Firstly, this is not a post about making Single-Minded Fury better than Titans Grip before any of those ‘If you want to parse high play the meta spec’ people rock up with dual-wielding pitchforks.
This post is more about adding some fun / different talent interactions if you take Single-Minded Fury and chose the route of using 2x 1h weapons.
Some possible options for this could be:
Taking SMF (and wielding 2x 1handers) & Annihilator your side-arm talent procs also apply Annihilator damage.
Taking SMF (and wielding 2x 1handers) & Storm of Swords your Slams now strike with both weapons (off-hand doing 50-70% of Main-hand damage).
This is just some quick spit-balling, would enjoy hearing what other people who want to see more SMF being played have to add.
Sure, but one must avoid the pitfall that is making these fun interactions being tied to power. Or you will get into the TG vs SMF debate, and deep fast.
So some other options would be:
(power) Taking SMF combined with Annhilator causes your autoattacks to grant 0.5% movementspeed per hit, up to 10 stacks.
(power) Taking SMF then during hurricane your movementspeed is improved as well.
(visual) When using SMF and slam, you do the animation of hitting twice and the damage is broken into two parts (66/34%).
(visual/SFX) When using SMF your annhilator makes a small blood splash effect on hit and causes enemy to grunt in pain.
Now, if you want to see SMF being more played:
Remind everyone that SMF is viable, even if it is weaker.
Remind everyone that if you enjoy the playstyle, you can play it in 90% of the cases.
The problem would be solved by just giving warrior the transmog option to make 1handers and 2handers visually interchangable. So you would have the visuals of the 1hander, yet the stats of the 2handers.
Don’t fret, I am sure blizzard will do a dumbdumb and release a broken 1hander that will force the TG enjoyers into SMF. Then you can take the highground of ‘Just ask for visual fix mate’ or ‘Just play TG mate, it is only x% weaker, kek.’
1: Make 1-handers and 2-handers transmoggable to each other like suggested by Funkykittié
2: Make SMF give +X% to primary and secondary 1-handed weapon stats (Weapon damage is compensated by higher attack speed, so don’t buff that), this to pull them even with 2-handers, maybe move SMF to the middle of the tree for more talent flexibility, or make it baseline.
why not both? And baseline ofc
and while they are at it: make fury only loot 1h.
That being said, its a very uninteresting solution, yet its much better than what we have now as it is freeing up talent space for more interesting things at least
True, it’s an uninteresting solution, but interesting ones are prone to getting messed up, making SMF good in a way other than stats just means more balancing issues.
I agree with the “Only 1-handers for fury”-thing, BTW, if people want 2-handers, they can set loot-spec to Arms.
Baseline is a great idea, didn’t Frost DK get that with Might of the Frozen wastes or whatever?.
I am kind of surprised they have not implemented One-hander transmogs over two-hander’s, although that really feels more like an aesthetic fix for the ‘berserker’ warrior fantasy.
Making SMF give +X% to primary and secondary 1-handed weapon stats feels like it could pull TG and SMF a little too close Primary / Secondary wise.
I think if Blizzard is to look into making SMF better/good or Carve out its own distinct niche within fury (Shouldn’t be right on par with TG) it is probably better to get it out of the way earlier in the expansion before they run out of ideas and add something bonkers like corruptions 2.0 and throw a spanner in the works for the balancing team.
Why is TG/SMF being “too close together” a problem?
The main factor in people’s preference for either is aesthetic, some people love swinging two huge weapons around, others think it looks ludicrous and prefer one-handers, the sole gameplay difference is that SMF has slightly smoother rage generation due to more frequent, but weaker autoattacks.
Its more about the ‘Make SMF give +X% to primary and secondary 1-handed weapon stats, to pull them even with 2-handers’ which is the problem.
Instead of bringing 1-handers stat values up to that of 2-handers via a talent point would be more of a bandage, It would be I am just playing TG but with 1-handers kind of like playing SMF when they added it baseline to the fury in Shadowlands.
Hopefully Blizzard think of something fun/interesting and balanced to close the gap a little and make SMF a little more popular other than just a flat buff of the must take talents.
I’d prefer “Fun/Interesting and balanced”, but anything that doesn’t directly address the stat-difference between 2-handers and 1-handers (The reason TG is inherently more powerful than SMF) will just be a bandaid-fix that will have to be adjusted every tier as the stat gap increases in size…
All you have to do is equalize the stats of TG and SMF and add something interesting and unique as a utility or even some special animation/aura when each is used. But damage wise should be the same so ppl will start using them.
Or remove and numb down the spec again, make it even more simple and add it as a mog option.
wow, it didnt know that this was true but I just did a little bit on research on it and…
its way worse than I could have imagined it to be oO
Blizz is rly just doubling stats on 2h compared to 1h waepons with same ilvl.
Turns out: the difference in secondary stats (sum of stats from 2h - sum of stats from 1h) for a normal dungeon item is around 250, while it is around 375 for a mythic raid item. For fury that means 500 vs 750.
tl;dr: The difference in secondary stats between smf and tg is increasing by 50% (!!!) going from normal dungeons to first tier mythic raid.
Yeah, because everything is balanced for either two 1-handers* or one 2-hander, which is that way for every spec in the game, except Fury, introducing TG due to “It looks cool in Diablo 2!” was a mistake, but like pre-DF flight, they can’t take it away anymore.
Or 1-hander and offhand item for casters and tanks.
