Anyone else concerned about WAR and Fell Cleave in particular?
I've noticed a lot of complaints about jobs have been very theorycraft and raid-meta oriented, so I figured I'd try pointing out something that bothered me that wasn't related to potencies (seeing as how there've been numerous tooltip errors, and numbers aren't final until June 16th).
Let me precede this by saying that I don't main WAR, but some of the changes I've seen for it so far have really startled me. First and foremost of which is the ability to do 6 fell cleaves in a row.
Fell Cleave right now is WAR's signature move, and you can execute it a maximum of two times in a row. It has a huge potency(500) and one of the best animations in the game. What I'm mainly concerned about in SB is jadedness through repetition.
Setting aside that a lot of jobs are getting more skills with higher potencies than Fell Cleave (which devalues it's "awesomeness" in the grand scheme of things), you've gotta be concerned that you'll be hitting the same button and seeing the same animation 6 TIMES IN A ROW. I imagine the first few days of doing it will feel awesome, but as the weeks wear on, seeing it over and over and over again is really gonna drag it down.
An amazing "signature ability" to me is something that you have to work a bit to unlock, and then when you execute it, it does huge damage, or has a huge effect. Some great existing examples of this would be Deathflare, Samurai's 720 potency new move, Black Mage's new 'Foul', or the existing form of Fell Cleave. However I think "new Fell Cleave's" repetitive nature will make it lose it's identity as a 'Signature ability' in the same vein as these other examples, and I think it'll make WAR as a class be ridiculously boring to play.
Something to compare this too would be Machinist's Split Shot. If you've ever played Machinist, you've almost definitely run into the scenario where most of your kit is on cooldown and you're trying to get a proc onto Slug Shot. Yet no matter how many times you spam Split Shot, you just don't get that goddamn proc; so you're just sitting there pressing the same button over and over again until Quick Reload comes up. It feels terrible when that happens. Now compare that to Fell Cleave. There are no procs, you're just hitting the same button with the same animation 6 times in a row with an Infuriate somewhere in the middle. It almost feels like it's being relegated to a psuedo-filler ability, like Stone III, Ruin I & III, Heavy Shot, Malefic II, etc. I think it's a terrible direction to take one of my favorite abilities in the game :(
A possible fix to this (although I have no hope it'll get fixed, I haven't seen anyone else complain about this yet), would be to scale Fell Cleave up. Maybe make the first one 300 potency, and then make it go up 100 potency each time to a maximum of 800. Doing this and adjusting the animation to get bigger and more grandiose with each strike would break up the staleness. You could even go as far as making the 6th Fell Cleave something ridiculous like 1000 potency, with an absolutely INSANE animation, like the motherfucking DEMI-BAHAMUT OF FELL CLEAVES. I dunno, it's just a thought :)
TL;DR - Overall I think the new changes to Fell Cleave will make WAR the most exciting tank to play in the short-term, and easily the most boring tank to play in the long term. In addition to it losing bloodbath and flash, I don't think it'll even be that fun to play in dungeons anymore.
I'm curious if you think this is going to be an issue at all, or if you think I'm just overreacting.
Edit: I've been informed that it (probably) won't be optimal to actually FC 6 times back to back during a berserk window, but I'm still concerned over the repetitiveness. Even if it's not directly back to back, it still feels as though it's moving away from it's previous identity. Overall, I'm less worried about theorycrafting(as I stated at the top of the post), and more concerned about the feel of the job.
Edit2: Another question I would like to pose to WAR mains is "Are you satisfied with what you've seen so far". In terms of changes, DRK and PLD both got some new flashy big skills, but WAR essentially can just do MORE of what it's already been doing for the past 2 years.
Posted Jun 3, 2017, 5:07 PM UTC · edited