I just want to hear, from a developer, what the intended design and gameplay are for Fury Warrior.
Every class/spec has a role that it fills in either 5-man or 20-man content. It has to, otherwise it would just never get taken, right?
Let’s look, for a second, at the role that all the melee DPS specs fill. I’m only considering utility that is unique to each class/spec that cannot be achieved by grabbing any other spec.
Windwalker Monks have Mystic Touch, Ring of Peace, and Paralysis. One increases damage, one offers great displacement for either an AOE stop or even for skips, and the third is a great hard CC that can even be used out of combat for skips.
Rogues have Shroud and Assassination specifically has Mass Garrote–a unique way to skip a huge portion of packs and a way to trivialize caster packs by opening with a 5 second silence.
Enhancement Shamans have Skyfury, Thunderstorm, Tremor Totem, Ancestral Guidance, Hex, Cleanse Spirit, Healing Stream Totem, Bulwark Totem, and Wind Rush totem. In other words, raid-wide mastery + windfury, a big AOE stop that works on more targets than stuns, a fear cleanse, out-of-combat hard cc, a decurse, a huge shield cooldown, a speed increase, and massive insane giga heals.
DKs bring Deathgrip, Abom’s Limb, Frostwyrm’s Fury, a battle res, and Blinding Sleet. In other words, two separate ways to group targets that are off target (unachievable by any other spec in the game), an AOE freeze, an AOE blind, and a battle res.
Ret Paladins give Devo Aura, a battle res, BOP, Bubble. That’s a 3% flat DR on the group, a battle res, a targeted physical damage cleanse + immunity, and a self-immunity that they can use to cleanse debuffs and even trivialize mechanics.
Feral Druids have Mark of the Wild, roots, Hibernate, a decurse, and a soothe.
Hunters don’t really have much besides Hunter’s Mark.
Then you have warriors. Warriors have Battle Shout, spell reflect, and Rallying Cry. 5% attack power (benefiting only physical damage classes), a reflect on subset of spells that are targeting the warrior+ some added utility for CC from certain casts and mechanics, and a raid-wide 10 second increase of max HP by 10% (in other words, about 600k hp on anyone not a tank in a season when you have bosses with dots that tick for more than 1 mil).
Given this lack of utility in comparison to these other specs, what is the role Fury is supposed to play here? Well as a DPS class, there’s really only one role that matters–damage dealt. Utility is a bonus, right? So if a class is lacking almost any valuable party- or raid-wide utility, then surely it has to make up in damage so that it provides any real value to the group.
Well, unfortunately, that just isn’t the case. Fury warriors are the lowest-performing spec in single-target DPS, and in M+ dungeons they are quite consistently falling short in overall damage in comparison to every one of these melee specs besides Feral druids.
Okay, so to recap, Fury warriors don’t have anywhere near the uniquely valuable utility that other specs have, do the lowest amount of single target damage among all these specs, and do less overall damage than a huge majority of these specs.
What role are they supposed to fill, then? What do they bring to the table that makes them valuable enough to slot into a 5-man team without making huge sacrifices in both utility and damage? For example, assume the 5% physical damage increase from shout is deemed essential-- monks provide the same increase in Mystic Touch, have a higher duration AOE stun than Shockwave, have RoP, have Paralysis, do more damage in ST, and do similar AOE damage.
For one week, we filled a distinct purpose–massive AOE burst. This has value in both raid and m+, enough so that our lack of utility and boss damage was able to be overlooked in favor of this burst.
So what’s the goal here? What’s the plan for Fury? Are we expected to just always have the least utility and least damage with no distinct role or damage profile in mind?