Diablo 2 Fury
Lawana Stuckert
Each of the Barbarian primary abilities generate "X Fury per attack". Fury is then used by the secondary abilities, and if you mash the right mouse button like me your beefy Man or woMan will soon be reminding you gruffly about his or her lack of anger with the minions of Hell.
Since it is essential to maintain my Barbarian's disgruntled state, what strategy can I use to best maximize Fury? Does it only come down to each left mouse click? Do I get more for hitting monsters in groups? Does taking damage increase my rage? Should I pattern my use of primary and secondary attacks (P+P+S, P+P+P+S, etc). What is the best strategy?
Based on your skill choices and the way that you are dealing your damage you may not need as much Fury as you think. Personally, most of my damage output comes from Cleave and I seldomly am spending fury anyway. However, if you find that your Fury is frequently low there are ways to beef up the generation. There are several runestones that help fury re-generation. Your bread and butter Fury generation is obviously going to come from your Fury Generating skills.
Fury was initially displayed by a bulb that filled up and was spent just like Mana. During development the bulb was changed to a "traffic light" system with 3 smaller bulbs; most skills cost one bulb to use, at that point. Eventually the "fury balls" were removed, presumably returning the resource to a single pool, like health.
Fury is built up during combat; successfully hitting and being hit by enemies fills up the Barbarian's Fury bulb, enabling him to use his most Powerful Skills, most of which cost some Fury to use. When the Barbarian is not fighting, or not hitting enemies, his Fury steadily fades away, until it drops to nothing several seconds after a battle. The resource is designed to encourage an aggressive, fast-paced play style, as Jay Wilson explained in a December 2008 interview with 1up.com.[1]
Jay Wilson: "But then mana doesn't mean anything for the Barbarian since he uses a completely different resource. For him, we tend to focus on skills that make him play in a way that's interesting. His "fury resource" is designed to drive the player forward, like a Barbarian, because he's very tough and is a close-quarters combatant. He wants to move forward, because the mechanic is, 'I have a lot of fury, which helps me deliver a lot of damage, but I'm going to lose it just sitting around.' It makes him very aggressive, which is what we wanted out of the character. So that was driven by [the concept of] how do we want this guy to play. Very aggressively, and hence we built this mechanic."
Fury changes the Barbarian's play style, making it impossible for him to use his most powerful abilities at the start of a fight. He must warm up a bit, building up his Fury with basic melee attacks, then unleashing his most devastating skills when the Fury has filled up enough to allow him to expend the energy in violence.
The visual representation of how much (or little) Fury a Barbarian has accumulated, and that display's connection to the function of the resource, has undergone numerous changes during the development cycle. Changes that will no doubt continue right up until the game's release.
As of April 2009 the mana-like Fury bulb was gone, and a three-level, traffic light type system was in, with all new graphics. The evolution of this graphical change was discussed by Bashiok, Mike Nicholson and Julian Love during BlizzCast #8, in March 2009. [2]
During the BlizzCon 2009 Diablo 3 panel on August 21st, Jay Wilson "The Mad Overseer" showed off new improvements and iterations on the Fury system, as they felt it wasn't at the same gameplay pace that Diablo games usually were. Since Diablo games are fast paced, the old fury system didn't work well, as it was taken from the Warrior class in World of Warcraft (to some degree), and in World of Warcraft, doing damage and taking damage would generate rage for the player, but World of Warcraft is a much slower game than Diablo, so it did not live up to the task. The Diablo 3 team didn't want a barbarian to hit a monster 10 times just so you can use one spell.
They first came up with an idea that, the more Fury you had, the more damage your weapons did. The image on the right shows bottom orb with a bit fury, and "100%" written on it, meaning that, at the moment, the barbarian's weapon does full damage. The upper orb has more fury, and "200%" written on it, meaning that the barbarian's weapons do Twice as much damage. However, this did not fit their needs, as the whole idea of different Resource pools, is that each character class plays differently and is interesting, so that when a player chooses a new class, it wont feel the same. This idea was dropped since it didn't change the way that the Barbarian played, at least not enough.
They then came up with the idea of "Endless Fury", (A video was suppose to showcase this, but sadly, it didn't start) to make the barbarian more fast paced. The video was suppose to show the barbarian spamming his skills, because he made the right decisions by attacking the right enemies with the right skills. If the barbarian hits many enemies at once, he generates a lot of fury, thus being able to spam more skills. However, if the Barbarian used a big AoE skill on one monster, he would end up losing alot of fury, taking the barbarian back to step one. This system encourages the barbarian players to think before using skills, as a wrong choice could leave the barbarian skill-less, and make fights much harder to win. This system is what makes the Barbarian feel unique and different.
Though we've not seen that much official information yet about Fury, and how this property functions is sure to change during development, some insight into the Barbarian's designed play style can be gleaned from analyzing how Fury works and reading over the Barbarian Skills.
As the D3 Team has commented, the D3 Barbarian is designed to be melee brawler. He's strongest while in combat, and has various skills that increase his powers when he's dealing with multiple enemies, or that only trigger when he scores critical hits. Fury ties into this design theme in obvious fashion. The Barbarian's Skills require Fury to cast, and he can only build up Fury during combat, and Fury drains away quickly when he's not in combat. Hence a Barbarian will want to be in combat as often as possible, and will be at his strongest while fighting. It's a nicely-designed feedback loop.
In a related issue, if Fury drains away quickly after a fight (as it did in the BlizzCon 2008 Demo), Barbarians will want to hurry from battle to battle. This is a big change from the D2 Barbarian, who almost always starts off a fight with his mana fully charged and his biggest skills ready to go.
Ironically, Fury might enable skills to be more powerful. If some of the biggest Barbarian skills cost a lot of Fury, that would effectively limit how frequently they could be cast. This would mean the D3 Team could make those skills massively destructive, compared to a skill that could be used all the time and would be overpowered if it were too strong.
If Fury is needed to use Barbarian skills in combat, he will be near useless early on, having to resort to auto-attack until enough Fury has built up. This would not only make each encounter less fun, but also be a massive impairment in PvP combat. Not being able to do anything the first 10 seconds of combat would equal death. Bashiok has commented on this:[6]
The D3 Barbarian's Fury works much like the "Rage" property of the Warrior class in World of Warcraft. This isn't surprising, since the D3 Team has frequently cited WoW as a major influence on their design concepts in Diablo III just like WoW had heavy inspiration from Diablo II.
There are not yet any gameplay movies showing Fury in use. In the WWI debut movie from June 2008, the Barbarian had mana, since the bulb was blue and could be seen refilling when no skills were in use. Fury wasn't added into the game until later in 2008, and the Blizzcon gameplay movie was shot from a Wizard's PoV.
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