CC diminishing returns still persist.
-> overly complicated scenarios like Whirlwind-Hurricane sucking them back to you won’t work…
-> this short 3sec. fear most likely lasting much shorter or worse: Enemies being full cc-immune for short.
6 slots for abilities as cap persists, too.
“Needs ability to fear for dmg bonus” and “needs an ability to keep enemies in position to not run uncontrolled”
…is twice as bad as the sometimes given circumstance of…
“needs one ability to take effect”-cases.
It also does not spare us from requiring certain abilities for other items and/or the build in general.
On top of that, “freeze” as a fix to “feared enemies running away” would also mean, all enemies are immediately @ 100% cc-resistance for quite some time.
The fix to this problem is not by entitling “fear”, it is by changing this 4p bonus completely.
If they want to enable fear in barbarian gameplay, they should do that by implementing more synergizing legendary powers, or change fear as a mechanic in general.
People do not avoid this specific cc-type for no reason.
Hiding a part of a set integrated damage multiplier behind a cc-effect pretty much means, that there will be cases where we can’t trigger this bonus at all due to other hard-cc effects being currently active or too high cc-diminishing-return-effect (especially on a class that easily turns enemies cc-immune in seconds with “baseline barbarian repertoire” like AncientSpear-RageFlip or “chosen ability” to proc [Band of Might])
… while this specific cc-effect not being helpful at all when you are actually trying to fight and kill your enemies.
Fear is pretty much a defense-oriented cc-effect. Disabling enemy actions AND gets them away from you. Especially if you got no movement-tool and get stuck between hordes of enemies, it frees you.
If it takes additional cc-effects being applied while enemies are feared…
…to counteract what fear actually is supposed to do…
… why even chosing fear as trigger here?
… why enforcing the use of fear just for the cause of fear being used at all - while not changing the reason for people avoiding fear as a mechanic in the first place?