I haven’t actually seen too much discussion in the Guardian forum about our new Elites yet, and I was curious how people feel about “Feel My Wrath!” now that we know the numbers. To recap:
-10 base seconds of Fury
-5 base seconds of Quickness
-30 second cooldown (!), traitable to 24 seconds
-Can remove up to 2 conditions per cast with Pure of Voice/Trooper Runes, potentially converting one into a boon.
-No indication of a cast time in the patch notes, so until we learn otherwise, I’m assuming it casts instantly like our other Shouts.
Of course, any Elite we get is competing with Renewed Focus for the slot, and RF grants its own shorter-duration Fury when traited, but FMW’s 5 seconds of Quickness on a 24-30 second cooldown is really something. If we want to make comparisons, the Mesmer’s Time Warp Elite currently provides up to 10 seconds of pulsing Quickness to allies standing in the circle, but on a 180 second cooldown, and it’s still considered a good Elite skill (I’m not going to discuss its upcoming buffs here, though). FMW can provide half that effect at least 6 times as frequently, with a more flexible range and Fury as well. I haven’t had the chance to review all of the other balance changes yet, but it seems like a strong contender for the best source of party-wide Quickness in the game.
Quickness also has some pretty great synergy with some of our weapons, especially our 2-handers:
-Some people currently use Sigils of Rage with the GS in PvP to take advantage of how deadly its burst can be while under Quickness, and bringing FMW will let you replace that sigil while gaining the same effect (plus Fury) more consistently.
-Hammer’s slow animations suddenly become much less of a burden while the shout is in effect, making it easier to land clutch control skills, burst down targets, or even drop Symbols of Protection.
-Empower on the Staff doesn’t leave you exposed for nearly as long under Quickness (and gives you some nice Might stacks to complement FMW’s boons) and Line of Warding becomes even more disruptive when you can basically drop it out of nowhere. The new Staff trait also increases boon duration by an unspecified amount, improving the Fury/Quickness from FMW even more.
Besides specific weapons, my understanding is that FMW will also have synergy with Shelter, since Shelter’s channel is independent of the 2 second block the skill grants. If this is accurate (and please correct me if it’s not), then casting FMW before Shelter will accelerate Shelter’s heal while allowing us to block for a short time after the channel completes. This will make it more difficult for unblockable interrupts to put Shelter on cooldown and lets us use Shelter to set up other skills, or to regain momentum in a fight (especially with Smiter’s Boon).
There’s lots of other great utility packed into Quickness, like how it speeds up downed state revives and finishes, and since we’ll have Slow to contend with in the next patch, being able to speed your animations back up when you can’t cleanse seems valuable (I assume Slow and Quickness cancel out). I’d like to know what everyone else thinks, though. For all that it brings, do you think FMW will still get edged out by RF, or do you think it will see play in some builds/game modes? Discuss!
. I was trying to decide what runes to roll with on my DH…