Update: Die Entwickler über den Furor-Krieger in BfA

We’ve been iterating on Fury Warrior since last week, and the next Beta build will again be a slightly out-of-date version of Fury compared to we have internally at this moment.To give an update: everything on the baseline spec described last week hasn’t changed. However, many talents have been adjusted, moved, or replaced to better fit together with the updates to the Fury spec.

Level 15, 30, 60 rows: No changes since last week/last Beta build.

Level 45 row: Inner Rage, Sudden Death, Furious Slash – this row speed up/adds to the rotation

Inner Rage is now -1 sec off the base cooldown of Raging Blow (which is now 8 sec base cooldown) and increases its damage. Simple and direct, and does the job of slightly speeding up/adding to the rotation.

Sudden Death is the same talent many know, adjusted for Fury – “Your attacks have a chance to reset the cooldown of Execute and make it usable on any target, regardless of their health.” It replaces Wrecking Ball in the talent tree, and fills the role of “occasionally inserts an ability into your rotation” better than Wrecking Ball does, because Whirlwind is now already used often as part of your single-target rotation. Additionally, now that Execute generates 20 Rage for Fury, this proc will also serve to slightly speed up the rotation, which is desirable on this talent row.

Furious Slash is the Furious Slash attack (from live) combined with Frenzy (the talent from live), as described last week, granting Haste per stack, stacking up to 3. It serves as the higher-complexity talent that add a brand new button to your rotation. The Haste granted has been reduced to a more appropriate level (2% per stack, pending playtesting/feedback/tuning) considering the spec now has 25% Haste baseline from Enrage, and with another talent (Frothing Berserker) also providing 10% Haste occasionally.

Level 75 row: Carnage, Massacre, Frothing Berserker

Massacre has been redesigned into “Execute is now usable on targets below 35% health”. Now that Execute has a cooldown and generates Rage, the live Legion version doesn’t make much sense anymore – it would’ve just amounted to a Rage proc on Execute. Additionally, Execute adds a significant amount to the rotation already when it’s available – any redesign that made that Execute window even more impacted by adding more resources or buttons to press didn’t seem to overall improve the Execute rotation. Instead, widening the window during which you can use Execute, made more sense.

On Execute’s cooldown, which is currently 6 sec (reduced by Haste, ending up at ~4.2 sec with Enrage up): Currently, there are no lack of buttons to press during Execute windows, with Execute being available on every 4th ability use (at a high priority), and pushing some other buttons out to make room for itself. We think Execute being any lower cooldown makes the Fury rotation more cramped during Execute, and not any better overall.

Carnage and Frothing Berserker are unchanged since last week.

Level 90 row: Meat Cleaver, Dragon Roar, Bladestorm – this row is primarily AOE

Whirlwind still has its baseline mechanic of making your next 2 attacks strike up to 4 additional targets for 40% damage (this mechanic/buff is called Meat Cleaver on live). That proc/buff has been renamed to simply “Whirlwind” because if anyone referred to Meat Cleaver when talking about Fury, it wasn’t possible to find those words anywhere in the spellbook, which made it harder to learn about the mechanic. Meat Cleaver, the new talent, uses that name, and gives Whirlwind a 10% chance to Enrage you and causes it to generate an additional 1 Rage per target hit (up to 3 additional Rage), pending tuning.

Dragon Roar’s cooldown has been increased to 40 sec (up from 25 sec), radius has been increased to 12 yds (up from 8 yds), damage increased significantly, and it now generates 10 Rage. The goal is to put it much closer to Odyn’s Fury in usage and damage impact (high cooldown, more one-hit damage). Generating a respectable amount of Rage allows it to be used during Recklessness without you feeling like you’re missing out on its potential Rage generation increase.

Bladestorm’s duration has been reduced to 3 sec (down from 6 sec), cooldown reduced to 1 min (down from 1.5 min), and now generates 20 Rage over the duration. Shortening the duration allows Bladestorm to fit into an Enrage window (without requiring extreme amounts of Haste) if used right after after gaining Enrage, and a shorter duration/cooldown Bladestorm feels more like Fury anyways.

Level 100 row: Reckless Abandon, Anger Management, Siegebreaker – this row modifies or adds damage bonuses

Reckless Abandon is a fine talent, no changes.

Anger Management has been added to Fury, reducing the cooldown of Recklessness by 1 sec for every 25 Rage you spend. Recklessness is cool, so why not have it more often?

When looking at the third talent slot on this row, we tried various version of Bloodbath or Avatar at different cooldowns, or with different mechanics, or with up-front damage, and even a version where the talent literally just cast both Avatar and Recklessness for 15 sec with a 1.5-2 min CD. In the end we concluded:

• Any version that was a separate self-buff damage cooldown button didn’t feel great to press consecutively with Recklessness, because you’re pressing two straight abilities which both feel more like self-buffs than attacks
• Any version that made Recklessness stronger (high damage/amplitude) or replaced Recklessness with an ability with a 1.5 min cooldown, felt too similar to Reckless Abandon
• Any version that made Recklessness shorter cooldown was Anger Management
• Any version that made Recklessness a longer cooldown or replaced it with a new spell with a longer cooldown, didn’t feel great because you were taking a talent that made Recklessness available less often

In the end, we’re going to try a cooldown attack that debuffs the target, increasing your damage done to them for a duration. This synergizes with Recklessness in a way that feels better – Recklessness first to buff yourself, then a heavy attack against the enemy. The intended gameplay is: Build up Rage -> Siegebreaker -> Rampage -> Rebuild Rage -> Rampage before Siegebreaker ends. Correct tuning on the duration will allow 2 Rampages to be doable during one Siegebreaker, but not trivial to do mindlessly. During Recklessness you should be able to get off three Rampages in the Siegebreaker window.

Siegebreaker (30 sec cooldown, Generates 15 Rage): Break the enemy’s defenses, dealing [120% AP] Physical damage, and increasing your damage done to the target by 20% for 10 sec.

Notes:

• Outburst, Bloodbath, and Avatar have been removed from Fury.
• Auto attack damage, as a portion of your overall damage, has been reduced. This came from increasing the damage of most abilities on the spec. Our target for auto attack damage on Fury is currently much closer to 25% of your overall damage than 50%.

Thanks for the continued feedback here and everywhere else.

This week’s beta build caught the Fury Warrior changes mid-flight, and is an incomplete picture of the overall changes. Work is still underway – the spec is currently being iterated on. To give some more information on the overall direction of the spec, here are some points we are looking to address:

• More tightly adjust/control Enrage uptime and Rage income (both of which heavily impact pacing, flow, and the feel of the spec) throughout the expansion, rather than letting both scale up dramatically as gearing happens.
• Reduce the amount of stacking damage bonuses on the spec that are available simultaneously, which reduces the desire/need to stack multiple at once, which now feels much worse to do now that virtually all of them are on the global cooldown.
• Figure out Furious Slash’s place on the spec.

Enrage

Getting mad and being better and stronger is definitely still the fantasy of Fury, and Enrage is staying as the spec’s core base mechanic and Mastery. However, Enrage is changing a bit into 25% Haste (still being adjusted) and 10% Movement speed. It’s currently 100% melee attack speed on live, and was 50% melee attack speed previously on Beta. Haste is something that’s much more felt in terms of pacing (button presses, cooldowns compressing) compared to auto attack speed, which mostly gets covered up by ability animations anyways.

The 20% increased damage taken during Enrage is being removed. Along with this, the 15% passive increased maximum health the spec had is also going away – this was largely added to counteract the increased damage drawback that Enrage had. Now, Fury will simply have the bonus of ~8% more health than other non-tanks in the same gear level, due to being able to dual-wield a pair of 2-handed weapons.

In terms of Enrage uptime, our current thought is we’d like to try targeting Enrage uptime to around ~60%, and not growing wildly throughout the expansion as gear improves. I think there exists a sweet spot for Enrage uptime where it’s not up so often that it’s taken for granted and you don’t have to think at all about playing around it, but also not so rare that it feels bad.

Because Enrage uptime is a function of Enrage duration and Rage generation (which is directly proportional to the time in between Rampages), Enrage duration going up means uptime can get too high, which means time in between Rampages can get too high, which then feels bad. Currently, Enrage duration is back to 4 sec, but Rage generation has increased significantly since this round of Fury changes, so the spec should feel much faster now and the uptime on Enrage shouldn’t feel low.

Raging Blow

Raging Blow now Generates 12 Rage, has 2 charges, 7.5 sec recharge (reduced by Haste), has a 20% chance to instantly reset its own cooldown, and no longer requires being Enraged to be usable. It’s more similar to the Inner Rage version than the live baseline version, where it has no cooldown but requires Enrage to be usable. Raging Blow is doing a lot of things for the spec here:

• Raging Blow was changed to fit together into Rampage and Bloodthirst, both of which we thought were good and didn’t need any notable changes.
• Being usable only while Enraged, meant you very frequently pushed it multiple times in a row for 5 Rage each time, which didn’t feel super engaging.
• Having 2 charges baseline felt better, as a version with either a 6 or 7.5 sec cooldown but no charges meant it collided with Bloodthirst’s cooldown very frequently, which did not feel good. Additionally, charges on Raging Blow is sort of the only actual resource you manage on the spec, since Rage is technically a resource but only spent on Rampage and nothing else.
• Having a 20% chance to reset itself is the random proc on the baseline spec that adds an amount of unpredictability to the rotation.

Furious Slash

Furious Slash didn’t really found its place on the spec. it’s a no-cooldown free filler that didn’t feel great to press, largely as a direct result of being the lowest priority/impact ability by design. The version of Furious Slash you’re seeing this week is a first iteration, where we tried giving it more tie-ins to your core rotation/mechanics: Generates 3 Rage, has 10% chance to trigger Enrage.

Playing this version some more internally, we thought the button felt better, but still didn’t feel great to press. Additionally, it overlaps some with Whirlwind, which is also a baseline no-cooldown free filler. So we’re going to try removing Furious Slash baseline and making Whirlwind the baseline filler in single-target. Whirlwind has the benefit of having better audio/visual feedback, and generally feeling better to press. It also just fits the fantasy of a whirling blademaster/berserker pretty well. It will generate 3 Rage + 1 additional per target hit, up to a maximum of 8 Rage (this is intended to also speed up the AOE rotation). Furious Slash is being merged together with Frenzy (talent) and becoming a talent in that slot, without the new experimental 10% chance to trigger Enrage mechanic.

Whirlwind’s Meat Cleaver effect

Whirlwind will now cause your next 2 single-target attacks to gain the effect of striking up to 4 additional targets for 40% damage. With the changes to Raging Blow, it made sense to add Raging Blow to this effect, but at that point the only thing not included was Execute and Furious Slash, so we’ve added them too.

Execute

Execute being a Rage spender caused it replace Rampage entirely during execute range (against enemies below 20% health). We are trying a version of Execute where it has a short 6-sec cooldown, and generates 20 Rage instead of spending it, so that it adds to your rotation and helps fuel your Rampages, rather than replacing one of your core buttons. In the current design of the spec, it feels more correct for Rampage to remain the almighty and only Rage spender, and Execute to be a more support role (rather than the spammed Rage spender), even if it deals similar damage to Rampage on paper (because Execute is available less frequently and Rampage Enrages you).

Recklessness

With Enrage no longer coming from Bloodthirst critical strikes and instead coming from Bloodthirst at a consistent 30% rate, the spec no longer has a core critical strike mechanic, and it made less sense to have 100% critical strike chance as Fury’s baseline cooldown. Thinking about it more, 100% critical strike chance would make more sense as Arm’s cooldown, because that spec is slower-paced and more about setting up for fewer, larger hits. Fury is currently much more about flurries of many smaller hits, speed/haste, and Rage generation. To that end, Fury’s cooldown turning into double Rage generation from all sources (and some critical strike chance for flavor) made more sense, both in terms of feel, theme, and gameplay.

As a side note, one of the upsides of Fury’s resource model is that it can support a huge amount of burst/temporarily increased resource income in a way that feels great (something many other specs can’t do as well), because Rampage spends 85% of the Rage bar – we’re consciously leaning into this more with the Recklessness mechanics changes.

As always, thanks for all of the feedback.