#1 - May 10, 2018, 6:15 p.m.
1) The majority of racial throughput traits are passive. By preventing us from putting Blood Fury into a macro, we will now need to track this cooldown as a separate ability (and keybind) in our DPS rotations / openers. I don’t think it’s fair that my racial should impose additional complexity on my class just so that I can have parity* with other races on the DPS meter. Also, because Blood Fury is competing against passive throughput benefits (such as 1% more crit) it is a button that doesn’t reward you for smart play but rather punishes you for mistakes - with perfect play the best you can hope for is doing as much as a 1% boost in crit and you can only go down from there.
*(As an aside, Orc has consistently been a lower performing race for windwalker. While the difference between races has been so minimal I haven’t minded, if Blood Fury had been on the GCD I would have felt especially bad that I’m doing this extra work to -still- be a bad race choice for windwalker)
While a Tauren gets to enjoy 2% critical effect at all times, Orcs will need to optimize an additional cooldown, which brings me to my next point:
2) This change exacerbates the cooldown stacking problem. We’ve all seen the infamous Fury warrior .gif where they would use 4+ GCDs on cooldowns before pressing a single damaging ability, and that did not even include using Blood Fury. The fact that Blizzard has been changing how Bloodbath and Avatar work is evidence that they know that this is a miserable experience - and adding Blood Fury to the mix just makes it even worse. But Orcs can be classes other than Warriors, which can turn a frustrating yet bearable opener (such as Xuen -> ToD -> SEF) into a bad one. (Hey theorycrafters, can you please do the math so I know where in my opener I need to fit the active ability for my bad race?)
3) Blood Fury is not a fun or satisfying button to press. Spending a global to turn bigger and redder is just not interesting. It’s clear that Blizzard agrees with this statement, since they’ve been modifying Avatar and Bloodbath to give some kind of benefit on button press. In this regard, Blood Fury should at least either be made more interesting or it should not be on the GCD. (At least Troll Berserking is a mini-bloodlust that has a noticeable impact on the pacing of your rotation. I don’t think you can get more boring than a small bonus to attack power)
4) Unlike talents, you cannot opt out of your active racial for a passive one. Macros (which Blizzard is intentionally breaking with this GCD change) would alleviate this problem, allowing you to ignore this ability in exchange for less than optimal usage.
5) Orc utility is quite bad, and this GCD change really highlights this fact. I don’t get to have the moments of excitement that other races could have. I don’t get the make a clutch Warstomp stun or Bullrush knockdown. If I played Blood-Elf, I would have access to an offensive dispel that my class wouldn’t normally have. I could make plays with the Pandaren incapacitate. Instead, all I get is stun reduction by a fraction of a second… which I hear is decent for PvP (a gameplay type that I do not participate in) but is completely useless for PvE. And in exchange for having such poor utility I have an active +attack power skill that can only be as good or worse than 1% crit. After all, it would be imbalanced if it was better.
TL;DR:
1) Other throughput racials do not affect the DPS rotation. As a result, Blood Fury only feels bad, never good / rewarding
2) It exacerbates CD stacking problems
3) It doesn’t feel good to press as a stand-alone button
4) Cannot opt out of GCD bound racial complexity, unlike talents / macro combining
5) Emphasizes how bad Orc utility is
I’m not trying to whine about numerical racial balance, or about the entire spectrum of GCD changes. I believe blood fury is a uniquely bad spell to be put on the GCD for the reasons listed above.
As a brief aside - all of these arguments apply to the Mag’har active racial as well, although that spell is not currently (and hopefully never will be) on the GCD.
