So 8.2 has some buffs for Vengeance but it won’t be enough as Vengeance is currently the worst tank spec by quite a margin. Easily the squishiest of all the tanks and doesnt have the damage to compensate for it, being well behind both Warriors and Paladins who are both MUCH more surviveable.
I suggest the following:
1: Make Feed the Demon baseline. We should have a way of reducing the cooldown of a main defensive, just like Paladins reducing the CD of Shield of The Rightous by throwing judgements without majorly nerfing our soul generation and single target damage.
2: Give us a new defensive ability. Just a regular old 20% damage reduction for 8 sec. on a 2 min. timer. We need another defensive CD, Metamorphosis is nice but it is on a long timer and its the only real aoe defensive we have. We are the tank class with the worst defensive abilities by quite a margin and our self healing does not make up for it.
3: Increase our damage. At the beginning of BFA, Vengeance damage was very good, sometimes rivaling that of dps but we have scaled very poorly with item increases and are now mediocre at best. If our niche is to be the squishy tank (which we would still be with my proposed changes), at least make us the high dps tank. Being mobile and having some interesting utility is NOT enough.
A boost to Immolation Aura and/or Sigil of Flame would help a lot.
Honestly blizz just need to get a grip. VDH niche was always mega self heals, and good AoE. They took both them away, and gave us absolutely nothing in return.
Tanking a 15 FH on my VDH is a horrible experience, one slight mistake and i’m dead. Always feel so so sorry for the healer. Tanked a 15 FH on my pally last night, what an absolute walk in the park. It’s meant to be a rough week with necro, I literally had to kite 2 packs in the whole dungeon. And was pulling decent size packs… It’s worlds apart tanking on a pally/war compared to dru/dh.
They need to give VDH twice as much self healing and 20% more dps. Or like you said, a way to maintain spikes 24/7 like all the other classes can.
There’re even more issues. THREAT. It is so difficult to maintain aggro. Espiecially during this, skittish, week. People are used to all of these either warrs or palas and their super burst aoe dmg and I find it very difficult to proceed further in dung because of that.
There’re only 2 aoe spells for vdh that you can use without any condition: sigil of flame(very low dmg) and immolation aura. Immolation aura is not enough for threat purposes majority of time. You have to double fracture and Spirit Bomb to be able to hold it. So it takes you 3 GCDs to be sure that you won’t lose aggro… that’s very uncomfortable. Imagine playing no SB build… haha…
As far as I know all tanks have spammable aoe abilities. Why vdh have to struggle with threat so much?
Hence why I suggest a boost to the damage of Immolation Aura and Sigil of Flame. Boosting their damage will also increase threat. Sustained aoe isn’t horrible (although very mediocre for a low survival tank) but you are right that burst lacks something.