argument is like saying that Blessing of Might isn't an attack power boost because it 's caused by something else (the paladin) and not by what you do.

Q u o t e:
in the first 15 seconds you and the dps both have cooldowns. thus trying to solve that problem via vengeance is going to fail.

if after 2+ minutes, all cooldowns used, heroism/bloodlust used, you have someone right on your threat, and the paladin ends up blowing hand of salvation on them, thats the situation they want to fix.
IE they want effects like salvation to be emergency use, and not "look, i caught up to the tank again" use.

as a fury warrior who has had to drop to auto attacks with occasional lower end tanks, i really appreciate this change if it works.

Exactly. Vengeance shouldn't affect the first few seconds of a fight much. If you have trouble doing that today, Vengeance won't solve that problem for you. If you don't have trouble today, you probably won't in Cataclysm.

It should help with that Fury warrior from Xurk's example. If Fury warriors never catch up with you, then you don't need Vengeance. For everyone else, it will add a little more buffer.

Q u o t e:
Yes exactly. That's what he wants. Tell your DPS not to be dumb. He said he didnt want a constant +1000% threat so that threat never mattered. Threat will still matter and the tank has to be smart and the DPS cant be dumb. Sorry. No free pass on that one.

Vengeance is meant to fix one thing and one thing only. A lot of people replyting in this thread might not see it because honestly your raid's DPS might not be good enough. It's meant to fix the problem where even though the tank is doing everything well, and that Fury warrior waited a few seconds before starting to DPS.. Solidly into the fight that Fury warrior STILL has to just sit there for moments at a time and autoattack so to not pass the tank. Nothing the tank can do about it. He is pressing all the right buttons. Nothing the Fury warrior can do about it. He gave the tank enough of a head start but he still need to autoattack at times because his threat generation is higher than the tanks. THAT's the only problem vengeance is meant to fix. When the threat production of the DPS actually outpaces that of the tank. If the DPS in your raid sucks and they're not chomping at the threat ceiling while DPSing then don't worry about it

Yes. Tricks of the Trade and Misdirect (and Vigilance if you're a warrior) can offset this to some extent. However we don't want those abilities to be tank crutch abilities. We want the tank to be able to maximize threat instead. But read Cynddl's post again.