For those unaware the tuning last week, and there were also hotfixes yesterday not in the notes via the Warrior discord.
Fury Execute buffed by +50%
Bloodthirst buffed by +15%
Bloodbath buffed by +20%, and its DoT now ticks every 3s instead of 1s (66% nerf)
Raging Blow buffed by +20%
Crushing Blow buffed by +20% and has +20% crit damage (up from +10%)
Rampage buffed by +20%
Buffs are good. I can’t speak to where overall tuning falls on the PTR, but fury definitely needed buffs - and these get the job done. However, continually buffing the “big 3” if you will like this has caused essentially all of our talented abilities to be very lackluster. Reckless Abandon also magnifies this problem even further by only buffing two of our abilities.
I would like to ask the team to consider reverting some of these targeted buffs in favor of full aura buffs to grab our talented abilities and hero talents and make them feel like impactful choices to use/take. Beyond a spec aura reshuffle I would still call out Odyn Fury as needing some love to be a viable choice.
Looking at Hero Talents specifically I think Mountain Thane Thunderblast would benefit the most from a rebalancing of our damage profile.
Moving to Slayer I’d like to see Reap the Storm toned down in AoE in favor of raw spec damage and Bladestorm damage. The casino gameplay of Reap procs feels a little too impactful to the overall performance of the spec in a world where all of our aoe tools have been nerfed so hard through season 1.
The new RA still feels pretty crap. Given how long of a bloodbath you can create it just ends up being dead damage whenever there are short lived targets about. Or if you’ve had to send your Recklessness into a priority target that won’t live out the bleed.
It really needs changing to be a Rampage only amp, none of the augmented BT/RB nonsense that hyperfocuses on RB in the kit.
Being nerfed to 3s ticks makes the bleed very minor now (talking like 1% of your damage), so it hardly even matters in the first place.
Arguably, you shouldn’t be prioritizing Reckless Abandon or at least not Bloodbath (versus Crushing Blow), when those targets won’t live long enough for the DoT to tick on them.
The first version of the new Reckless Abandon, in which the DoT was stronger but purely single target, was better for this, as it more firmly cemented RA as the single target pick and AM as the multitarget one. Being able to cleave the DoT sounds good on paper, but the reality is that it just makes RA and AM uses overlap with one another, so one talent is just going to be best everywhere again.
The desync/downtime aspect of AM seems fairly polarizing. While the “best everywhere” problem is somewhat rampant across many fury talent choices - in this particular case I’m not sure it’s that bad and I’d probably rather them look to establish distinction elsewhere.
The knock on effect here is astoundingly awful though due to that logic for the spec.
As Slayer you want to hit your BT as often as possible for higher AoE damage in order to activate Reap the Storm procs.
Then as Mountain Thane you want to be hitting your BT as often as possible to proc Thunderblast to empower your next thunderclap.
So the problem lies in there that Crushing Blow is forcing it’s way in and pushing BT out in those AoE situations causing a muddy mess of priorities.
We already have next to zero build diversity and the only real talents changing during raid anyhow are RA/AM and that’s on Ovi’nax while also picking a full ST build that just removes OF for Sikran/Kyveza (technically Ulgrax too for parse monkeys but that’s due to silly WCL ommision of the intermission because some people were extending the fight to pad numbers).
The current way RA is set, alongside the most recent adjustments don’t really help fury at all and is just putting it back to the same stagnant prioritise crushing blow nonsense we got away from finally after TWW released.
Then we’ve also got the capstones that are never taken like Onslaught who are negatively effected by this talent adjustment. The stronger our baseline attacks are the higher Onslaught’s contribution needs to be. The fact that this is still a dead talent boggles the mind.
This must be a new grievance that some people are voicing, as far as I remember AM was lauded as the best thing since sliced bread and people frothed at the gills at wanting it back in the build for DF s4 when they voted for the wrong tier set (annihilator build was more fun, fight me), but now crying about desyncs when cooldowns are still pretty well synced up if you’re always active on target feels to me like a non issue.
The latest buffs are nice, but I still don’t think it’s enough. Until they revert our target caps to 8 then we’re still going to be way behind many classes.
Bloodbath currently retains value in multitarget, since the DoT cleaves, and all those other effects you mentioned. Even if the mobs won’t last a minute, the faster they die, the less times you’re likely to apply Boodbath anyway. That said, I still believe the healthier version of RA was the one that didn’t cleave at all.
Which is exactly why the first version of RA was better, establishing RA as the ST talent and making more room for AM as the multitarget one.
This is a separate problem that requires a more comprehensive solution. Just straight buffing Onslaught might push it into the rotation, but not in a healthy way - the real issue is that there are just more things competing for GCDs now (increased SD via Imminent Demise, Thunder Blast).
At this point, better to leave it dead and figure out a better long-term design solution than to just repeatedly buff it until it’s too good not to take and relive same debacle it went through in Dragonflight already.
Hero talents create a lot more desync than we had in Dragonflight. That said, while I don’t think the options are that polarizing, I don’t particularly care either - you’d be hard pressed not to find someone complaining about virtually any choice or option being the “worst thing ever ” these days.
We certainly have had a fair share of “Doom’ing.” Though with all these buffs being thrown at us, you can certainly see why we were.
As for the AM/RA situation, I would love to see them be actual choice nodes. One ST and one Multi. Right no RA is just the most obvious choice and their fix certainly does not solve it. The problem though, is that in order to buff AM they need to do something drastic, and that could be … Well, as you said,
Is it really a choice if it’s simply a binary option of Single target vs multi?
The choice and gameplay attached to how we use our major cooldown is a good choice for people to make. I think the ultimate goal on this particular talent should be to keep them as even as possible to allow you to choose how you prefer to play rather than being dictated by nothing more than AoE vs ST.
Obviously something will always come out on top, and the follow-up nodes probably need to be part of the equation in balancing the choices as well given how poor they are currently. But that’s unlikely to happen in this patch at this point.
That’s fair, and I guess I should have reworded that. I mean that I would rather have them as a binary choice. One better in AoE, and one for ST. You’re right though, it’s not really much of a choice at that point.
Yes, because it’s not that binary. Although it’s described as “single target vs multitarget” it’s usually not quite that straightforward, since most content and encounters are a soft mix of both, forcing you to decide how much of one or the other you should prioritize.
In Mythic+, players sometimes make single target-centric choices in order to gain more priority damage, rather than just going for more raw multitarget (e.g. Thane taking Vicious Contempt over Odyn’s Fury).
You also see this in raid: Rashanan is a multitarget fight, but there isn’t actually much reason to taking a full multitarget build, as you rarely actually cleave the adds and therefore don’t need to spec into Thane or take Improved Whirlwind/Meat Cleaver.
In any event, it’s a lot more of a choice than just playing the same talent in every situation.
AM doesn’t need to be buffed, as RA already has several tuning knobs.
They went for duration over value to give it more flavor and to slightly reduce the amount of burst/increase the amount of sustained damage. Both are valid, just different ways of working.
Leaving a talent dead and not having any form of build diversity in different situations for a whole expansion is horrible design, I get the point where you’re coming from but being ok with it? Idk about that one on this end as more is to be expected of developers in a game so old.
Onslaught definitely needs a rework angle added to it to fit in the GCD competition fury has now with how often RB resets itself (which is silly in and of itself). Whether it replaces BT as a longer cooldown (1.5x~2x longer), more damage dealt while also providing somewhat of a secondary effect (could bring in an AA steroid to keep it ST based) so it ends up being a defacto ST choice over Odyn’s Fury.
Honestly this on the whole AM/RA situation, ideally they stay equal (within 2~3%) so players can utilise the playstyle they enjoy the most between the two rather than players being forced into RA where they’ve got to deal with it’s awkward contradictions it brings into the fold during moment to moment gameplay decisions which will not be fun at all to play around with in a raid.
The flavour of choice there is akin to boiled Brussel sprouts. Your burst cooldown providing a sustain option based on how you play within it? That also has massive downfalls for lost damage (less now than before due to the BB bleed nerf) on priority targets that everyone is saving cooldowns to meet the dps check which wont live past the 15~20s before raid wipe mechanics come into play.
That’s a big miss imo as RA thematically should be the burst option in having Recklessness being a set cooldown as opposed to AM being the consistent option that gives you at least double the uptime of your cooldowns at more frequent intervals.
I know it’s not anytime soon, could be the next raid tier but I do hope that fury does see somewhat of an extensive rework which fixes the issues it has with it’s lack of build diversity in it’s capstones and options for builds less centralised on spamming one button over others.
The whole draw to warrior playstyles historically have always been that you’re not spamming the same resource generator multiple times in a row like a discount rogue but in fact have a variable priority system where you rarely press the same button more than twice in a row. Live RA hits this theme on the head and works well, the PTR variant just doesn’t hit as well from a gameplay perspective.
I don’t think we’ll ever get another oGCD attack added to the game ever since heroic strike’s removal.
Adding an oGCD generator though? The knock on effect from that would be that you’d just macro it to every attack and it would play itself. So I don’t think that idea is very well thought out at all.
Maybe something akin to every 5th BT turns into it if we’re not looking at adding in a new keybind into the mix. But even that sounds kinda eh.
Nobody said it isn’t, but there are practical realities and I don’t see the point in tilting at windmills. Would it be nice if they spent more time on some of these things? Sure, but I’m not the arbiter of their workflow.
I think you’re overestimating the (rather pitiful atm) damage contribution of Bloodbath’s DoT. Nobody said RA turns Recklessness into a sustained damage cooldown, only that they made the DoT extend instead of ignite to make the total damage a little less bursty (for which there are several reasons to, PvP being the most common example).
Right now, it’s about 1% of your damage with nearly 80% uptime, so I really don’t think this is the major issue you’re making it out to be. The real takeaway is some players just won’t like it as much this way… and that’s fine, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything inherently wrong with it.
Not a chance in the world. Fury gameplay is already fast, and you can just look at Prot for a good example of why they don’t want to inflate it further with unnecessary off-GCD abilities.
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