The row is badly designed, soul-rending is not competitive with the other two options by miles, fracture gives a huge damage bump while feed the demon gives a large survivability bump.
my suggestion would be to switch infernal armor with soul-rending and then tune infernal armor up to be competitive with the other two options, perhaps bake in an extra 5% haste to FTD so that it isn’t a complete defensive talent?
or maybe make FTD increase the fury generation of shear so that you can get more soul cleaves out?
a tuned up infernal armor could grant armor based on x amount of agility and deal more fire damage to melee attackers
Having very recently picked up DH (dinged 120 yesterday and tanked my first mythic+2 about 30 mins ago) I have to agree that where i’ve experimented tanking without Fracture, it just feels terrible.
Fracture is just too complete of an ability, generates the pain and souls you actually need, and the cooldown regulates your play into clear spend/build portions whereas Shear does not.
I see Feed The Demon has clear defensive benefits but even so, the extra souls and pain from Fracture are just a bit hard for me to think about going without now.
Yeah I can see it becoming a necessity at the higher keys but i’m nowhere near there yet, I need the dungeons to scale up a bit more. At current my tankiness is absurd and i’m barely dropping below 80-85% health across the dungeons i’ve tanked and i’m only using Demon Spikes when I feel like it at the start of pulls, but not finding I need to.
Making sure I had full essences (yeah they’re green, but they’re all pretty awesome ones for Veng) before I started to mythic tank might be part of why.
Having several Infernal Armour stacked seems to help as well (I think my reduction atm with immo up is something like 59-60%). So atm i’m finding I only use demon spikes if neither immolation nor meta (from glutton/VoP) is up, which isn’t often!
What’s harder mythic? Because I can tank up to +19 with Gluttony. No idea about higher, though this will have to be revised in SL. I honestly think that the Fiery Brand build will become meta in 9.0.
