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Fyr'alath Legendary Axe AoE Hotfix Explained - Improvements & Remaining Issues
Live
Posted
2024/01/05 at 9:50 AM
by
Mandl
The
latest hotfix
for
Fyr'alath the Dreamrender
looks to improve the AoE capabilities for the new legendary axe by increasing the cap of
Rage of Fyr'alath
stacks to 50. Our guide writer, Mandl, details the impact of the latest hotfix and addresses the remaining issues for this legendary weapon.
Be sure to check out all the latest coverage and editorials for
Fyr'alath the Dreamrender
below.
How Good is Fyr'alath? - Part 1Fyr'alath DoT Hotfix Review - Part 2
Fyr'alath, the Dreamrender Legendary Axe Overview
Fyr'alath the Dreamrender
Buffs... Again
On the weekly reset,
Fyr'alath the Dreamrender
was once again hotfixed, fixing an issue outlined in a
previous article
.
Previously, the on-use part of the legendary,
Rage of Fyr'alath
, would consume all
Mark of Fyr'alath
present on any target within 50 yards in order to buff both
Rage of Fyr'alath
and
Explosive Rage
by 10% per mark. Unfortunately, this capped out at five marks consumed while still consuming every additional mark, leading to a counterintuitive loss of damage beyond 5 targets.
The hotfix applied on weekly reset raises this consumption cap to 50 different
Mark of Fyr'alath
, yielding a new maximum of
+500%
damage, up from +50%. Obviously, due to the nature of dungeons and encounters this season, there aren't that many cases where this is particularly noteworthy, but it is welcome nevertheless.
All other behavior points mentioned previously still hold true: casting
Fyr'alath the Dreamrender
still consumes all marks (even those out of line of sight), and you can track how many the effect consumed on your logs as each mark turns into a stack of
Rage of Fyr'alath
- this is what buffs the legendary by 10%, and whose max cap got raised to 50.
Whilst this isn't exactly a massive change due to the overwhelming majority of pulls having less than 10 targets, we thought it would be interesting to showcase one interesting use-case for this buff: Tindral Sageswift.
Tindral Sageswift Revisited
Tindral features a large amount of very short-lived adds:
Fiery Vines
on all difficulties, and
Scorched Treant
on Mythic difficulty. These adds typically live for a very brief period of time, which is
ideal
for this hotfix.
Previously, you would gain 50% maximum if you had 5 targets marked. This made sending
Fyr'alath the Dreamrender
somewhat worthless both for boss damage and for AoE, as a large majority of the specs able to wield it had better abilities to use during both mechanical overlaps. With this change, two options are now open:
If you are still progressing Tindral and the
Fiery Vines
/
Scorched Treant
are a problem for you, you can now mark all of them and then use
Fyr'alath the Dreamrender
. This is
still
only a gain of 10% per mark, but will be slightly more palatable than before.
If, on the other hand, you are specifically after boss damage, your goal is to mark as many
Fiery Vines
/
Scorched Treant
(depending on overlap and difficulty) as you can, and then engineer a situation where only Tindral is caught in the frontal. This can be done in one of two ways:
By only having Tindral in front of you (the bulk of the legendary effect -
Rage of Fyr'alath
- is a 90 degree cone in front of you and only targets hit by it cause the split and each tick is split independently)
By using
Fyr'alath the Dreamrender
just before all of the
Fiery Vines
/
Scorched Treant
you have marked die.
The latter case is something you absolutely want to practise if you are raiding on Mythic difficulty. The most common strategy for Mythic Tindral revolves around spawning a very large number of
Scorched Treant
at 0:50 - a prime opportunity to move the boss very slightly, mark all the treants and roots and score a modest amount of boss damage.
Outstanding Issues
While this sounds like a significant buff, it barely moves the needle on where the legendary is still the weakest: single target, and for specs with quadratic scaling in AoE. It is also particularly annoying as it significantly affects DPS specs able to wield the legendary.
By far the biggest drawback of the legendary across all target counts and all specs is that
Rage of Fyr'alath
is not a hasted channel, meaning that instead of costing 2 GCDs, it instead costs 3 full seconds irrespective of haste rating or haste-increasing effects. Effects such as
Heroism
,
Timeline Acceleration
(
Iridikron
),
Power Infusion
cause the player to lose additional GCDs during the channel, up to a maximum of four - 200% of the GCD cost for a channel intended to be fit for a legendary.
As a result of this,
no spec
currently recommend casting
Rage of Fyr'alath
during cooldowns, and for a number of DPS specs, the cost of the channel is large enough to push it down to a very low priority cast. This has also led some players on a quest to find ways to mitigate or offset the cost of this channel the hard way: by moving far enough away from a target so that the travel time on
Rage of Fyr'alath
(the charge part of the legendary) is longer than one GCD, you are able to cast a
single
ability during the channel without breaking it - something warriors have been leveraging to be able to cast
Bladestorm
(with
Blademaster's Torment
) during it.
This gets even worse in AoE for DPS specializations with quadratic scaling in AoE, where each GCD spent channelling could have been a cast of
Epidemic
. For this reason alone, Unholy Death Knights will still avoid casting
Rage of Fyr'alath
at or above 7 targets, as the damage dealt by
Rage of Fyr'alath
is still completely overshadowed by what would be three to four
Epidemic
casts - or casts to generate resources to fuel these. As a quick indication, simply hasting this channel would raise this to 15 targets, essentially turning
Fyr'alath the Dreamrender
from a somewhat desirable passive stick for Unholy to a worthwhile legendary across virtually any pull in Dragonflight - including the aforementioned Tindral example, where instead of being able to leverage either scenarios, Unholy Death Knights default to casting
Rage of Fyr'alath
as the
absolute last GCD
while adds are up.
The worst part in all this is that hasting this channel would not actually change the damage value of the legendary; it would simply compress its delivery and allow specializations to be able to cast
Rage of Fyr'alath
in a fixed, two-GCD time interval, irrespective of their current haste.
About the Author
This article has been written by Mandl (Mandl#0001 on Discord). I am a tank multiclasser and Useful Minion for the
Acherus Death Knight community
, where I answer questions regarding death knights and discuss class and encounter strategies.
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Comment by
messiah77
on 2024-01-08T05:50:39-06:00
same old Blizz, give us something and then spend the next year trying to fix it.
Comment by
Fleneth
on 2024-01-09T05:00:13-06:00
split and each tick is split independently
Does the axe really split the active damage LMAO? No wonder people were complaining about it being trash.
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