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
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:
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.
