Is it worth the countless hours of accumulating bad luck protection and small fortune of gold spent on materials to craft?
Fyr’alath, the Dreamrender Legendary Axe Overview
Fyr’alath the Dreamrender‘s additional effect is split into two separate effects – a passive, and an on-use charge + channeled damage effect. We will break down how each of them works, and more importantly, how they interact with each other.
Mark of Fyr’alath: Passive DoT Damage
Mark of Fyr’alath is Fyr’alath the Dreamrender‘s passive effect, and is always active. Any time you hit a target with either an auto-attack or an ability flagged as a melee skill, you apply Mark of Fyr’alath to your target. This does a decent amount of ticking damage, and lasts 15 seconds. Its ticking damage is not hasted and cannot crit, and we assume that both of these are bugs as it massively reduces the relative power of this legendary depending on gear and itemization choices made by players of different specializations.
For Death Knights specifically, this is applied by the following spells:
- Blood: Heart Strike, Death Strike, Marrowrend, Soul Reaper (initial hit), Consumption (all targets), Bonestorm (every tick)
- Frost: Frost Strike, Obliterate (main target only), Frostscythe, Soul Reaper (initial hit)
- Unholy: Scourge Strike, Clawing Shadows, Apocalypse, Soul Reaper (initial hit)
It is worth noting the issue with frost specifically – unlike both other specs, Frost Death Knights have no way to reliably and quickly apply Mark of Fyr’alath to multiple targets at once, due to what looks like a bug in how Obliterate gets copied through Cleaving Strikes.
Rage of Fyr’alath: Channelled Ability
The active on-use ability present on Fyr’alath the Dreamrender is complex, both in terms of behaviour and limitations. It is composed of three effects:
- A charge (Rage of Fyr’alath)
- A channeled effect (Rage of Fyr’alath) that starts when the charge lands, and ticks instantly and every 0.5s for 3s. Every time it ticks, it deals heavy damage to all enemies in front of you, split evenly between them. When this begins, this consumes all Mark of Fyr’alath present on any enemy, and increases the damage of this channel by up to 50% – 10% for each mark. This channel is not hasted, and you cannot move while this channel is happening.
- A final detonation Explosive Rage in a 5yd circle around you at the end of the channel. This appears to also be split.
The channel is uncancellable and prevents you from doing anything else during it. You can stil dodge, parry and block while it is being channeled, however. You can see this entire effect on the following clip:
Implications & Verdict: Blood DK (Tank)
First, let’s talk about the good: Mark of Fyr’alath is nice and predictable and scales the way you would expect as target count increases. Its non-hasted behaviour and inability to crit are seriously negative points reducing its power, but it’s still fine.
The problematic part is the on-use, and this is where this article will take a darker, more difficult tone: discussing how a forced 3-second channel on a tank is not always the best way forward. We’ve had this in the past with Blooddrinker, and this brings back some of its issues to the fore – even worse as, unlike Blooddrinker, Rage of Fyr’alath cannot be cancelled mid-use. Fortunately, you are still able to dodge and parry while channelling Rage of Fyr’alath, but this effectively locks you out of any ability or spell and prevents you from moving, even by a small amount.
This makes this channel a high-risk, high-value ability for Blood – one where encounter knowledge and personal play excellence will shine, and the inability to plan a few seconds in advance will lead to the worst kind of player deaths – the ones where you are stuck looking at your screen with all abilities disabled as you see events unfold.
The rotational implication for blood is simple. The ideal time to use the legendary varies:
You should never use the on-use as a charge – not only does this reduce the damage of the ability, but this also places you in a position out of your control, completely rooted and unable to perform any other action for 3 seconds.
Numerically, there is also a somewhat perverse effect in AoE: while the Mark of Fyr’alath scale linearly with target count, Rage of Fyr’alath actively consumes them to gain less than most split-target damage bonuses (10% instead of 15%), is capped at one fewer target than them, and actively consumes all Mark of Fyr’alath. This means that you are effectively punished twofold when using this legendary effect in AoE. In addition to losing all Mark of Fyr’alath, you are guaranteed to lose at least two ticks of Mark of Fyr’alath on any target that had them: the first during the channel, and the second because Mark of Fyr’alath does not tick instantly on application. This can be even more if you didn’t have a Death and Decay pre-place and hit Heart Strike as your first GCD out after the channel. This is very odd, to say the least – particularly given the fact that the tooltip on Fyr’alath the Dreamrender actively portrays a behavior that is not split.
In terms of relative power level, it is tuned slightly above other cantrip items in the raid, at a decent – but not great – 10k bonus DPS over a non-cantrip weapon. This in itself is a problem of its own, and a shocking lack of foresight by the developers: in a world where Rashon, the Immortal Blaze (5.5k bonus DPS, no casts lost), Dreambinder, Loom of the Great Cycle and Iridal, the Earth’s Master exist and are tuned to be uncomfortably close to Fyr’alath the Dreamrender‘s additional effect, the appeal of a legendary that essentially does the same thing with a slightly different color loses quite a lot of its sheen.
Implications & Verdict: DPS
For DPS specs, the main considerations when using Fyr’alath the Dreamrender are around how to use the active ability. Its DoT effect is applied passively to enemies damaged by most abilities, but since the on use effect locks you out of casting other abilities during its channel a small amount of planning will be necessary. This essentially means using it outside of regular cooldown windows, since most cooldown effects don’t buff these types of item effects anymore. In general, Fyr’alath the Dreamrender should be relatively straightforward to use – apply the DoT during your regular rotation, then use it outside of cooldown periods for some extra burst damage. Since the on use effect gets buffed based on the number of DoTs you have active, there may be situations where it’s better to wait for some extra adds to spawn to buff its effect too, but it’s not an especially complex effect to have to play around even then.
Acquiring Fyr’alath the Dreamrender is worth somewhere between 3% and 6% damage on single target depending on the DPS spec, and around half that much on AoE when compared to other maximum item level weapons, since the AoE effect is split. Since most of the damage from the effect comes from the active ability, it still has some value beyond simply a percentage since burst damage has uses in a ton of places in both Amirdrassil and Mythic+, especially burst AoE damage, but the channel requirement does limit its usefulness too since you could often simply press your regular AoE buttons instead. The charge effect might be useful for doing Raszageth in Fated Vault of the Incarnates, but overall isn’t an important part of the total effect.
This damage gain feels relatively lackluster. For comparison, Nasz’uro, the Unbound Legacy was around a 5% increase for Devastation at the time, but unlike Aberrus, this tier we’ve seen a huge jump in the number of cantrip weapons available for most weapon types. Almost every spec has access to a weapon like Dreambinder, Loom of the Great Cycle, Thorncaller Claw, or Rashon, the Immortal Blaze from Amirdrassil, or Iridal, the Earth’s Master or Borrowed Time from Dawn of the Infinite. Special effects on weapons have become the norm to the point where the only specs prior to Fyr’alath the Dreamrender becoming available that couldn’t use one were two-handed Strength users and ranged Hunter specs. If Fyr’alath the Dreamrender were one of only a few weapons with this type of effect, or if the effect were particularly strong relative to what other cantrip weapons were available then it’d feel like a good reward, but as it is the effect doesn’t seem special or Legendary. If a Shadowflame Suffused two-handed Strength weapon was available from Amirdrassil like they are for most other specs, then Fyr’alath the Dreamrender would only be a couple of percent better.
Is Fyr’alath Worth the Effort & Resources?
Crafting Fyr’alath the Dreamrender is a long process. It takes weeks for most players to begin to even get a chance at looting the starting item, and it’ll be weeks if not months before you’ll be able to get bad luck protection high enough through weekly raid clears to have a better than miniscule chance of looting it.
Once you loot it, you still need to spend hours doing world content for the subsequent quests and hundreds of thousands of gold to finish crafting it. Considering the time, effort, and gold required to actually obtain it, Fyr’alath the Dreamrender should feel like an impressive effect on damage, but compared to the plethora of other cantrip weapons available this tier it doesn’t.
Many players would almost rather have had a regular purple weapon they could have looted from the raid in the first week, with a similar but marginally worse effect, than a Legendary that was unobtainable for the first few weeks of the raid, and then difficult and expensive to acquire afterwards. If special effects on weapons are now the norm, then Legendary weapons need to be actually special beyond that to truly be Legendary, and Fyr’alath the Dreamrender falls short of that goal.
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.
About the Author
Hi, I’m Bolas. I’ve played Ret since WotLK, I’m a mod in the Paladin class discord, and I help with some of the work on SimC for Ret. You can find me on Twitter or in the Hammer of Wrath discord if you have any questions or are interested in more information about Retribution.
