Vengeance And Vigilance.

Back in February, I extolled the virtues of Vigilance as the best tanking ability in the game. I spoke about how to apply it to tanks, despite the marginal and wholly unimportant threat loss. Now they've changed it, and guess what? It's even better than it ever was before. Before patch 4.0.1, tanks would more often than not whine incessantly about their infinitesimal threat loss when a warrior tank rightfully applied Vigilance to them, now, all I hear is the "revolutionary idea" to put it on another tank. This idea is far from revolutionary, as I know for a fact I'm not the only tank to apply it to another before the patch. As a result of the patch, Vigilance has gone from completely amazing to mind-bogglingly awesome. Not only does it retain the 3% damage reduction, as well as the infinite Taunt refreshing (the two abilities that made it so great), but it also has forgone the lackluster threat transferring in exchange for a direct attack power increase based on Vengeance as if 20% of the damage was done to you.

What is Vengeance? Essentially, Vengeance is a stacking buff to the damage we deal, based on the damage we receive, capped by a percentage of our stamina. It's a passive ability given to every tank spec, designed to give us increasing threat gains (by way of stronger attacks) the higher tier gear we access. So moving into a higher tier of raiding, we get hit harder, so we deal more damage due to Vengeance. As we start to get gear for that level of raid, we're being hit less hard, however, we have much more stamina, further increasing our maximum Vengeance stacks to compensate. Due to this passive ability, we never have to worry about the dps getting out of hand due to our gear stacking just as well as theirs, a common problem in later Icecrown tier raiding.

So, Vengeance will work quite well for tanks all around due to being scaleable, as well as allowing us to hit surprisingly hard for a tank. The other day while in Icecrown, a warlock forgot to dismiss his pet and jumped down the hole after Blood Queen Lana'thel, and his pet ran to him, dragging the entire procession of trash along one side with him. I did my tankly duties and grabbed the mess up as well as I could, in the process taking massive damage and stacking my Vengeance to insane heights. I easily topped over ten thousand attack power, and because I was able to attack so many targets, I quickly found myself doing over eleven thousand dps! Only our resident star death knight was able to top me. This example just goes to show the amazing power held within Vengeance, which will reach even more astonishing numbers by the time we reach Cataclysm raiding, where tanks will have one hundred thousand to one hundred fifty thousand health!

How does this all relate to Vigilance? Since Vigilance now gives a portion of Vengeance to you, putting it on a dps is almost pointless, unless they're not too bright and tend to pull first most of the time. Putting it on another tank, will copy 20% of that Vengeance to you, giving you a significant advantage over other tanks, especially in a single target situation. You're not stealing their threat, or their Vengeance, so they have nothing to worry about, you're merely boosting your own. This makes tank swap fights even easier, due to your already considerable attack power bonus. The only danger is in accidentally pulling before you're supposed to, which may happen on more than one occasion if one is not careful. Before these changes, I recall doing 10-11k tps, and it was a pretty big deal. After the changes I can easily reach 14-15k tps, and with other bonuses I can occasionally reach beyond 20k tps.

There is only one downside I foresee happening as we enter into Cataclysm, which I was hoping to avoid after the single-mindedness of Wrath's tanking community. That is, with Vengeance capping with your maximum stamina, I can see a lot of tanks heading into the expansion with the idea to stack stamina derpa-derpa. Unfortunately, the way the ability is set up at the moment, there is very little reason not to. In Wrath, I resisted the fad to stack stamina at the expense of other stats like armor, because a healthy balance of stats is always better. Sadly, stamina has now become king and armor has been nerfed to a shadow of its former glory, making single stat stacking a very appealing idea. As I go into the expansion, I will be maintaining that a balance of stats like mastery as well as stamina and armor will be the ideal way to go as a tank. I guess the only way to find out will be to play the game and see.

Thanks for reading, and tune in next entry for: Survivability Vs Threat.