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Video version: My In-Depth VDH Guide for M+ in Season 2 of TWW! (11.1)

Note: M+ tanking is a problem that doesn’t have one unique solution. I highly recommend looking at what others do as a guide but trying to think of things on your own as much as possible. Also this guide will probably be updated a lot in the future as we learn things. If something is wrong here feel free to contact me!

How good is VDH in high keys? IMO Vengeance DH is positioned as one of the best tanks of the season. It has very good priority damage with the wounded quarry rework, and some buffs / talent tree changes have given it a lot more options to work with than previous seasons, including the capability to get all three capstones (last resort + soulcrush + dif/is). Overall I would say VDH has the highest damage output, best survivability, and best self sustain of all tanks at the moment which is a strong combo.

Talents

UPDATED TALENT CHEATSHEET: Yoda's VDH builds TWW Season 2

Fel-scarred (easy to start / survive pulls, good for low-stress weeklies. Lower self sustain and DPS.)

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Aldrachi No brand spread (easiest aldrachi build, missing a decent amount of damage but very consistent survivability)

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Aldrachi Last Resort DIF (safeish aldrachi build featuring last resort and DIF). Many answers for tank busters, high / controllable mitigation uptime, and cheat death. Good for playing without oracle priest.

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Aldrachi Standard (what most people play in high keys, very good with oracle priest)

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Which is better? After the reworks, Aldrachi is IMO the superior M+ hero talent due to the increased self sustain and DPS (especially to the main target with wounded quarry). I’m not sure which exact talent setup will be best for each key, although I’m leaning towards the last 2 builds shown in the section above.

Choices: Spec tree:

Note Post rework there are a lot of viable builds. Most of the builds here will have a few options that can be tweaked:

Internal Struggle vs Pitch Black vs demon muzzle internal struggle is worth ~2% damage, but the other talents can have good defensive value.

Soulmonger vs Focused Cleave Focused cleave is a lot more single target and priority damage. Soulmonger provides a small buffer against 1shots. Don’t look at soulmonger’s HPS and immediately think it’s good since the way it procs basically guarantees that it will steal healing from your other healing sources. It’s better IMO to think of it as a conditional 10% max HP with minimal HPS gain (which is still a good talent)

Sigil of Chains vs Soul Furnace vs Extended Spikes With new FtD you most likely don’t need extended spikes, so the free point has been going to either chains or soul furnace usually,

depending on if you want the utility from chains. Extended spikes can still be taken but is usually not necessary with one point in FtD.

Soul Barrier vs Burning Blood + 1 more point Soul barrier is an OK defensive option especially for no-bomb builds. I don’t recommend it but if you’re having trouble with tank busters or want to watch your HP not move in low keys this can help with that at the cost of ~5-8% damage.

Spirit bomb vs Ascending Flame + 1 point (chains/ext usually) Spirit bomb is IMO not worth it most of the time for aldrachi. Costing two talent points means if you need to sacrifice any throughput talent for it in dungeons it’s going to be at best a very small damage gain overall (and most likely a damage loss). If you’re taking feed the demon and don’t need chains for the dungeon, you may be able to spare the point in which case you can use it in massive pulls for a bit more damage and frailty application.

One common misconception is that you need spirit bomb to consume souls and heal yourself. You can consume souls just by walking over them or by overcapping any souls generated when you have 5 souls are automatically consumed so consuming with spirit bomb is only burst healing, not more overall (and can result in longer periods where you’re unable to heal yourself). The main HPS gain from spirit bomb is the fact that it applies frailty in uncapped AOE. IMO this is not a massive gain since most of your healing in these pulls would come from souls anyway.

Class tree : There are a bunch of utility nodes here that can be swapped around, although personally I would stay away from live by the glaive and aura of pain as both talents have very low throughput compared to other choices.

Stats

Haste this is our best stat up to ~21k. More frailty stacks, more soul gen, more uptime on brand/sof, lower cd on immolation aura. Crit This is our best stat against anything you can parry due to the additive bonuses from deflecting spikes and illuminated sigils. Vers This is our best stat against non-parriable damage. Mastery This was oversimming, not an awful stat but I would not prioritize it over vers/crit.

Trinkets

There will be trinket tuning so these are not final, but the best trinkets so far on ptr are:

Damage: Tome of Light’s Devotion (offense mode only, defense mode sucks) Improvised Seaforium Pacemaker Eye of Kezan (high uptime on 10+ stacks only)

Absorb:

Ringing Ritual Mud (really good on fel-scarred since it procs from set fire to the pain) Chromebustible Bomb Suit

Recommended: Seaforium Pacemaker + Tome. Bomb suit or Mud are good for absorb trinkets.

Embellishments

For an early season boost you can craft one 675 weapon with symbiosis to guarantee high ilvl mainhand, though this most likely won’t be an endgame item (and use it with writhing armor band).

You can put armor band on boots, belt, cape, or bracer endgame most likely will be cape or bracer.

If you don’t use a weapon enchant then you should use dawnthread or focusing lens.

Embellishments are also all much worse than previous seasons so don’t sweat it too much.

Adrenal surge clasp is best for damage however agility is worse than secondaries defensively so I prefer other embellishments.

Special items

Capo’s molten knuckles is bis for damage, though since it comes with no stats it is not great defensively. Cyrce’s circlet will be good at the start of the patch but most likely be phased out as you get higher ilvl rings. The Jastor Diamond is good for damage but not as good defensively since it comes with high mastery.

Cooldown Overview

Metamorphosis Go into demon form for 15 seconds, gaining 40% health and a lot of armor. Unlike previous seasons you can actually die through meta depending on what you’re fighting so be careful. Generally OK to overlap one spikes on pull but try to avoid it otherwise unless you have FtD and extended spikes.

Fel Devastation - This puts us into meta for 6 seconds. It is really good at getting aggro so using it early on pull is desired. As with meta try not to overlap this with demon spikes except on pull.

Fiery Brand With fiery demise and burning alive this is a super strong cooldown both defensively and offensively. Generally we want to be using this off cooldown. Try not to overlap with metamorphosis unless you are playing fel-scarred with fiery demise and have two charges ready.

Demon Spikes Gives us 10% parry and some armor. Generally try to combo this with fiery brand or sigil of flame if talented into illuminated sigils. Try not to overlap this with

metamorphosis more than once per pull or you will run out, unless you have both extended spikes and FtD in which case just spam it off cd.

Darkness With pitch black this is a 3-minute cooldown, almost always used for yourself on trash pulls. Usually good to use if you don’t have meta or brand and spikes is not enough to tank the pull. On bosses this is usually more useful when used on the group. Note that it casts around you so you need to position near the group if you’re using it on them.

The Hunt This is used off cd for damage as fel-scarred, and used to proc reaver’s glaive as Aldrachi. Make sure you don’t use it with reaver’s glaive already available.

Sigil of Spite This generates 4 souls and does some damage. We don’t need to worry about spirit bomb combos as much anymore so this is usually just used off cooldown for souls with Aldrachi, or can be saved for a heal as fel-scarred (or used for damage immediately).

Immolation Aura This is an overlooked cooldown a lot of the time. With normal haste and no lust usually this has ~11 seconds cd and 9 seconds duration make sure the downtime is as low as possible and be wary during that downtime if you don’t have meta or brand rolling.

Defensive rotation

Demon Spikes If you have one point in FtD or extended spikes, you’re usually going to want 100% uptime on either this or meta, which means don’t overlap it with meta other than the first one. If you have both extended spikes and FtD then you can just afk brain and 100% uptime no matter what. Any time you’re taking melees without spikes or meta you are in trouble.

Illuminated Sigils With IS we’re accepting that we can tank most packs with just spikes + sigil of flame (no meta or brand). In this case the opener looks something like:

(gather globals) -> fiery brand something (if you have brand spread) -> feldev + spikes -> sof the pack -> maintain spikes + sof for the whole pack, use meta if scared and feldev/brand are not up.

Down in Flames With DIF our goal will be to have either meta or brand up for most of the fight, using darkness + externals + trinkets to fill in the gaps.

(gather globals) -> fiery brand something -> feldev + spikes -> meta when brand falls off -> feldev to extend meta -> brand + spikes -> external or darkness (or tank with spikes only if it’s an easy pack) -> feldev -> brand + spikes.

You don’t have enough brand / feldevs (especially without darkglare) to have 100% uptime on your strong defensives, so feeling out which situations you can coast through with just spikes will be crucial to regain brand cooldown. Also note that in season 2 your tierset can randomly

proc 4 seconds of meta, so try and use that to your advantage to save fiery brand when possible.

Further min-max Don’t forget that you (most of the time) have demon muzzle and felflame fortification, so having sof/immolation aura up can be very useful against certain magical tank busters. If you are at world first key level, occasionally you will have to min-max calcified spikes in order to survive certain tank busters (aka, use spikes 8-10 seconds before every buster hits). You can also min-max painbringer stacks, consuming souls when you are about to take a lot of damage (sigil of spite / soul barrier are both really good at this since they result in consuming a lot of souls at once).

Souls heal based on your recent damage taken, so if it doesn’t cause you to die due to lack of painbringer you want to consume souls after taking a lot of damage (although if you just do a normal no-bomb rotation then you will be consuming souls regularly anyway).

Also note that in lust (or pi if you randomly get that) your uptime is higher on sof/brand, as well as generally higher frailty stacks / soul gen so you should be able to save on defensive resources (most commonly, metamorphosis).

How to gather packs

One of VDH’s biggest struggles is gathering packs. Not only are half of your abilities bugged and sometimes don’t generate aggro, you are also very weak on pull. Add on to that the fact that aldrachi has to do 3 globals before it can even use hero talents, and on-pull is by far your weakest point. Generally my advice would be to try and tag everything from range don’t jump in. You can use fiery brand, the hunt, reaver’s glaive (or throw glaive which is less ideal) to tag packs, but keep in mind that these are not reliable sources of aggro. The goal is to tag everything and then have it all run in at the same time, at which point you can pre-sof into fel devastation, which hopefully gets aggro on everything. Anything that you didn’t tag yet hopefully gets hit by either your fury of the aldrachi (best uncapped damage) or subsequent sigils. If you’re still struggling, self-cast infernal strike can also help in a pinch.

Offensive Rotation

Fel-Scarred Cooldowns Fel-scarred changes our feldev and meta to be offensive cooldowns. During these we want to use one of each empowered ability (soul cleave and spirit bomb for feldev, and immo aura + sigil of flame + feldev as well for meta). If you are spending a fiery brand for damage here then you ideally also want to get all your demonsurges off in the fiery demise window.

Generic Rotation Other than that we want to be using sof, immo aura, and felblade off cooldown for fury gen. Also we are playing a “fury dump” rotation which means you want to use all of your fractures together then dump all fury into soul cleaves until empty rather than alternating uses of both buttons.

Aldrachi Cooldowns The major cooldown we get from Aldrachi is Reaver’s Glaive. After using The Hunt or consuming 20 souls, throw glaive becomes empowered and allows you to proc a few buffs, most notably Thrill of the Fight. To actually use it, gain reaver’s glaive then use it and then fracture. The next time we soul cleave it will proc Thrill of the Fight (though you can use different skills in between that are not soul-cleave).

On single target you will usually want to soul cleave before fracture as we value the stronger debuff over the extra hits from fury of the aldrachi.

Generic rotation Aldrachi is all about optimizing uptime on the Thrill of the Fight buff which means unlike fel-scarred we are playing a rotation to maximize soul generation. Which changes our priorities we are still using immo aura off cooldown, however since we care more about souls than frailty dumps we are prioritizing not capping on fracture charges then prioritizing not capping fury which results in alternating fracture/soul cleave somewhat often. Felblade is mostly dropped from the rotation except on single target, or to get fury quickly in the opener.

Two major mistakes to avoid with Aldrachi are: 1 Never use the hunt with reaver’s glaive available. This basically sets you back 20 art of the glaive stacks if you ever do it. You can cancel the hunt cast with escape if you notice you accidentally started casting hunt and have reaver’s glaive ready. 2 Don’t re-proc Thrill of the Fight until it’s run out or about to run out. This usually means don’t use reaver’s glaive unless the buff has 3 or less seconds remaining. Note that if you are talented into spirit bomb, you can throw reaver’s glaive early and spend on spirit bomb instead of soul cleave, then use soul cleave to proc thrill of the fight on time.

Exceptions can be made for this in season 2 since your tierset has a chance to reset the hunt at any time, which means you really want the hunt to be on cooldown at all times. So you can re-proc Thrill of the Fight early if you have a reaver’s glaive in the chamber and hunt coming off cd soon. Fury of the Aldrachi is also a big source of your uncapped AOE / funnel so you should be more willing to send it early on big pulls (although it will result in less uptime overall throughout the key).

Using the tier set (TWW season 2)

You don’t play around the tier set much, other than being more willing to throw your reaver’s glaive whenever you get a luck of the draw proc and occasionally being able to hold defensive cooldowns for longer. Of course, if you get a hunt reset then you will want to use it ASAP especially as aldrachi.

Using your utility

Sigil of Silence We still have one charge of this. Try to use it after people put interrupts on cooldown. Good combo with Evoker’s Oppressing Roar. Worth noting that every time you use this it picks one target in the radius as the main target it will interrupt the main target even if that target is immune to CC so with clever placement this can be used as an interrupt in a pinch.

Sigil of Misery This has three main uses. 1 As an AOE stop. This has super long cd so only use it this way if other things are on cooldown 2 As a skip. If the whole pack is not immune to cc, you can misery it and have everyone go past then use shadowmeld (night elf only can’t do this as blood elf). 3 To stall mobs. This lasts for a pretty long time so in situations where it won’t be broken you can use it to cc mobs for a while (last set of boss adds, or someone ninja pulls something and you need to make time).

Sigil of Chains This has three main uses: 1 Grouping. Enemies are not moving to you because they aren’t programmed to focus the tank (casters/shooters/fixates etc) and you want them to be pixel stacked sigil of chains is perfect for this. 2 As an AOE stop. This pulls everything near it so it will stop casts if they can’t cast while moving. 3 Kiting. If you’re about to run away this applies a pretty strong slow and also keeps mobs stacked while you’re not tanking them.

Chaos Nova AOE stun around you, used to stop casts. With chaos fragments this is also nice to use if you’re short on defensives for a couple seconds as it also refunds spikes with FTD.

Darkness Don’t forget that you can use this for yourself. It is also quite effective for the group in TWW since most bosses deal ticking damage rather than 1-shot bursts.

Imprison This has three main uses: 1 As a stop. This ccs whatever you use it on so it will stop them from casting. 2 Skips. Imprisoned enemies will not aggro when you walk past them (unlike some other ccs) so you can use this for certain skips. 3 As an actual cc. Some packs feature a high concentration of mobs that you don’t have tools to deal with (such as double caster or double shooter type mobs). A useful tactic against double casters could be to imprison one, pull the pack away, then fight the imprisoned caster once the first one dies.

Mobility VDH is the most mobile of all tanks (and probably all specs). You can use this to your advantage to get ahead of the group to set up pulls (really useful against aggro bugs they can’t pull aggro if they aren’t there yet), do certain skips, pull from a different location, kite, etc the sky's the limit.

Random tricks/macros

1. Moving with glide - You will want to bind Glide to an easy keybind. This is because when moving, it is better to do jump-glide-jump-glide than jump-doublejump-glide as it’s more glides per second (and as a result more distance moved per second).

2. Canceling fel devastation - If you try to use normal movement keys while feldev is active it won’t cancel the cast since casting feldev just slows you and you can move while casting (really weird). For that reason I play with this macro:

#showtooltip fel devastation /stopcasting /use fel devastation

This will cancel the feldev cast if you double tap it.

3. Playing around aggro bugs - sigils and throw glaive are bugged and sometimes don’t generate aggro. Make sure you consider this when you’re setting up gathers - don’t try and pull mobs that are super far with just sigil unless you’re ready to either use another sigil or hit them with feldev, immo aura, infernal strike, or torment (taunt). This also extends to reaver’s glaive even if you talent preemptive strike.

4. Felblade movement - There is a certain minimum range where felblade won’t charge you to the target anymore. Knowing and playing around this range is crucial for dodging certain attacks - make sure you know it.

5. Self-infernal strike. This macro is used to cast infernal strike at your current location. It can be used for more aggro or damage, or to cancel knockbacks. Be careful when cancelling knockbacks as due to ping/server ticks the game will sometimes count your jump as happening before the knockback when you don’t expect it and knock you anyway. You can also cancel knockbacks with glide but sometimes that can propel your character forward which results in taking back attacks.

#showtooltip /cast [@player] Infernal Strike

Make sure you don’t unbind normal infernal strike as most uses will not be cast at yourself.

6. You can cast while using The Hunt (though it will put you on global). The best uses for this are usually to throw reaver’s glaive midair and/or to cancel your hunt movement with either infernal strike or vengeful retreat (which effectively makes it a 50yd ranged skill to aggro packs).

7. Reaver’s glaive has an extremely long range - you can use this to aggro packs too (it won’t generate any threat though).