Protection: Impending Victory (Victory Rush)

I have searched lightly for this and found no relevant thread so I figured I'd go ahead and post my small amount of math and thinking I've had going behind this.

The premise is pretty much these three things:
Victory Rush
Impending Victory
Glyph of Victory Rush
Field Dressing

From what I understand the math to calculate for how much you would be healed using Victory Rush from a proc would be:
0,05*1,06*1,2*1,5=0,0954

Which means that a Victory Rush proc should heal you for 9% of your maximum health.

Once the boss hits 20% and we assume you're spamming devastate and using Victory Rush every proc avaliable, would it be reasonable to simplify the rotation down to:

Devastate -> Devastate -> Victory Rush

If we go with this it means that simplified you will be healed for 9% of your health every 4,5 second. If we have a tank with 150k hp (an imo realistical number). This would mean that they would have a HPS of:

(150000*0,0954)/4,5=3180

Correct?

This would in turn mean that a warrior tank during the last 20% of a boss would be able to have a stable selfhealing on himself for 3,18k HPS, gimping threat and damage.

I don't know what numbers healers are at these days but would this not be quite viable?

3k HPS is pretty awful considering HPS are in the 10k marks from what i can tell in just 5 man heroics.

I think Impending Victory might be underrated at the moment. Sure the heal is small, but most tanks are taking Field Dressing and the glyph is just a major anyways. So trusting your math 9% makes the heal similar sized to a potion.

And since it comes at the end of the boss fight, this is when healers are most likely to be struggling with mana right? Of course it could be useful as well for any boss that does a soft enrage/berserk at the end like Patchwerk.

Also, don't forget that the heal also does threat and VR damage from what I can tell will scale very well with Vengeance. So your threat won't be that adversely effected.

Anyone else willing to test this? I will once I start tanking raids, but that probably won't be until the end of the month sadly.

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Originally Posted by Kazeyonoma

3k HPS is pretty awful considering HPS are in the 10k marks from what i can tell in just 5 man heroics.

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I would have agreed with you prepatch. But it is a fair bit of healing and I just can't see any major dissadvantage with it, maybe that in order to benefit asmuch as possible you'd have to stack stamina, and the fact that the glyph itself costs 200g on my server at the moment.

I have been using this talent lately for progression fights and am loving it. I have 189k buffed and it usually heals me for around 18k every use. But you have to be smart with its use ... you have to be aware of your healers mana situation and the incoming abilities of the boss.

If the boss is under 20% your threat should be so far ahead that you could actually not attack at all in the last 20% and no one would come close ... so threat isn't an issue.

But because prot warrior dmg is so high these days and definitely contributes to boss kill this is the only thing you have to look out for. If its a 20% burn phase and your healers are good on mana and there is no incoming abilities that will knock you down a bunch ... you don't need to worry about it to much, but you will still get procs off the devastates which normally come with your rotation anyways and victory rush crits for about 25k at times so it ain't to shabby on the dmg either. But if its under 20% and your healers are struggling with mana and you know there is going to be lots of consistent dmg in coming I spam devastate only and chain the procs and I can tell you it is very helpful.

For 2 points there isn't going to be any other talent that is going to give you what this talent does, i put this in last after talking to a few top tanks about using it, the only real thing left to put your last 2 points in are really going to be threat/unneeded talents so you may as well put them in a talent that could possibly save your life near the end of a boss fight.

I mean eventually with time this ability will not be needed ... its not really needed for to many normal mode fights for my guild anymore save maybe cho'gall/Nefarian but it definitely comes in handy in heroic 10/25 mans. Our healers are fairly geared atm though and I haven't heard a healer say oom in a normal mode for a while now ... but for the guys who aren't super geared this talent will help out a lot.

the major problem is having to spend 2 talent points, and a glyph as well as gimp your damage and threat just to have this, I'm not saying it isn't at least a viable thing to try, but i'm already struggling with figuring out where to take out talents for more utility I'd like, let alone 2 for this and a glyph slot. My problem is that you're spending all of the above, for only the last 1/5th of a fight, while other talents can be used to help throughout the fight. likewise you can argue that doing more damage would finish the boss quicker and therefore not stretch your healer's mana as thin across a longer fight. tank dps isn't exactly trivial anymore, while most raiders are doing 15k, tanks are still putting out 5-7k numbers, that's 30-45% damage over the duration of an entire fight.

What other talents are you putting 2 points in. Thunderstruck or deep wounds I would assume ?. I don't have either of these talents and I have victory rush and I pull an easy 9-11k on 90% of boss fights. As i said even if you don't need to spam this at the end of the fight the dps on victory rush isn't any kind of gimp if you use it in a normal rotation it hits quite hard. The only time you would loose dps with this talent is if you needed to spam it to keep yourself alive near the end of a boss fight and even if you had to do that it would be more beneficial to live then it would be to do a little bit more dps. Basically let the dps do their job ... dps ... and you do yours ... Live.

Step into heroic 10/25's then come back in and tell me if you want a little more dps in the last 20% or for your tank to stay alive :)

IMO, its use is more or less situational, i.e., your healers are having trouble with mana and are constantly running out around 20%, or youre on a boss like Maloriak, and are taking increased damage during the last 20% of the fight. If youre wiping on a boss before 20%, then the talent is completely useless. Any major CD should more than cover for impending victory, i.e., enraged regeneration.

My personal experience using the talent 2/2 with the glyph, and other aforementioned talents, suggests the talent is not worth the cost. Additionally, I cannot recall a single attempt where the talent made the difference between downing a boss and wiping. Just my 2 cents, im no expert.

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Originally Posted by Kazeyonoma

tank dps isn't exactly trivial anymore, while most raiders are doing 15k, tanks are still putting out 5-7k numbers, that's 30-45% damage over the duration of an entire fight.

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That's 30-45% of your DPSers damage, obviously... assuming somewhere around 18 non-healers in a 25man raid group, for encounters with 2 tanks you're looking at (16*15k)+(2*7k)=254k DPS of which the tanks are doing 14k meaning they're responsible for 14/254=5.5% (2.75% each) of the raid's damage. Overall, if a tank is dropping even 2k DPS you're looking at less than a 1% overall drop (~0.78%) in total raid DPS.

That's in exchange for what amount to an extra potion cooldown becoming available every 3-4 GCDs at the end of a fight when, as was pointed out, they tend to be most useful.

That's my relatively simplified take on it as I haven't had a chance to raid in Cata yet, but it's certainly something I'll be trying out for myself.

Like i said, it's a situational talent, along with a lot of our other "filler" talents, it's possible to work it in, and will likely be a variable talent and glyph that people decide to use based on their individual needs.

By no means is this talent a must have or anything like that, what it came down to for me was either ... deep wounds/thunderstuck/booming voice/impending victory so as i saw it ... threat, threat, useless, survival, and our raid dps is fantastic and im pretty happy with the 10k or so I'm doing lets go for some heals this talent is amazing for cho'gall/Nefarian so if nothing else test it on those fights. Impending 3rd phase crakle ? dev/rush, dev/rush, dev dev dev/rush its faptastic for that. And really good for the shite fest that is cho'gall 25%-0% phase

Your math is slightly off.

Keep in mind the 20% from Field Dressing is "an additional 20%". You still also benefit from the 6% increase to all healing received.

0.05 * 1.06 * 1.2 * 1.5 = 0.0954 = 9.54%
Not a huge difference but a difference of half a percent when dealing with health pools as large as we're talking can be quite a bit.

Also, can Victory Rush's heal crit? Might be another factor in the equation to consider, though in many cases with percentage of total they can't crit.

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Originally Posted by Quinafoi

Your math is slightly off.

Keep in mind the 20% from Field Dressing is "an additional 20%". You still also benefit from the 6% increase to all healing received.

0.05 * 1.06 * 1.2 * 1.5 = 0.0954 = 9.54%
Not a huge difference but a difference of half a percent when dealing with health pools as large as we're talking can be quite a bit.

Also, can Victory Rush's heal crit? Might be another factor in the equation to consider, though in many cases with percentage of total they can't crit.

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Thank you, it is fixed. As for the ability, it can crit damage wise but since the healing is not reflected by the damage done but is a flat proportion of your health I don't think and have never seen it crit, it is most likely affected by abilities such as Last Stand however.

If it was 100% chance everytime you devastate, but only heals 4% hp on a 20 sec cooldown maybe it would be viable.

I don't see why, it seems that the power of impending victory is spamming heals not saving it when needed. 9.5% healing is still less than a deathstrike.

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Originally Posted by Muffin Man

I don't see why, it seems that the power of impending victory is spamming heals not saving it when needed. 9.5% healing is still less than a deathstrike.

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The difference is that DKs are balanced around death strike, warriors are balanced without it. Still, if I spec into it (which is pretty rare these days with all the aoe tanking) 16-17k Heals are far from useless.

I have dual specced prot/prot just because of impending victory. Anything that helps your healer near the end of the fight when mana is low makes a huge difference in the likelihood your raid will survive. In a close fight, it dramatically increases your raid's chances to succeed - something that should be considered.

Talents like gag order an thunderstruck have little effect on a boss fight unless you are relegated to add detail. They can easily be shifted around. Likewise, impending victory and last stand have little use in trash mob round up. These talents are situationally mutually exclusive but good enough to each deserve their own spec.

I have an aoe tank spec which I use for mobs and add detail, and a boss tank spec with impending victory. Impending victory's heal scales with stamina. We are seeing 15k per and it procs a lot during a part of a battle where you have enough threat lead that you can afford to change your rotation to devastate, devastate, victory rush.

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Originally Posted by Booi

The difference is that DKs are balanced around death strike, warriors are balanced without it. Still, if I spec into it (which is pretty rare these days with all the aoe tanking) 16-17k Heals are far from useless.

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I never said it was useless, I just don't see the point in saving it unless already topped off. But if you insist on saving it in current form you can go ahead and do so since the proc lasts a very generous 20 seconds. You just can't guarantee it'll proc immediately after usage. But like you said warriors aren't balanced around it, so we should be fine in the 1 - 3 gcds it'll likely take to reproc it.

Impending Victory isn't underrated. It really is fairly poor.

There are a number of very simple changes that could be made to the design which would make it a lot more useful and viable as a tool, but unfortunately Impending Victory was not once changed on beta from when it first appeared in the game even though this feedback was given by many Warriors.

Basically pick any two of the three following changes:
a) Much larger
b) More reliable over the whole fight (not a proc and not based on mob HP)
c) Had improved threat and/or was added to Sword and Board

...and you would have a really nice talent. The lack of any one of those three points makes it a very poor talent.

It is unreliable, doesn't fit well into our rotation, and despite all its problems actually is a pretty small amount of healing done. Honestly, Impending Victory is not going to save your healers mana in most cases. They will continue to cast heals on the MT and not be waiting for an unreliable heal used at the mercy of the tank who has other things to think about. Additionally, if your healer goes OOM you will likely die with or without Impending Victory as it is not nearly enough HPS to keep you up for any meaningful amount of time.

Yes, it's useful in some very edge cases--but all around, it's a very weak talent. It's mostly disappointing because it has the potential to be a great talent but was never really worked on since it was first implemented and tested.

As I see it (as a healer), I'ld rather you did more DPS, and if you REALLY need that 10k heal, I'll just let a DPS die at 5% of the bosses HP, because the damage we lose there is countered by your Deep Wounds ticking (or Thunderstruck dmg)