Vengeance as a skill and forge guard as a whole gain huge benefits from being attacked. Which is very weird considering there are increased stun chance tied to a passive point in forge guard… 10/10 points in Guardian node grant 120 health and 60% stun chance. The passive node Faint Strike in Vengeance skill tree 3/3 gives 45% more damage and 45% less chance to stun. Combined with guardian node we are at a net 15% increased chance to stun before increased stun chance weapon implicit are applied on a class/skill that wants to be attacked.
In my opinion Faint strike should grant Vengeance, Riposte and Iron blades can no longer stun enemies. You could possibly move Faint strike to branch off into its own area so you arent forced to take it if u want to path towards the fire/ physical shred nodes. Maybe move the 45% more damage off of it and give it something else so players dont feel like they are losing the damage if they somehow had a build that wanted the increased damage but also wanted to stun.
Now, the bottem of the Vengeance tree is a mess. I love the idea of Riposte / Vengeance also proccing iron blades but there are way to many out dated and frankly garbage passive nodes. Vindicator for instance 4 point passive node. 4 /4 grants 100% chance to attack with an iron blade when you KILL an enemy with Riposte. you are spending 20% of your base skill points to throw 1 iron blade IF YOU HAPPEN to kill it with RIPOSTE not even the main skill but them attacking into you… dying by the riposte attack… not vengeance or another iron blade proc… very bad and its attached to a 2 point passive node 2/2 20% chance when you KILL with VENGEANCE to attack with an iron blade. 6 / 20 passive points invested for a very mediocore proc that doesnt work on bosses. If for some reason you wanted to make a build revolving around iron blades you dont even have enough skill points to take HALF of the iron blade nodes that take up more than 50% of the vengeance skill tree. In my opinion you need to condense the power of about 30 - 40% of the iron blade nodes into already existing nodes and add some more flavor to the skill tree.