I’m really not a fan of being overly negative, especially this early in the feedback cycle, but just to press home two major reasons why I believe the new Fury Apex is problematic:
Only Fury has Room for Failure
- Arms’ Master of Warfare is a rotational proc enabling a single button press that deals direct damage and leaves a lingering buff - no real maintenance required.
- Retribution’s Light Within causes the main passive proc to empower various other rotational abilities - also completely rotational without any real maintenance.
- Frost’s Chosen of Frostbrood is a direct buff to Frostwyrm’s Fury - one (now two) key presses every 90s.
- Unholy’s Forbidden Knowledge is basically Reckless Abandon, causing the major cooldown to empower spenders - this does has some extension, but it’s also a static buff and the duration is closer to 20s every 90s.
None of these have major failure states, while Fury has two.
Fury’s Rampaging Berserker expects players to spend 12 seconds stacking a buff, and then maintain it for another 30-50s every 60s.
- Don’t get a good Recklessness? You’re gonna have a weak buff until Recklessness comes back off cooldown.
- Can’t maintain the buff? Lose all your stack value until Recklessness comes back off cooldown.
I have previously brought up that Fury gameplay in Midnight feels overly simplified and could use something more to think about, but “press Rampage as much as possible” doesn’t make it more intellectually engaging, because the rotation already asks you to do that anyway: it just introduces a punishment for failing to do so.
I also have nothing against the idea of focusing Fury as a sustained damage dealer either, but after 20 years of this, we know how players think - they’re going to focus on the failure state, rather than the “reward” of tunneling without being targeted by anything, and going to become frustrated any time a mechanic interrupts them… which in modern dungeon & encounter design is practically all of them.
- There are degrees to this sort of thing. Swapping targets or being forced off target may drop Frenzy, which can be mildly annoying, but is also very easy to recover from… while this new Apex is not.
Rampaging Berserker is repeating the same problems that Legion Juggernaut and v1 Breath of Sindragosa already dealt with.
Homogenizing Frost and Fury
This is more of a personal complaint, but I don’t really understand why Fury is inheriting the most divisive mechanic modern Frost DK has ever had, when the two specializations are already so similar.
Do the only two dual-wield plate DPS specs who are both focused on sustained attacking, constant uptime, and big burst AoE also need to share the same core gameplay mechanic? The sheer number of players who commonly say “I like Frost DK, but I hate dealing with Breath…” would suggest probably not.