In having trouble building and maintaining Fury with my Axe Brute once again, I decided I would put to the test my hypothesis that Battle Axe is a poor Brute set as it generates Fury more slowly than the other sets.
Taking damaging powers from each set (leaving out things like Clobber, Hand Clap, Rage, Buildup, etc.), we can take their cast time and add to it their recharge time to get a raw Fury Generation Rating (shown in "Total"). We can then adjust this number to normalize the FGR in order to account for sets that have more or fewer attacks by dividing the Total by the number of damaging powers in a set (this eliminates the artificial advantage attack-lite sets have over attack-heavy sets):
Battle Axe
Chop 8.33
Beheader 5.33
Gash 11.5
Swoop 13.83
Whirling Axe 16.67
Cleave 17.33
Pendulum 17
Total 89.99
Powers Divisor 12.84
Super Strength
Jab 3.07
Punch 5.2
Haymaker 9.5
Knockout Blow 27.23
Hurl 10.5
Foot Stomp 22.1
Total 77.6
Powers Divisor 12.93
Dual Blades
Nimble Slash 4.03
Power Slice 6.03
Ablating Strike 7.03
Typhoon's Edge 14.27
Blinding Feint 13.2
Vengeful Slice 10.43
Sweeping Strike 12.23
1K Cuts 18.3
Total 85.79
Powers Divisor 10.72
War Mace
Bash 5.33
Pulverize 9.5
Jawbreaker 11.83
Whirling Mace 16.67
Shatter 14.33
Crowd Control 14
Total 71.66
Powers Divisor 11.94
So we can take the final adjusted FGR of each set (of course this list is incomplete) and show which ones generate Fury better than others:
1. Dual Blades 10.72
No surprise here. Dual Blades is famous for its fantastic Fury generation.
2. War Mace 11.94
Surprise number 1! War Mace is a Fury Generating beast. This is the Issue 12 number, of course. Dual Blades is 10% better at generating Fury than it.
3. Battle Axe 12.84
Surprise number 2! My hypothesis is falsified. Axe is 17% worse than Dual Blades at Fury generation, but:
4. Super Strength 12.93
Axe is actually 1% better at Fury generation than Super Strength, and Super Strength is also 17% behind Dual Blades.
This tells me that it isn't Axe, but me. This calls for redoing my power picks on my Axe Brute because I've apparently done the set an injustice. I think I'll drop Whirling Axe out of my plans, and pick up the first three attacks in the set and see how things go.
Can you say, "Respec at level 8?" LOL
Of course, Fury building chains (especially in the early game where my Axe Brute is right now) usually consist of the first two or three attacks in a set, plus brawl (yep, I'm an old-school Brute player. Of course when you solo as much as I do, you must generate Fury on your own. On large teams where there no other Brutes, there are so many mobs that it doesn't matter how fast your set generates Fury. But on small teams, solo, or where there are a lot of other Brutes, it becomes very important to take responsibility for your own Fury).
So in the early game, as you can see from the initial three attacks in each set above, Super Strength is ahead of Battle Axe in the Fury building attack chain metric. But as you level and you gain all of your attacks, this difference smooths out and Axe catches up (eventually overtaking by 1%). So maybe it isn't 100% me, the low-level Battle Axe really isn't all that great at generating Fury. And I skipped Chop, trying to make room in my build, but that is probably making a bad low level experience even worse by artificially creating a bigger gap than would otherwise be there (compared to my SS/WP Brute who has all three of the lowest level attacks, and no Fury generating problems).
But yeah, respec at level 8. LOL
Still, it's nice to know that it isn't Axe's fault. At least not completely.
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