Rabid Furor : new Warrior/Knight ability, how it works, bugs and improvement feedback

[KaellSolaris]

Hello,

 

After some testing on the PTS, I decided to make a little post about Rabid Furor the new ability for Warrior/Knight. the goal of this post is to explain how it works, report some bug/strange behavior, and make some feedback about potential improvements.

 

Please, do not hesitate to add your how thought about this ability, as well as your how experiance with it.

 

 

 

How does it works :

 

Rabid Furor ability is describe in the game as the following :

 

Consume all ability charges of Rabid Furor and applies Rabid Furor stacks to you. Each stack increases your next direct single target melee attack by 25% and is consume whenever you dead damage with these attacks. Recharges 1 ability charges every 30 seconds.

 

I'm going to go a step further and add as much detail as I can :

 

 

• The ability icon has a number on the bottom right corner, it show the number of charges you can get as a "buff stack" if you use the ability.
  
• Once you click on the ability, all available charges become a buff with a number of stack equal to the number of charges who were available, this buff last 15 seconds or until you use ability who can consume it .
  
• This ability stacks can only be consume by single target abilities classified as "melee" (you can see the full list below).
  
• You can have up to 4 charges in the Ability icon.
  
• The recharge timer is only active if you have less than 4 charges, once you get a fourth, the timer disable himself until you use the ability.
  
• Rabid Furor is an off GCD ability.
  
• Rabid Furor is affected by Alacrity (but not by Carnage's Berserk).
  
• If you use Rabid Furor while you still have charges on you, your previous charges are not wasted, they are add on to the existing charges (ex: if you have 2 stacks of Rabid Furor on your buff bar and you get another 1 charges ready to use in the ability, you can click it and have 3 stacks in your buff bar).
  
• It increase all damage of your melee ability, including multi-hit ability like Blade Rush (including Ataru damage from carnage), but do not increase damage of dot's from melee ability ( like Rupture for Annihilation Marauder or Marauder Fury's Ravage bleed effect).
  
• Several tactical item and set bonus required a Rabid Furor stack to modify an ability effect.
  
• There is a bonus set who allow you to use Rabid Furor more frequently.
  

 

Basicly, you want to use Rabid Furor with your biggest damage ability, steaking of which.

 

 

 

List of all abilities who can use Rabid Furor :

 

Below you will find the complete list of all abilities who can use a charge of Rabid Furor:

 

Sith warrior shared ability.

• Assault
  
• Force Charge.
  
• Ravage.
  
• Vicious Slash.
  
• Vicious Throw.
  

 

Juggernaut shared ability:

• Retaliation.
  
• Saber Throw.
  
• Sundering Assault.
  

 

Immortal discipline:

• Aegis Assault.
  
• Crushing Blow.
  

 

Vengeance discipline:

• Hew.
  
• Impale.
  

 

Rage discipline:

• Furious Strike.
  
• Obliterate.
  

 

Marauder shared ability:

• Battering Assault.
  
• Crippling Slash.
  

 

Annihilation discipline:

• Annihilate.
  
• Rupture (only on initial hit, dot does not benefit from rabid furor).
  

 

Carnage discipline:

• Gore
  
• Massacre
  

 

Fury discipline:

• Furious Strike.
  
• Obliterate.
  

 

 

Some abilities have a strange behavior :

 

• Assault: Assault consume a charge but Republic's counterpart Strike do not (both Guardian and Sentinel).
  
• Crippling Slash: When use in melee range it use a charge, however when you use it in range with the utility Maiming Reach it does not, for Sentinel it does not consume a charge for both melee use and range use.
  

 

 

 

Percentage of increase:

 

Due to the damage range of each ability, testing the exact percentage of increase was a little hard, however when you use Rabid Furor the tooltip of each ability who can use it is refreshed and new number corresponding the increase are added.

Anyway, I found some strange result when you use Rabid Furor, the increase showed in the tooltip is a little less than 25 % ( from 23,58 % increase to 24,27% increase, very few ability are at 25 %).

As I wrote these lines, I still don't know if it is a tooltip error or a bug in the ability.

 

 

 

Set bonus

 

On the pts there is a set named "Descent of the Fearless" , it is a 6P bonus set with the following bonuses :

 

• 2P: + 2% Critical Rating
  
• 4P: Taking damage has a slight chance of building a Rabid furor ability charge. Can only occur once every 5 seconds
  
• 6P: Dealing damage has a 5% chance to build a Rabid furor ability charge. Can only occur once every 5 seconds
  

 

This bonus set is most likely mandatory if you want to use tactical items who required Rabid furor (and in comparison to other set bonus it's probably going to be mandatory one for every knight/warrior dps). The fault I found him this set bonus is the rng around the charges generated, sometime in 20 sec I'm going to get 3-4 charges, sometime nothing up to 45 seconds, it's a pity it is not more regular in the generation of these charges.

 

 

 

Good point

 

It's a good concept to add a off gcd tool to boost DPS, definitively useful in both PVE and PVP, it also t leave you the choice to add a lot a burst on small period of time or regular burst on long period of time depending how you like to play.

It is a very dynamic CD and it forced you to anticipate your burst phase or to be very regular within your DPS cycle to optimize your damage on long term.

 

 

 

Bad point

 

You are forced to use ALL available charges at once, it is ok if you only need one or two depending the next ability coming next in you cycle, but what about the exceeding stacks ? well they will be "wasted" upon low damage abilities, which is not what you want !

 

You want to use each stack upon you biggest damage dealer, not a Rage generator nor a filler ability, unfortunately the way it was design does not let you do it that way, which lead to a ton of frustration, especially during pull time where you are going to waste 2/4 to 3/4 of your stacks.

 

This is even more frustrating with the bonus set, sometime you have the right amount of charges but it generate one more just before you use it and you are force to use it on something you do not want to.

 

If there are 2 thing to change :

 

• Allow us to consume charges one by one.
  
• Make the set bonus more regular
  

 

 

 

Conclusion

 

Rabid Furor can be a ton of fun, as well as a real challenge to use it properly to optimize your dps, but because of his mechanism, it is as cool as it is frustrating.

Edited September 10, 2019 by KaellSolaris
add space between paragraph

[CooperReagly]

Thanks for this.

[mrphstar]

the problem of "wasted" furor stacks only occurs in the opener.

so thats once in each fight, maybe twice when you got fights with very long downtimes (Cora, Revan).

 

any furor stack after that can be activated an applied exactly to the ability you wanna use it for. i dont see the problem there.

and one could try to change the opener to put3-4 hard hiting abilites right into the furor-window.

carnage and vengeance do this anyway.

rage and fury could swap some skills to do it as well.

for anni someone gotta do the math if delaying the DoTs for 2 harder hits after Annihilate is worth it. from a quick thought about it, i would say yes. if not, maybe atleast the other way around: apply both dots followed by furor anni + ravage + procced saber throw + vicious slash.

 

so honestly, i dont understand your frustration. its a crisp clean dps buff, probably the strongest of all lvl 75 abilites. so thats complaining from a high level of comfort.

Edited September 11, 2019 by mrphstar

[Balameb]

If there are 2 thing to change :

 

• Allow us to consume charges one by one.
  
• Make the set bonus more regular
  

I like you post, very well done.

 

I personally disagree with your first change about giving more control in consuming it. As it is, is a big bump in DPS. Changing the rotation or using a couple furors with lesser abilities seems natural.

 

Now about the regularity of that set bonus, i fully agree. I really hate rng dependant procs/rotations, and this falls too close to that.

[KaellSolaris]

Hello,

 

I may have not been clear about my frustration, it mostly came from 2 specific moments :

 

 

• The pull where you are going to have 4 charges used at once and some of them are going to be used on moderate to low damage ability (you get used to it after some time, but still).
  
• During cycle when you prepare yourself to use 1 or 2 charges for your next ability to dot a quick burst, but the set bonus decided to give you an extra charge, you got 3 of them and the last one is going to be wasted on the third skill
  

 

 

My main cause of frustration is from the total rng of the bonus set, who tend to ruin your plan to use your charges by being too generous or too cheap.

 

Example: as a Carnage Marauder, I got 4 Rage remaining, and 2 charges are ready to be used. Gore and Ravage are available and Battering Assault is going to be ready to be used just after to refilled my resource, so I trigger the ability, but just before that, the bonus set gave me a third charge, this third charge will be "wasted" on Battering Assault because i have no other choice but to refilled my Rage.

 

I Agree, using charges one by one might be too easy, it is already the case when we are in the middle of the rotation, so what do you think of these options ?

 

 

• Using charges 2 by 2 ?
  
• Fixing the rng from the bonus set ?
  
• Prevent Rage generating abilities from using charges ?
  
• Leave him as it is ?
  

 

These are just some idea, you are free to disagree, as you said, Rabid furor is already a very good ability, it's just my personal opinion, and if a change is needed, at the end of the day the devs are the only one who can decide to do something about it.

Edited September 11, 2019 by KaellSolaris

[Balameb]

 

I Agree, using charges one by one might be too easy, it is already the case when we are in the middle of the rotation, so what do you think of these options ?

 

 

• Using charges 2 by 2 ?
  
• Fixing the rng from the bonus set ?
  
• Prevent Rage generating abilities from using charges ?
  
• Leave him as it is ?
  

 

These are just some idea, you are free to disagree, as you said, Rabid furor is already a very good ability, it's just my personal opinion, and if a change is needed, at the end of the day the devs are the only one who can decide to do something about it.

I think "Prevent Rage generating abilities from using charges" would be a good way to avoid some frustration. Specially for maras. Juggs have other ways to generate rage and depending on the situation and utilities, sometimes use very little Sundering Assault. And now that they loose the set bonus perk of it, maybe even less.

[Hawkebatt]

Don't have a opinion on the new skill other than it messes with my current rotation. Adding it in feels like a wasted action. Though I only used a few times and not for very long.

The new sin ability is situational at best. Might be better for a tank spec to use. The sorc new ability is even worse for out sync with the current rotation. Plus for most of them the tool tips shows low dps compared to another skill.

 

I want them to fix freezing force to actually work right and do the proper damage with the utility active and to show this on the tool tip. It would be even better to put it back where it was before and just put a does not do any damage in pvp condition on it.

 

Thanks for the time it took to break down its potential. Since Vigilance is situational in its rotation it could become a click on it if it is up part of the rotation. Any extra that a set will give you will just be that an unplanned use. I think such an ability would have been better for a dps hatred assassin as more of their abilities are single melee attacks.