#1 - April 30, 2018, 1:23 a.m.
Part 1 of 4
General Rotation
While basically the same as Legion the rotation feels so much slower. To clarify here, by slower I'm not referring to the GCD change, we'll get to that in due course. I'm talking about rage generation; how many auto-attacks are required before being able to use Rampage and how long it takes to perform those auto-attacks.
Specifically the change to how Enrage works combined with the alteration of the rage given per auto-attack. To test the changes made in BFA vs live, I hit a target dummy with only auto-attacks and record the rage given per attack, until reaching 100 rage. This was done without the Endless Rage talent. I performed three repeats in each case to try to have a better sample size for variability.
My findings were that in BFA the rage generated per auto-attack is more variable than in the current live version. On live, every main-hand strike generated 5 rage and each off-hand strike generated either 2 or 3 rage, averaging out at 2.5 per hit. In BFA there is variability in both the main-hand and off-hand rage generation: being either 6/7 and 3/4 respectively. The averages worked out to be around 6.3 rage per main-hand attack and 3.1 per off-hand attack. We can clearly see that there is more rage generation per attack in BFA than live.
It took 27 auto-attacks to reach 98 rage on live, with the next attack to be a main-hand hit and put us over the 100 rage cap. In BFA it took 20 auto-attacks to reach 94 rage with the next attack scheduled to be a main-hand attack and cap us nearly exactly. There is potential for less wasted rage in BFA, but obviously abilities would be used, which means we can't say for certain.
So if we get more rage per attack, and it take us less attacks to cap on rage, this is surely a good thing, no? This should result in faster game-play, right? Well not quite. The change in auto-attack speed bonus from Enrage (100% live to 50% in BFA) must be looked at carefully. On live (ignoring haste), our weapon has a 3.6 second swing timer, which halves (1.8) when Enrage is active. In BFA, the 3.6 second swing timer goes to 2.7 seconds when Enrage is active.
So if we assume 100% Enrage up-time in both cases, we can calculate the time it takes to cap rage. 21 auto-attacks for BFA at 2.7 seconds per round of attacks (remember we attack twice as we have both weapons), results in: (21/2)*2.7=28.35 seconds to cap rage. In the live case: 25.2 seconds. Now, I would like to ascribe this difference purely down the to Enrage duration buff to 6 seconds in BFA and therefore the increased Enrage up-time it should bring. However, with the loss of our legendary effects, along with traits such as Uncontrolled Rage, Oathblood, Pulse of Battle and Death and Glory, we are generating less rage overall resulting in this slowdown in pace, which is abhorrent to those of us currently enjoying the live version of Fury.
The problem of rage generation may well be fixed by some Azerite traits, but that's what we keep hearing about everything and frankly, it's a poor excuse. We may well be able to keep our artefact weapons and legendary items for a time, but they will lapse at some point and leave a void in game experience at whatever level Blizzard decide to make them ineffective. Why should we go from an enjoyable spec, to something vacuous, to what we are promised will be an enjoyable spec again? Can't we just have an enjoyable spec as a baseline?
New players (as in leveling from 1-120 in BFA) will also be left with a bad experience of playing Fury until max level if they enjoy any form of tempo in their game-play.
tl;dr the general rotation is slow and boring at the moment and therefore isn't working well. This is because of the slow pace of rage generation. This is easily fixed by increasing rage per auto-attack slightly or increasing rage from abilities.
