Vengeance Changes!

First off:

Vengeance will now apparently only affect survival abilities. Your Word of Glories, your Shield Barriers, your Frenzied Regenerations - these are going to be boosted by how much damage you're taking. However, the damage you deal will not.

Here's why you should be happy about that:

As anyone who reads this blog regularly would know, I have some big problems with Vengenace. While I think that the mechanic had noble intentions, it's had some big flaws, and has led to some really frustrating problems, from making tank swaps way harder to the the fact that it only scales with the content, and not your gear.

Let's take a trip back to the late days of Wrath, which was the environment that spawned vengeance.

Back when we were climbing Icecrown Citadel in order to take down the Lich King, we were also dealing with the biggest case of stat inflation the game has ever had. My Rogue, for instance, was at something like 54% base critical strike chance. Yes, every attack he made was more likely to crit than not. Granted, some of this was the existence of talents that would boost these ratings, but the gear did not help.

A big part of the reason it didn't was that as DPS characters got higher and higher crit, haste, and armor penetration (this one was a particular problem, as the more of it  you had, the more valuable more of it was, which is probably why it got the axe,) tanks would simply be stacking up dodge, parry, and block rating.

Now sure, as item levels went up, the tanks would get more strength or more agility, which helped somewhat, but really, they couldn't keep up. When the Fire Mage is getting a crit two out of three Fireballs, she's probably also going to have a constant stream of massive Pyroblasts beefing her damage up by a ton.

So they wanted to help tanks' damage scale with their gear. The idea was to link it to their health. The problem, though, was that you might get into a situation where the tank wasn't really tanking, like, say, in PvP, where they're just trying to be super-powered and indestructible. So rather than having a straight health to AP conversion, they based it on damage you had recently taken.

And that's why Vengeance is so weird.

Now, Vengeance has changed a lot since then, but here's something to take into account: tank stats are basically going away. Tanks will get to have plenty of crit and haste to boost their damage along with the DPS.

Admittedly, tank Masteries don't boost damage, but it might be enough with crit and haste to keep tank damage up high enough that they'll scale alongside DPS.

The really exciting thing here is that we'll now be able to do our full damage potential while in content we outgear AND WHEN SOLOING. Without Vengeance, Blizzard can balance tank damage higher (they're saying roughly 75% of DPS) pretty consistently. Granted, with dual-specs, you don't really need to be able to solo as a tank, but for those of us who might not be so crazy about our class' DPS spec choices (I don't hate Ret, but I like Prot a whole lot more) this will be a welcome alternative.

Obviously, this also makes problems with co-tanks less troublesome. In the days of Vengeance, especially with big AoE packs, the first tank in is probably going to have aggro on the whole pack. This is frustrating for both tanks, as the first tank is taking more damage than they should and the second tank is standing there feeling kind of useless. With this change, you should be able (with a little tab-targeting) be able to go back to the days of splitting up a pack, something I haven't been able to do with much ease since Wrath.

And having Vengeance scale with survival abilities makes decent sense. While I don't know if it wouldn't be better to just have our survival abilities scale with our gear instead and simply let us be indestructible gods when we do older content, at the very least this is something that we'll be able to manage instead of being left feeling helpless when that equally-geared Fury Warrior pulls all the Shado-Pan monks off you at the beginning of SPM.