Fury has had an issue that’s been bugging me since start of war within.
Put simply, all the buttons that on paper should be the most impactful and exciting to press are either used as filler or only pressed at the tail end of a buff falling off to avoid wasting resources. The perfect and main example is execute. Fury as it stands almost never presses execute. This to me seems an egregious oversight, as execute is what most people would say is the most iconic warrior ability throughout all of the games history.
There are two main reasons for this that I will talk about separately.
1. Execute needs to be the highest damage builder on our bar, period.
Historically the idea of execute was an incredibly hard hitting ability that you could only press under certain circumstances, and when you are able to press execute it should feel incredibly powerful. If you look at the guides right now on wowhead, based on the current mountain thane M+ API, execute is currently bottom of the priority list. Only to be used if both bloodthirst and raging blow are off cooldown, no charges of thunderblast, and not enough rage for rampage. It’s a filler ability. Bloodthirst does more execute damage than execute. I’ve done multiple keys where I never pressed execute once. Even if you are playing slayer, the hero talent tree that’s supposed to be built around execute, you only ever press the button if you have maximum stacks or marked for death / Juggernaut is about to fall off / Sudden death is about to expire and the target is above 35%.
This amount of priority mathematics is in my view completely ridiculous for execute. The only buttons above execute in priority should be cooldowns and rampage to avoid wasting rage. If execute’s damage was proportionally tuned how it was before, none of the above math would be needed: if you can press execute, press it.
2. Raging blow and Bloodthirst have way too many additional effects, execute doesn’t.
This I think is the main culprit for the problem of fury’s rotation being wonky.
Right now for example raging blow does it’s damage and also has:
- Stacking crit chance for bloodthirst
- Stacking damage for Rampage
- Two separate chances to reset itself
- Chance to proc Lightning Strike (Thane)
Bloodthirst then has:
- Chance to enrage
- Chance to cause cold steel hot blood
- Chance to proc Thunderblast / Reap the storm
- Extend enrage
- Extra 50% damage in execute range
- A small heal, that becomes huge with enraged regen.
The only thing like this that execute does is juggernaut, boosting its baseline to crit chance to 50%, and then even when that is fully stacked it is still not any higher on the priority to press unless that stacking debuff is about to expire.
Functionally the only way to solve this in my opinion is to grant execute all the same modifiers that raging blow has. For example it already shares the lightning strike chance, what if execute also stacked up rampage damage and bloodthirst crit chance? That way on paper it does more damage than RB, generates more rage than RB, and also you aren’t missing out on the stacking amplifiers when you press it. Immediately Execute becomes our best builder again and the problem is solved.
As a last side note, sudden death also needs some attention. Right now the only reason any talent setup takes this ability is because you are forced to take it to make slayer work. Sudden death should feel like hitting the lottery when it procs, like it used to. Sudden death could be easily fixed if execute was inherently better as listed above, but if for some reason that’s not possible sudden death could simply increase execute’s damage by 25/33/50% or whatever is appropriate to make it worthwhile to use.
There are other issues that Fury is feeling at the moment (5 targets, people skipping capstone talents, etc) but I wanted to keep this feedback specific and somewhat concise in hopes that it is useful and seen by the development team.
Fury warrior has been my favorite way to play the game since 2004, and right now it feels like the soul of the spec is missing. Please make execute fun to press.