I do not make plans. My answer to the classic interview question “where do you see yourself in a few years?” is a pause followed by “huh, I never thought about that before. Wherever I end up I guess.” My most distant plan is a trip in September that my friend made me plan a while ago. I would have waited to plan until a month prior if allowed. I got a headache when my boss asked me for yearly goals, since I cannot comprehend what anything will be like in a year, let alone plan for it!
Vengeance is a planning specialization. Every damage event must have a plan and a period of preparation. With building up souls and planning around the cooldowns of all your toolkit, you can’t expect to go into a fight unprepared. Not a difficult one, at least. Before a big damage event, you need to have a laundry list of set up: get a full stack of souls, use a soul consumer to get Painbringer up, all while leaving enough pain for Demon Spikes, plus whatever cooldown you have planned.
Playing vengeance at its best means knowing where you need Fiery Brand for defense and where you can get away with using it for offense. Same goes for Metamorphosis. And Demon Spikes with the Razor Spikes talent… And it keeps going. You gotta know what’s coming and prepare for how you’re going to use your skills.
You might think “but Sunnier, basically every tank class has to plan around their mitigation abilities!” But I counter with brewmasters. What cooldowns do I need to accommodate? If I’m lucky, I can use Fortifying Brew twice in an encounter, but usually I don’t need it. Big scary damage event? All I need to prepare is having a spare brew or two. The most preparation I have to do is pooling resources and planning Dampen Harm if I happen to talent into it. It’s great, and fits into how my brain works just perfectly.
I like challenging myself with Vengeance. It’s totally counter to how my brain wants to be when it’s lazy, so it feels like a mental workout whenever I play my DH. Sometimes it’s even helpful to have to think so much about it, because if stuff is too easy I tend to zone out and forget to do my few important tasks. Though for raid bosses that already have a lot of tank jobs, it’s proven that my brain can’t quite handle the extra cognitive load.