Sunday, September 21, 2014

Spec in Review - Fury Warriors

Fury is a spec that I've flirted with from time to time, but in the Catalcysm/Mists era (and actually also in the Wrath era, though my sole warrior at the time eventually transitioned to being a full-time tank,) I was pretty staunchly an Arms guy. I hadn't really paid it much thought until Wrath introduced Titan's Grip, which of course iconically allows Fury to dual-wield two-handed weapons. Later Cataclysm introduced Single-Minded Fury for those who, for some bizarre reason, would want to stick to single-handed weapons.

Fury has gone through some evolution, and indeed some of the biggest changes to the spec on the Warlords Beta came through only recently.

In my last spec review, I really focused on what had changed, but this time I'm going to just sort of talk about what Fury's all about now.

The number of abilities to juggle for Fury is relatively small, but there's a lot of interactivity between them.

Essentially, Bloodthirst is your main Rage generator and your main means of becoming Enraged (in fact, it might be the only way - not sure about changes to Berserker Rage.) Bloodthirst has a 30% increased chance to crit, and when it does, it enrages you.

Wild Strike is your main Rage spender, costing 40 Rage and dealing rather high damage. Your Bloodthirst has a chance to proc Blood Surge, which makes your next two Wild Strikes free. I could be mistaken, but I also get the impression that Wild Strike triggers a shorter global cool down.

Raging Blow functions both as a major proc ability and also a kind of cleave ability. Whenever you become enraged, you activate Raging Blow, which costs only ten Rage, but can't be used unless you get this proc, but given the increased chance for Blood Thirst to crit, and the fact that you're going to be stacking a bunch of crit anyway, this happens pretty frequently. The Raging Blow proc stacks up to two times. This ability I believe hits harder than Wild Strike when you take into account the fact that it hits with both weapons.

Whirlwind is your primary AoE ability. I'm not sure how many enemies you'll need to be fighting to make it a full substitute for Wild Strike, but you might want to toss it in there for an extra effect, which is that it causes your Raging Blow to hit a second target, stacking up twice for a total of three targets (and once you get the requisite Draenor perk, the extra targets are doubled, so you can hit a total of five.)

The rest is pretty familiar if you've played a Warrior. Execute, Victory Rush, and Charge are all still there. The most notable absence however is Heroic Strike - the idea here is that Wild Strike will be your main Rage-spender.

Most recently, Colossus Smash was made Arms-only, which does change the gameplay quite a bit. Fury, at least in Mists, was built around building up as many procs and resources as you could, and then spending it within the CS-window. With CS no longer a part of the Fury rotation, you'll want to react a lot quicker to your procs and spend them as quickly as you can.

Notable talents  in the Warrior's "rotational changes" tier (which I think is either level 30 or 45) are the option to have Wild Strike cost 15 less Rage - meaning you'll be hitting it far more often, or to remove the cool down on Bloodthirst, which means you'll never not have something to hit. The last is available to all specs, which is Sudden Death, giving you a proc that allows the use of Execute on targets over 20% health or getting to do it for free when they're below that.

In many ways, I feel that Blizzard has kind of traded out the gameplay concepts for Fury and Arms with one another. Arms is now the spec that takes time to carefully build up resources for a burst of damage while Fury is much more dynamic and fast-paced as you respond to procs. Some veterans will no doubt be very unhappy with where Fury is now, much as I have been with Arms. But coming to the spec as a relative stranger, it... kind of works.

Mind you, I still think the version of Arms on live is better.

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