Ideas for Making the Left Side of Fury Tree A More Active and Varied Playstyle

Classes Warrior
1

In Liquid Maximum’s stream today, Danwarr from Method talked about how the left side of the Fury tree was boring to play on the alpha right now because there aren’t enough active buttons to press, and Bloodthirst is pressed way too often without much else feeling worth pressing. He also stated that a lot of people are trying to find ways to make a left-hand side build of Fury that doesn’t use Rampage because Rampage feels like it isn’t worth pressing.

So, I figured we could cook up some ideas for how to make it more active without removing the identity and playstyle of “make auto attacks great again” and “make bloodthirst go brr” that it currently has. I would also like to try to solve the problem of other buttons, especially Rampage, not feeling good to press. I invite everyone else to come along with me and submit your own ideas for ways to change things while maintaining the core concept of what currently exists on the left-hand side. This is a creative exercise, and we will see if anything anyone says gets included in the future.

Here is an initial idea to prime the pumps. It may not even be a good idea, but it’s an idea:

Cadence of Fujieda
Since Frenzy and Cadence are almost the same effect but one works off Rampage and the other off of Bloodthirst, and since Rampage needs to be more useful, what if Cadence became an active ability that interacted with Rampage?

  • 1.5 min cd. For the next X seconds (probably around 20-25), gain Fujieda’s Cadence, gaining 1% haste. Using Rampage gains another stack of Fujieda’s Cadence. After the effect ends, a number of auto attacks equal to the amount of stacks of Fujieda’s Cadence you had are guaranteed to critically strike (or have a Y% higher chance to critically strike).

The idea here is to make it have the same overall vibe that it does currently, but on an active ability. The stacks would increase with Rampage instead of Bloodthirst. Since Rampage is cast less often than Bloodthirst, the haste ramps slower, but there is a payoff at the end that rewards you for doing well while you have the buff and plays into the auto attack centric style.

The effect with perfect play (using Recklessness when Fujieda’s Cadence has 12 seconds remaining, using Rampage immediately after using Cadence and then immediately off CD, etc.) would only be able to be extended enough to get 4 to 5 stacks of haste early in the expansion. As more haste gear is gained, maybe you could get up to 6 to 8 stacks.

The most obvious problem with this is that you can currently talent Cadence without taking Rampage, so something would have to be done about that. Alternatively, something would have to be added to this idea to where the stacks could be increased by another ability in some way as well (that isn’t as easy to pull off as using Rampage).

So, that’s idea #1, and there are way more ideas that are probably better than mine, especially considering my idea only makes it more active and varied for like 20 or 30 seconds every 1.5 minutes. How would you go about it?

2

Honestly, I think the best first step is just to remove the AA / BT-spam build.

A spec that braindead really… shouldn’t outperform or even perform equally with significantly more nuanced ones.

By making BT every other GCD—and, worse, allowing AAs to proc Enrage—moreover, the interplay of timing guaranteed Enrage activations is effectively neutered. There’s nothing worth playing around because your chances of getting Enrage anyways, regardless of anything you do beyond hitting BT on CD, is so damn high.

That kind of scroll wheel gameplay just should not be a sub-spec. Either the whole spec should be that way—and I wouldn’t wish that even on BM Hunters—or none of it, else those who like Fury thematically are pushed towards terrible playflow.

It’s fine for AAs to deal a ton of damage over time. It’s fine for BT to hit like a truck. It’s fine, even, for most of one’s damage to revolve around just BT and AA… so long as there’s some active, nuanced form of manipulation (e.g., onto those AAs) that brings its depth up to that of other Fury builds.

3

I think Blizzard purposefully wants an easy-to-play Fury playstyle, and that’s birthed the Auto-Attack build.

I don’t like it either, but if it’s here for the benefit of other players, I would give it a capstone that makes Rampage further increase auto-attack speed for 5 seconds. Something of short duration that makes you still want to spend your rage.

I would like 5 playstyles to be blended into the Fury Tree.

  • Burst-building (requires the most setup, but has biggest burst, IE Raging Blow grants a stacking buff to Rampage)
  • High APM (low GCDs, feels rewarding to press the basic kit, strong sustained damage)
  • Auto-attack (passive damage)
  • AOE (because every class needs one)
  • Frequent-Burst (weaves new spells around the basic kit to build strong, on-demand burst with sub-45 second CDs like Siegebreaker, Odyn’s Fury, Onslaught)
2 Likes
4

Would love it if that much attention to actual playflow choice was put into these spec trees.

Granted, I don’t really think of AoE itself or even auto-attacks as “playstyles”, but 4-7 major choices akin to your other bullets would be great.

For instance, I’d love to be able to pick or choose from among various playflow qualities like…

  • Target-swapping (wanting to swap for the likes of Fresh Meat)
  • Precise positioning (for the likes of spreading debuffs to exactly whom you want, via Whirlwind / Meat Cleaver)
  • Rhythm-matching (wanting to match uses of something to something else not normally on the same timer)
  • Syncopation (wanting to specifically keep skills apart)
  • Relative downtime minimization (ordering various short CDs to minimize the amount of times they refresh simultaneously and thereby minimize filler usage)
  • Gambles and hedging (such as in saving Rampage briefly because Bloodthirst might refresh Enrage in time anyways, or swinging Bloodthirst timing as not to waste potential Enrage uptime)
  • Active CD alignment or dis-alignment (as is being theorized for some Survival builds)
  • Deliberately timing (non-rigid) phases/swings (think Arcane or a Rampage that spends 60-120 Rage for roughly proportional damage and duration, such that damage favors spending high and Enrage uptime slightly favors spending low)
  • Meta-rhythm (Minor burst phases, Rampage timings, etc., getting shorter and shorter or longer and longer based on something larger)
  • Etc., etc.
5

I’d love to see Single Minded Fury changed to a Multiplicative 20-25% haste, rather than being 12% flat damage increase. It would lead to a much more unique class feel of being a fast-attacking berserker, a sorely missing warrior power fantasy. You’d hit for less, but hit more often, get more rage, proc more abilities, and proc more enchants/gear effects (they’d be normalized at 2.6, but your attacks speed would be sub 2.0 after haste + gear). It also would amplify the effects of haste rating on gear, giving SMF warriors a reason to actually gear different than other warriors.

Also, with that much haste + the right gear, perhaps sometimes you could use Bloodthirst every 3rd GCD, as you’d get close to a 1 second GCD

6

Yeah, I agree that there’s a lot of potential for more weapon/gear diversity between TG and SMF. For instance, with an SMF build, you could focus on 1h weapons that have on-hit procs with internal CD’s, and with a TG build, you could focus on 2h weapons that have on-use effects with CD’s.

This gearing difference would tie into each build type. On-hit procs happen more consistently (when the internal CD is up) due to higher attack speed giving more chances for the proc to occur. On-use effects are more in line with the idea that the TG build is higher APM where you might use the weapon’s effect in between GCD’s.

Unfortunately, it seems like Blizzard has not really made weapons that interesting in a long time. They seem to often not have anything but attack speed and stats on them. It would be cool to return to a world with a lot of weapon diversity, though.

7

I think you miss the point of the left side. It’s there to not be as interactive, as fast, or anything. It’s the casual side for players wanting an easier, slower build of fury.

8

They stated that design intent after I made this post. Since posting this, they have added Storm of Swords, which I think is a very good step in the right direction. Some people are saying that it will make the build as high of an APM as the TG build, though. I personally don’t care about the APM and only care about the feeling of attacking faster, but the people who would prefer a lower APM option seemed concerned about it.

I would suggest making the build not have high haste (so not faster GCDs) but instead have the abilities be consistent with their cd timing, and make it so that using abilities in the build increases attack speed only without increasing the GCD and then the abilities you use hit harder but have long enough cooldowns to not feel frantic, but also not have many dead GCDs. Dead GCDs aren’t fun, and I think it’s possible to fill them while still making you not have to spam your keyboard due to super fast GCDs.

Maybe something else also needs to be done to remove haste from gear and turn it into crit for this build.