The Fury orbs for the Barbarian, as seen in Blizzcast episode 8.
Fury is a resource pool that Barbarians have in place of Mana to activate powerful skills. Fury is generated by dealing and taking damage, and spent when powerful skills are used. Barbarians must expend Fury in order to use their skills, though details of costs and regeneration are still under construction.
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. Further refinements continue, with the most recent news dated to June 18, 2010.[1]
- Bashiok: Fury is going through some further iteration. The orb system wasn’t really working out like we had hoped and was creating some roadblocks.
Contents
Diablo III Fury
This feature was introduced in the BlizzCon 2008 demo build, and is not present in the gameplay footage from earlier that year, in June at the WWI 2008 when the Barbarian made his debut.
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.[2]
- "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 attacks, and only unleashing his devastating skills when the Fury has filled up enough to allow him to expend the energy in violence.
Fury is modified by a number of passive skills, some of which cause it to fill more quickly and drain more slowly.
Hands on Report
The most detailed report yet filed on Fury comes from a BlizzCon Barbarian gameplay report by Flux, posted on Diii.net. A quote:
- Fury is the new mana, but only (so far) for Barbarians. Fury replaces mana, but unlike the old blue bulb, it does not fill up when not in use. Barbarians have zero Fury to start with, and only build it up during combat, when they land successful strikes to their enemies. As soon as the Barb is not fighting, the Fury starts to drain away, and it seeps out quite quickly. I frequently filled my Fury bulb completely during a fight, paused to pick up an item or two, then ran to find more monsters, and arrived just as my Fury went down to nothing.
- My Barbarian had about 100 Fury at level 7 or 8, and while I didn’t get to experiment with it that persistently, I could see enough to like the concept. The Barbarian is designed to be a melee battling character. He gets all sorts of bonuses while in combat, and many of his skills only trigger when he scores critical hits. With that design goal, the fact that he has to fight to build up Fury, and has to expend Fury to use most of his skills, is only natural. It looks like an expert Barbarian player will be most at home when surrounded by enemies, and will have to learn to cycle quickly through a variety of attack skills and war cry-style buffs to stay alive and able to smash his enemies.
- The only big Fury expenditure available in the BlizzCon build was Battle Rage, a war cry that boosted the Barbarian’s damage by 100%, increased critical damage by 30%, and lasted for 15 seconds (with one point in it, which was all the BlizzCon build allowed to active skills). That was half, or more, of my total [fury], but I never minded spending it. The combat improvements were substantial, and since Fury faded away so quickly, I had a constant feeling of "use it or lose it." Whenever I finished a battle with a full Fury bulb, I tried to remember to cast this war cry, since the precious juice would all be gone by the time I got to the next battle anyway.
Fury-Based Skills
While few of the Barbarian's combat skills were tied to Fury (or had Fury costs) as of the BlizzCon 2008 build, a variety of passive skills effect or modify Fury in various ways. A partial list:
- Bad Temper slows the rate of Fury drain.
- Enrage gives the barbarian a single orb of Fury and increases the Fury gained and damage taken for a short time.
- Savage [removed at BlizzCon 2009] increases the Fury gained after scoring a critical hit.
These three skills were all located in the Berserker Skill Tree, but it was expected that other trees would have Fury-modifying skills as well. Since that time the skill trees have been merged into one larger menu, with a format that continues to evolve.
Fury Gameplay Issues
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 analysing how Fury works and reading over the Barbarian Skills.
Keep in mind that Fury (and all other game systems) remain under construction and much is subject to change.
Fury Only In Combat
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.
The rate of regeneration and drain has been tweaked many times during development, and the final ratios are far from yet determined.
Killtrain?
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. Enrage grants a single orb of Fury which will enable him to start using abilities that require Fury. 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.
Too Powerful?
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.
Bad start - Useless in PvP?
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:[3]
- Well there are skills that generate fury, as was said, and there are skills that don’t require any to be used. It's not going to be a situation where you get into a game and have to lumber around using your normal attack until you have enough fury to actually start dealing real damage. That wouldn’t be very fun, and we don’t like things that aren’t fun.
Conclusion
However Fury is handled, it seems sure to spur major changes to the play style of the Barbarian, from the versions of the character most fans knew in Diablo II.
Fury Questions
Few particulars are yet known about Fury. How is the maximum value determined? Is there equipment that will boost the total, or cause it to drain more slowly or fill more rapidly? Are there potions that will fill the Fury bulb? Does the Barbarian gain Fury when he or a party member collects a Mana Globe?
Lots of active skills don't currently list a Fury cost; are those skills going to be free to cast in the final game, or is their non-cost status more about the game's documentation being far from complete?
These and many other questions were discussed in a recent On the Drawing Board article about Fury. See it for much more on this issue.
The Fury Meter
Fury meter, with zero charge.
The visual representation of how much (or little) Fury a Barbarian has accumulated has undergone numerous changes during the development cycle. 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 during BlizzCast #8, in March 2009. [4]
- Bashiok: You're both working on a system which is the barbarian’s fury system. [How it's represented has] changed quite a bit. Can you guys go over how UI and effects are coming together to create the new fury system?
- Mike: Yeah well it’s always an, again, an Iterative process right, and one of the problems we had with one of the systems we had tried out was – it worked – but from a peripheral vision you couldn’t see what was going on. We wanted to be very clear and very bold about what was being done, so traditionally what happens is design will come to me and we’ll talk about what are the goals we need to accomplish. And then I’ll do some mockups and then I take it over to Julian and hope he can make those mockups look far better than my mockups.
- Julian: And I think where we’re at right now with it is the recognition that spending your fury is what we really want you to be doing, we want you to see it as a commodity to spend in order to gain access to more power, and that wasn’t really being communicated so clearly with the other one. So we’re trying to accomplish that goal of making it more, yeah, you know when to spend, you know what you’re spending but you don’t necessarily have to look directly at it. So effects plays a little bit of a role there, but I think we’re trying to not put effects in there just for effects’ sake, but only do it when we think that it’s going to help you really read and understand what’s going on.
- Mike: Yeah, before one of the problems was you would see the build up more than what you had to spend. Like you would build your fury up, and then you know “bonged”, and you’d have an amount you could spend. But everything was sharing the same visual space and you couldn’t necessarily discern one from the other. And again from an art standpoint, sure it worked, it was ok, but it wasn’t conveying the gameplay. And gameplay is king, you’ve got to make sure that it comes across in every way.
- Bashiok: Can you describe for those listening what it currently looks like?
- Mike: Let's see... if I had to use a cruel comment, one that I made myself as I was making it, oh "It's the fury traffic light". Because it's three spheres stacked vertically, and no we’re not making them three different colors, but you know as I was doing it I was like oh great, it pretty much well assures us that we are not doing different colors because it will well indeed look like a traffic light. But that's the gist of it, because when you're playing hopefully your vision is in the center of the screen, and this is going to be to your right and down below. So you need to see a very bright graphic that kind of flashes to let you know, that even if you flick your eyes down there you'll see I've got two or three of whatever that is to spend. Really that was the goal. Hopefully Julian and his team will ramp it up, so that, because we want it to catch your eye while you’re doing it, but not be a distraction.
A few weeks after this broadcast Bashiok revealed [5] that Fury expenditure will be in denominations of 1, 2 or 3 orbs, never a partial orb.
BlizzCon 2009
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.
World of Warcraft Influence
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.
Other Resources
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.
Besides the BlizzCon report cited above, Fury was discussed in great depth in this article, and it's a regular topic of conversation in the Barbarian forum.