New 31pt Trees, My take on the Fury Tree

Alright, so I was playing around with the new talent calculator and this is what I came up with:
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warrior#GeGO08KS,,12479

We'll start off with the good, since that's usually so rarely seen around these forums:

-Intensify Rage is back. I was upset when I saw this leave in the last beta build, and seeing it back in our tree makes me happy. The reduced rage cooldowns are very important to fury, even moreso with some of the other changes that were made

-As I made my way through the initial 31pt tree, picking up everything I could for increasing dps, I found I had ~5 points leftover, with which I was able to pick up Skirmisher and Bloodcraze. I guess you could even say there's room for 6 utility talents, but I've always considered Heroic Fury a must have ability.

-Fury in the Blood reworked to also provide bonus during Improved Zerker rage. I remember suggesting something along these lines a while ago, and while it may not have taken the idea directly from me (I have no idea if Blizz even read that post), I am glad that we're thinking along the same lines here. With Intensify Rage you have ~75% uptime on this buff, plus a 2minute cooldown Deathwish that can be thrown in as well. It's uncertain whether this will be enough to scale properly with other masteries, but it is definitely a great start. The base enrage amount can be tweaked if it's not working well enough.

-Impending Victory was moved out of reach for Arms/Prot. I was particularly worried about it being in reach of arms, given they already have two procs to watch out for, but a AP scaling 0 rage cost attack proc is too much to pass up, so they would have taken it and had a 3rd proc to watch. Moving it out of their reach was good.




So basically, there's a lot of good stuff going on here. But there's also some bad.

-Improved berserker stance and unendering fury appear to have been taken away, so fury just lost 20% bonus to strength, and 10% damage to all their primary abilities that was not accounted for in their level 10 bonuses, and looks to have nothing to compensate for it. You want us to use strength over agility, but nerf our benefits from strength. Why?

-I didn't feel like there was a single talent that I actually wanted that I couldn't get. The only real choice was at the very end where I had to choose between 3/3 incite vs 3/3 deep wounds. I'm sure eventually some sim will tell me which of those options is better. But outside of that there is nothing else I would want to change.

Furious Attacks and Piercing Howl are both PVP exclusive abilities. Furious attacks I'll wait to see if the proc rate got buffed significantly, which may help fury pvp, but as of now it looks unchanged. Piercing Howl is useless to a raider baring a few specific fights.

Booming Voice is an extra 10 rage per minute, for 2 talent points, that means for the price of 2 talent points and 2 unecessary GCDs (since you dont need to refresh every minute), I can get myself 1 extra heroic strike.

Similar to Furious Attacks and Booming Voice, the rage returns on Unbridled Wrath just aren't worth the point investment. If Unbridled Wrath has its proc rate bumped up, or the rage gained per proc bumped up, it becomes a worthwhile talent. Even just bumping it to 2 rage per proc at 3 ranks may make it worth it. As it stands, unless you bumped the proc rate behind the scenes, I have no interest in this talent, even with rage normalization.

Last but not least, Enrage itself is still a pitiful talent. Even reduced to 2 points, it's not worth ever picking up, because it requires that you be attacked directly to proc. This means it will never proc in a PVE environment, except while soloing, and again fury PVP is still pretty bad. If the goal is for enrage to be a leveling utility only, then it succeeds at its goal. If the intent for it is to ever be anything useful, please just scrap it. It's one of those trap talents that GC was talking about.

-Now that we're done looking at the talents in Fury itself, lets look at the offspec talents I opted to not pick up. In Arms, I opted to not pick up Improved Rend, which boosts an ability Fury does not (and should not) use. I did however manage to get field dressing due to the limited options at this tier, and field dressing is pretty awesome of a utility talent. I then grabbed Incite out of Prot and Deep Wounds out of fury. With the change to Impale it's all but useless to fury (but a pretty nice buff to arms), so I did not feel bad skipping out on that at all, nor did I feel bad about losing Blitz or any of the other prot talents besides incite, because none of those talents are generally applicable, or applicable to any ability Fury actually uses.


The long and short of this is, in the end I felt like there were no real decisions to be made. I was able to pick up all of the damage increasing talents I wanted except one, and had about 5 free utility points in fury, plus 2 predetermined points for utility from arms.

-There's a few decent utility talents I was looking forward to being able to get that are now gone. Secondwind was moved out of reach of fury. Toughness had its snare reduction removed. Either or both of these things would have helped to make fury pvp more viable (and thus make those bad options I pointed out above seem less bad), but as is they were removed as choices and made just bad.

-Improved Berserker Rage was another talent I hoped we'd have the points for. Unlike our other rage generation improving options, it actually would have provided enough rage generation to be worth talenting. 20 rage on a 20 second cooldown, a 2 point talent to give 1 rage per second seems just about right for what we should be looking at for a deep fury talent. Additionally, Zerker Rage is still on the GCD for fury, yet we will likely be expected to hit it on cooldown to keep FitB active. If the extra rage was considered too much, a talent to take zerker rage off the gcd would be very much appreciated.

-Titan's Grip/SMF are still in the tree as abilities. You have phased out anything else that looks remotely like a flat damage/stat increase, yet these abilities stay. If you want to keep TG in for flavor, please just bake it into the level 10 passives, even in a gimped form (say reduce damage of two handers by 25% while increasing 1 handers by 5% and giving the bonus stats), rather than keeping it at the capstone of our tree. They are the pinnacle of passive and boring talents, yet you insist on keeping them despite multiple people telling you that they don't fit your new model, both in and out of your beta.


Edit: I almost forgot. lol@ the new Cruelty. Add that as another point on the bad list. While it's going to get picked up regardless because the only alternative is Unbridled Fury, a 10% crit chance on one ability isn't worth 2 talent points. Compare it to Improved Overpower, which gives +50% crit chance to one ability, and reduces its cooldown by 4 seconds, for the same talent investment.


Edit2: Also want to comment that Rampage still has no selfish component, which was stated to be something that would be built into all raid buffs in cata.