With more players trying out the Beta, and no changes in almost three weeks, I want to reiterate the two biggest remaining issues (besides bugs) that most Alpha testers and commenters seemed to agree on:
- Rising Fury ramps too slowly
- Dragonrage lasts too long
Rising Fury does make Dragonrage feel stronger and maintaining it feel important. While I would prefer no ramp, it can work as long as you don’t get left too far behind at the start of big pulls or during Bloodlust. This should take at most 20 seconds to ramp up, leaving half of Bloodlust to overlap Risen Fury. A design that ramps based on your spell casts, and maybe offers some immediate benefit, might be better.
Rising Fury’s ramp is tied to Dragonrage’s duration; the design intent here is still unclear. We can easily get 6 extensions (3 of each empower) for a 48 second duration and almost guarantee 8 extensions for 58 seconds. After this, additional extensions are possible only with Eternity Surge but can reach 68 seconds and maybe more. Such long duration explains Rising Fury’s slow ramp-up but makes it really important to maintain Dragonrage for the full minute-plus; adding on Risen Fury’s bonus 20 seconds, most of our damage is inside a buff window, and any interruption (sometimes unavoidable due to fight mechanics) will drastically undercut your damage.
I hope we get at least some acknowledgement of these issues before raid testing begins; both the class and the raid will feel bad if there’s too much pressure to maintain a buff for 90 seconds. The most straightforward solution is some mix of:
- Reducing Risen Fury’s stack timer to 4-5s
- Granting stacks based on empower casts or essence spent instead of time
- Reverting Dragonrage to the Dragonflight tuning (14s duration, +4s per extension)
- Restoring the cap to Animosity, somewhere between 4 to 8 extensions
I have also been thinking more about this problem:
I may be alone in caring a lot about this but it’s because I’ve been there before, and I hated it. I played Devastation (exclusively) in M+ in Season 3 of Dragonflight, mostly out of spite; I wanted to beat my own record after having been forced to play Aug in Season 2. As soon as I achieved that goal, I practically quit the game.
Playing around this effect in dungeons is demoralizing. I can control my damage, but I can’t control routing, dungeon layouts, healer mana - or prevent my teammate from walking into a frontal right as I reach the top of my ramp, forcing us all to wait for a res before the next pack. I lost count of how many times I watched helplessly as Emerald Trance’s after-Dragonrage bonus, and all those free essence bursts, faded away. Not being able to use the effect felt like not having a tier set equipped; when this happens with Risen Fury, it will feel like a wasted talent point.
I am likely to NOT talent Risen Fury 4/4 in content where I can’t guarantee its usefulness. This applies not just in lower dungeons, but in world content, pvp, etc. The first 3 points are always useful, as long as you get at least 30 seconds of Dragonrage. The 4th is only useful if you know that combat will last longer than the practical limit on Dragonrage - or if you are very committed to chain pulling at any cost.
It’s not OK to simply say that this will get better in higher keys, or that you’ll benefit from it on bosses but not on trash. It’s the ‘transformative’ final point of your ‘Apex’ talent, it should be impactful as long as you play correctly, not stolen by circumstances outside your control.
The design provides some ‘insurance’ against Dragonrage ending too early and gives the Apex some contribution outside Dragonrage. I’m not convinced this is valuable; I want to do more damage during Dragonrage and less outside it - if we need this extra uptime then why wouldn’t Dragonrage extend further instead?
What bothers me is that on failure (Dragonrage ended too early) the insurance pays out well, but on success (you killed everything during Dragonrage) it spends itself uselessly, taunting you with essence bursts every 4 seconds. Dragonrage is designed to fall off once combat ends since you aren’t casting spells to extend it, which guarantees this effect will trigger when you least need it.
If there must be a bonus that only applies outside Dragonrage, then I simply ask that you let me choose when to use it, just like I choose when to use Dragonrage itself. Let me delay the effect if I don’t need it immediately, as long as I use it before my next Dragonrage cooldown.
A simple way to do this is to let me activate the effect by re-activating Dragonrage, while it is on cooldown and not active.
It would be nice if Risen Fury gave an effect that scales with Mastery, which is strongest only during Dragonrage and devalued by bonuses outside Dragonrage; and it still has problems with trying to spend 5 essence bursts quickly on a timer. Perhaps this could actually give you a second use of Dragonrage but with no Animosity extensions?
Another option is to convert the stacks into a resource, so we can weave them into our normal rotation; perhaps when Dragonrage is on cooldown and not active, it’s replaced with a new spell - something like Essence Bomb from the Flameshaper tier set, but with Tyranny baked in - and you gain one charge for each stack of Rising Fury when Dragonrage ends.
Edit:
Adding on to this - it seems like Risen Fury’s after-Dragonrage bonus is only meant to help you in cases where Dragonrage doesn’t last long enough to end a fight. It’s not really helping if you fail to maintain Dragonrage for its maximum duration (you still lose the Dragonrage uptime, when you could have had both), or in fights where you don’t start with Dragonrage.
Perhaps a simpler way to fix this is to convert the effect to a bonus that actually applies the entire time you don’t have Dragonrage. Something like this:
When Dragonrage ends, you gain Risen Fury, granting the damage and haste bonuses of Rising Fury, decaying over time based on the remaining cooldown of Dragonrage.
This buff would cover the entire window until your next Dragonrage, and is strongest immediately after Dragonrage ends, but decays more slowly if your Dragonrage ended early. This would help reduce the difference between a shorter and longer Dragonrage, without being an all-or-nothing bonus that you lose completely if you can’t re-enter combat immediately.
Edit 2:
Removed part of first suggestion after checking that Rising Fury actually does give a stack on cast; takes 24 seconds to reach 5 stacks, the same as Emerald Trance. A faster ramp, responding to player casts, is still preferable.
I have also seen suggestions to simply pause Risen Fury while out of combat; I don’t like this because its technical and non-interactive, and you might re-enter combat earlier than you want to do damage. But if a technical fix prevents this from simply throwing essence bursts away, I’ll take it.
For example, I have noticed that Risen Fury displays a stack count, based on the number of Rising Fury stacks it converted. I keep expecting this to go down each time it grants an essence burst; the number of bursts remaining is not conveyed in any other way except doing math from the duration. This could be split into two buffs, with the first one counting the number of bursts remaining, with no duration limit. Any time you are not capped on essence burst, consume one stack, granting an essence burst and a 4-second damage & haste buff. This would prevent overcapping bursts and let you carry the buff for a short while.
