Defending Impending Victory

Every tanking site I read continuously says to avoid IV. Here on Tankspot the guide says intervene should get the talent points before Impending Victory. When the final rush is on and the boss has started it's soft enrage, the healers are lower on mana than any other time, threat of the tank should be stable and far ahead of the dps, how can it be said that 5% (7.5% with glyphs) on a 170k tank not be a saving grace and a mana saving, tank saving device?

In Theory and Mechanics, takethecake did some basic calculations discussing the amount of heals IV brings, I've finished off an ugly amount of bosses from 25% life when the healer died along with 1 or 3 dps. With last stand putting me at 202k hp and getting around a 15k heal every 3 to 6 seconds (depending on procs and how long last stand stays up) total avoidance letting me skip 1/3 of the hits of those bosses. (13% dodge 14% parry, whatever miss % I don't quite know) how is it that in favor of damage talents this rather large survivability gift goes to the wayside?
Is aggro vastly different on the higher end of things, considering I hold off 15k dps while windowing, that prot warriors need to lose a solid minute on heroic bosses and more on raid bosses of this slight reduction in healing needs?
Perhaps I'm missing the assumption that a well balanced raid or group shouldn't need the tank to lighten the load of the healer, but then, what's the point of every other defensive stat?
Is this lost in the difference between tankability, survivability and aggro?

I'm sure my math could use some buttressing, or a proper tear down to argue the otherside, but if aggro is such that we don't need much in the way of hit or expertise, why skip this?

Wick, of Dolus Nomen Hic, Dalaran

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Originally Posted by Wick

In Theory and Mechanics

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Did you actually try it in a raid situation? Many of us used any possible talent choices on ptr and made our own opinions based on that. The only fights where it really comes really handy are Twilight Council & Cho'gall.

You can't even get any benefit on fights like eg Nefarian, Chimaeron, Maloriak, Magmaw due to fight mechanics or kite duty.

If that 15k heal is the only way to keep you alive either
a) the encounter is broken
b) you should bring a protpaladin instead *shrug*
c) there are other issues you should address first (most likely)

You might just want to point us to your wws examples where IV saved your day/raid and taking other talents choices wouldn't have killed the boss earlier.

Like a lot of our talents they have their use and place. On some bosses IV might help out the last 20% of the encounter, the main question is what you give up to get this talent. Personal I run a dual spec prot talent and I am goig to test IV to see it's potential. Glyphed and specced corrected it could heal for 9% HP (5% +20% +50%) every 6s on average which for me means about 16-17K healing / 6 seconds. I can see places where that's good but as the above poster stated, we can't rely on the talent ever.

Next patch no one will use revenge for single target DPS, so you have 2 points available for IV. While it is a situational skill, it is still quite useful when it happens.

Magmaw to help out healers.
Maloriak, I barely even need heals on p2 with impeding victory, my paladin healer can safely exorcism spam if he wanted to.
Atramedes if people go full retard and we want to 3man the last 20% for fun.
It will proc a couple of times on halfus due to 3 drakes.
On alakir you barely need any heals with impeding victory, you can 2man it if you really want to.
Elementium monstrosity.
Chogall, p2 damage overall is extremely low though.
Nefarian if you are tanking.

When we start doing hardmodes I'll gladly take the 20k heals every 5 seconds.

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Originally Posted by gacktt

Next patch no one will use revenge for single target DPS, so you have 2 points available for IV. While it is a situational skill, it is still quite useful when it happens.

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Why would you say that? There's nothing in the patch notes about revenge....

In it's current state, devastate is more powerful than revenge on th PTR. They haven't changed revenge, but you have the option of buffing devastate by 15%. Easier rotation, you free 2 talent points and IV makes sense to use since your rotation basically is SS > DEV > DEV > DEV. If you have a SnB procc, restart with SS. If rend is about to fall off, use TC to refresh it pref. at the CD prior to SS being of CD. Below 20% you can do the same and just slam VR at every procc.

Optimally for dps and possibly TPS you can keep shockwave and concussion blow in the mix given with the 15% buff to devastate the net win is probably minimal. Devastate also has the power to procc SS and VR.

With the above said the PTR situation will likely change. Revenge is a natural ability in our rotation and is quite odd to just have as a multi-target ability. Revenge hopefully will be buffed to be competitive and useful again.

I'd love to see some parses or something to show that the buff to deva is making it that competitive to revenge (esp. talented revenge). Devastate is soooo amazingly weak on live right now. I'm surprised to hear that a 15% buff is causing revenge to fall out of the loop. In fact it's the poor state of devastate on live currently that helps impact the problems with impending victory.

Based on my (admittedly limited) raiding experience, I think there are two basic problems with Impending Victory:

1) The talent is just too limiting. Its best-case scenario gets you a good bit less than 25% 'usable' time, because the last 25% of a bosses health bar is execute-DPSed quickly, and because so many bosses feature enrage mechanics that favor popping Heroism stacked with cooldowns.

Even then, when it happens, it requires drastically reducing your DPS - as others have mentioned, right now at least Devastate is terrible for damage. This is non-trivial, especially if you're tanking in a 10-man raid where you are probably contributing 10-12% of your raid's total DPS.

2) The other point is just that - at least for my healers - when we wipe to them running out of mana, it's because someone stood in fire too long, didn't dodge when they were supposed to, or something similar, and we wipe early. It's not a close thing. We have never had a cleanly executed attempt where we simply wiped because my healers ran out of mana.

Maybe hard modes will be different in that regard, but at the moment I don't think that my self-healing is all that important.


It's sort of a combination of the two of these things that makes me look askance at Impending Victory. It'd be one thing if there were clear fights where healers were running on fumes from healing me, or if Impending Victory were designed so that so many encounters didn't stack the deck against it from the start. The combination of the two just makes the talent very bad, in my opinion: it doesn't seem like tank healing is a very big focus this tier, and if it is, Impending Victory is entirely too dependent upon encounter design to be good at tank healing.

I'd spec it if I came across a fight where one or both of these variables changed, but from what I've seen so far, you might as well spend the points for extra damage.

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Originally Posted by Roarc

In it's current state, devastate is more powerful than revenge on th PTR. They haven't changed revenge, but you have the option of buffing devastate by 15%. Easier rotation, you free 2 talent points and IV makes sense to use since your rotation basically is SS > DEV > DEV > DEV. If you have a SnB procc, restart with SS. If rend is about to fall off, use TC to refresh it pref. at the CD prior to SS being of CD. Below 20% you can do the same and just slam VR at every procc.

Optimally for dps and possibly TPS you can keep shockwave and concussion blow in the mix given with the 15% buff to devastate the net win is probably minimal. Devastate also has the power to procc SS and VR.

With the above said the PTR situation will likely change. Revenge is a natural ability in our rotation and is quite odd to just have as a multi-target ability. Revenge hopefully will be buffed to be competitive and useful again.

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First of all, at 20k AP and a 460 DPS weapon Devastate does NOT beat Revenge on TPS. That includes both War Academy and Improved Revenge. Even at 1 point into Imp Revenge does this ability outdo Devastate. At the same numbers Shockwave & Conc Blow are at >50% extra damage compared to Devastate, hardly what I would call minimal. They even come close to Shield Slam (because they scale slightly better)

Feel free to present different numbers, but keep in mind that hitting a dummy in Orgrimmar or Stormwind is not the same as stabbing an angry dragon in the face. Vengeance gives a LOT of AP, which can tip the balance of damage on abilities, usually in favor of stuff that is NOT called "Devastate".

http://www.tankspot.com/showthread.p...944#post483944

This post seems to point to Devastate being better dps than Revenge, though still not better DPR.

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Vengeance gives a LOT of AP, which can tip the balance of damage on abilities,

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Devastate gets 4.1 damage per 14AP(+20% crit) after the patch. What's revenge's AP modifier? like 14%? no vengeance won't change it.

Devastate: 150% * 2.4 * 1.15 (WA) = 4.14
Revenge = 0.3105 * 14 * 1.6 (Imp.R) * 1.1 (Glyph) = 7.65072
That means it should scale 84.8% better. Without the talent it would be 15.5%, which is probably not enough to overcome GoDev + SnB, especially with Deep Wounds

I don't know where Koji got his numbers, so I can't comment on that.

Even if we use Devastate a little bit more in the future IV still is a sub-par talent.

The flaw is fundamental. Randomness and healing don't mix. Granted, at 50% chance you can get it if you want it. But you'd have to seriously spam Dev for that. Which we don't do. Especially in the execute, bloodlust, all-trinkets last 20% phase of an encounter.

Pretty easy for a warrior to do 8-10k sustained DPS throughout the fight. Rather unlikely anyone could catch up by the last 20% especially with DPS' lower than 100% threat modifier and threat reduction abilities.

True that. But still I will maintain my high-threat song&dance. Which has Devastate on a very low priority.

But I think I will have it in a second def spec. Somehow Arms and Fury don't work for me. So why not use it in a secondary spec and switch to it when it might be useful.

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Originally Posted by WarTotem

Devastate: 150% * 2.4 * 1.15 (WA) = 4.14
Revenge = 0.3105 * 14 * 1.6 (Imp.R) * 1.1 (Glyph) = 7.65072
That means it should scale 84.8% better. Without the talent it would be 15.5%, which is probably not enough to overcome GoDev + SnB, especially with Deep Wounds

I don't know where Koji got his numbers, so I can't comment on that.

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You missed Glyph of Devastate. Additionally, Devastate has a higher Crit rate from Sword and Board.

It probably depends on the exact setup (I will double check everything tonight--think I know what would cause our analysis to differ somewhat), but the issue is that one can argue that once Devastate even starts getting close to Revenge, dropping the 2 talent points required to prop Revenge up is worth the gains elsewhere. e.g. for those who have 33+ talents in Protection, they could drop those two points into Deep Wounds for an larger single-target TPS gain and a simpler rotation with no utility loss.

Revenge does need some buffage, and I also think it's wrong how much it relies on Improved Revenge to be viable.

Not that I like Impending Victory at all. I think it's pretty terrible and far too situational to be a staple talent.

Even if Devastate performs better with WA after the patch, I won't be taking Imp Revenge out of my rotation. I like the Damage per Rage, I like the fact that it hits another target if the situation comes up, as it often does (Our Omnitron kil the other night the other tank went down and I solo tanked the last 20% of the fight, tanking 2 trons at a time, as an example), and I like a somewhat less 2 dimensional rotation. Revenge is fun for me, and I'll still be effective using it, even if I can eke out 200 more tps or something with a Dev Spam build.

I'm not convinced on Impending Victory. There are so many good places to put those 2 points. I like that without the talent, it's a really big heal. If I could get it for free, I'd use it, but it's not worth the opportunity cost to me.

Don't get me wrong, I love Revenge. I personally just think it's a big mistake on Blizzard's part to:
a) Allow Improved Revenge to be the only viable way to use Revenge
b) Allow Revenge to even be moderately close to Devastate in damage

For as important as Revenge has always been to Prot Warriors, it has seen very little love or synergy in some time. (Keeping in mind that Revenge isn't even always usable as it requires avoidance to trigger and is non-viable while off-tanking in some scenarios.)

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Originally Posted by Kojiyama

Don't get me wrong, I love Revenge. I personally just think it's a big mistake on Blizzard's part to:
a) Allow Improved Revenge to be the only viable way to use Revenge
b) Allow Revenge to even be moderately close to Devastate in damage

For as important as Revenge has always been to Prot Warriors, it has seen very little love or synergy in some time. (Keeping in mind that Revenge isn't even always usable as it requires avoidance to trigger and is non-viable while off-tanking in some scenarios.)

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I'd love it if they'd just roll Imp Revenge into the base Revenge effect, untalented. It'd make Revenge easier to tune, as they wouldn't have to take into account people both with and without the talent, it would make it so that lower level prot tanks would have the same purpose of use on Revenge as level capped tanks, and it would free up 2 talent points in the tree. Right now, I feel like in order to get one of the "fun utility talents" like Safeguard, Impending Victory, Heavy Repercussions, etc. I have to either go 33 points in Prot, which really limits some of the outside tree choices, or take points out of "bread and butter" talents like Hold the Line, which don't do anything especially exciting but give a little more threat/mitigation.

I think it's a big mistake to put Devastate into War Academy, because it's in such a location that you can't have the expectation that all tanks will pick it up. This means that any balancing or tuning on the ability is either going to make it too strong for people with the talent or too weak for those without it. If War Academy were a dps warrior only talent, or if it were in early tier Prot, you could assume all prot warriors had it, and balance accordingly. I think it's better just to let it die for prot warriors and assume that the remaining points either go into fury, or extra utility in Prot.

at the end of the day, IV gives you HP you didnt have.. we are tanks.. our job is to live before anything else. i just dont see a reason not to have it. sure, paladins dont need wog, but i dont think any are running around cursing it, and not using it at all