Draw Steel Fury Class Guide: In-Depth Tactical Analysis

Introduction

Hey folks, Aestus here, back with another Draw Steel class breakdown. In this article, we’ll be talking about the Fury – Draw Steel’s frontline melee brawler, a class that lives and dies by getting into the thick of a fight and tearing it apart.

This is the next article in a series covering each of the nine base classes in Draw Steel’s Heroes book with an in-depth tactical analysis. If you’ve been following along, you’ve already seen my Conduit article and the Elementalist article. Those have longer introductions about the goals and assumptions I make throughout the series, so if that interests you, go read those. Here, we’re going to keep the intro short and dive right into the analysis.

If you want my opinions without all of the blather, I’ve linked a spreadsheet in the video description that ranks every class ability and feature the Fury gets from levels 1 through 10. If you feel like you’ve got a good grasp of the class and just want my verdict, you can check that out and skip the rest. But if you keep reading, I’ll be going into detail on my reasoning – and some of these rankings are going to be controversial.

Summary Opinion

By “brawler,” I really just mean a class that specializes in killing enemies before those enemies kill you. So it’s going to deal a lot of damage, but it’s also going to have a lot of durability. That pound-for-pound ratio of damage to durability is what defines a brawler to me, and Furies are great at both.

Honestly, it’s hard to go wrong with a Fury. It’s a very straightforward class – much less complex than the last couple I covered – and it’s easy to execute. More importantly, it does the things you want to be doing in any Draw Steel encounter: killing enemies effectively and efficiently, and force-moving enemies so you can kill them even more efficiently. That’s the whole identity. Damage and durability, delivered simply.

Starting Stats and Ferocity

Starting Characteristics

The Fury has two primary attributes: Might and Agility. I typically prefer classes with only one primary so I get to pick the second, but I really don’t mind here, because Might and Agility are two attributes I’d probably want anyway.

The difference between characteristics isn’t that high, honestly. The big class-agnostic use you get out of them is resisting potencies, so there’s a slight ranking between them based on which ones are more likely to be targeted and which ones resist the most debilitating potencies. Might and Agility both rank highly there – they get targeted a lot, so you’ll be resisting a lot of attacks. They also have other little perks most characteristics don’t. Agility reduces fall damage, which is absolutely going to come up in Draw Steel. Might affects a surprising number of small things, like how long you can stay aloft with a Wings ancestry feature, or what size of creature you’re able to grab.

Stamina

You start with 21 Stamina, you get 9 per level, and you have 10 recoveries. There are two patterns for Stamina in this game – the low progression and the high progression – and this is the high one. Combine that with strong characteristics across the board and you’ve got a class with extremely good starting stats. As you’d expect from a frontline brawler, the Fury is built to soak punishment.

Ferocity as a Heroic Resource

After the Elementalist and the Conduit, the Fury’s heroic resource is a breath of fresh air. It’s called Ferocity, and it’s simple. I won’t be blabbering for twenty minutes on it.

Ferocity is a chaos heroic resource, which means you roll a 1d3 at the start of each of your turns rather than getting a flat +2. I say this every video, but I’ll say it again: I greatly prefer the flat +2. Both average to the same amount, but the 1d3 carries a lot more variability and unpredictability. In a tactical game, being able to predict is itself a tactical advantage – it lets you plan turns ahead, which matters enormously. So being a chaos resource is a slight disadvantage right out of the gate.

Ferocity Riders

Ferocity has two riders, and they are night and day for me.

The first rider: the first time each combat round that you take damage, you gain a flat +1 Ferocity. In theory this is outside your control – it depends on the Director deciding to attack you. But in reality, this is Draw Steel. You will take damage. So this is something you can depend on. You can even proc it on your own turn by deliberately drawing opportunity attacks, which is something I allow at my table (technically it’s the Director’s call whether to take that free strike, but unless I’m roleplaying a clever monster, I’m always taking it). Dependable, low opportunity cost. This is a good rider.

The second rider: the first time you become winded or are dying in an encounter, you gain 1d3 Ferocity. There’s some ambiguity in that “or” – is it inclusive or exclusive? I read it as inclusive, meaning it procs once when you become winded and again the first time you’re dying, which keeps it in line with how other HRs work.

I really hate this rider, if I’m being honest. Unlike taking damage, which you can’t avoid, becoming winded or dying is something you very much don’t want to happen. The measure of success in a Draw Steel encounter is whether you can complete the objective without spending a lot of recoveries – and being winded or dying means you’re spending those recoveries to heal back up. So tying HR generation to it feels bad. It’s also wildly unpredictable: even if the Director targets you with something likely to drop you, he might roll a tier 1 and miss the threshold. And then you’re rolling a 1d3 on top of that. Roll two ones and you get 2; roll two threes and you get 6. That’s an enormous range.

There’s just too much chaos in Ferocity. It might be my least favorite heroic resource in the game, which is saying a lot. But here’s the saving grace: what you spend Ferocity on – the Fury’s heroic abilities – is so good that it more than makes up for how bad the resource itself is.

Primordial Aspects: The Fury Subclasses

The Fury’s subclasses are called Primordial Aspects, and there are three in the base game: the Berserker, the Reaver, and the Storm Wight. The differences between them are actually fairly minor – all three are great at force movement and great at killing targets, especially minions – but here’s how I think about each.

Berserker is the damage-focused variant. It gets bonuses to the values of your force movement, letting you push targets into each other and into objects for a lot of damage. It converts force movement into damage more efficiently than the others.
Reaver is the mobility and fight-control variant. It still deals plenty of damage, but it leans into debilitating crowd control and gets ways to convert your pushes into slides – great for aligning targets for big AoEs.
Storm Wight is the shapeshifter. It takes on animal or animal-hybrid forms (werewolf, werebear, and so on), and what you do depends heavily on which forms you pick. There are tanky, positional-lockdown forms in there, so you can lean it toward a damage-control tank, but it’s not only a tank subclass. There are many ways to build it.

If I had to rank them, I’d put the Reaver first – it gets some genuinely bonkers abilities. But the Berserker is a very close second, and I know skilled players who think it’s actually stronger. I respect that; it’s a close call. The Storm Wight is the weakest of the three to me, but it’s not so far behind that it isn’t worth picking, and narratively, turning into a werebear is amazing. We’ll see why I hold these opinions as we go.

A quick aside: there’s a fourth Primordial Aspect I’ve been designing – the Primal Maw – for a third-party project. I touched on it in the video and shared an early draft, but since this is a tactical guide to the base classes, I’ll keep my focus on the three official Aspects here.

Growing Ferocity

Growing Ferocity is a mechanic all Furies get. The structure is the same across subclasses: it gives you the option to build up toward stacking benefits depending on how much Ferocity you currently have. In effect, it lets you hold your heroic resource to get passive effects instead of spending it on heroic abilities.

Take the Berserker’s table as an example. At 2 Ferocity, whenever you use the knockback maneuver, the force movement distance gains a bonus equal to your Might score – pretty good. At 4 Ferocity, the first time you push a creature you gain a surge – decent. At 6 Ferocity, you gain an edge on Might tests and the knockback maneuver – much worse, and much harder to reach.

That’s the pattern I find across all the base-book Growing Ferocity tables: the early tiers are the most attractive, both because the effect is better and because they’re easy to reach. You can sit at 2 Ferocity even while spending heroic resource freely. But getting up to 6 means you’re deliberately not spending Ferocity on heroic abilities, and the opportunity cost is way too high.

My tactical recommendation is to mostly ignore the higher tiers. Play your Fury normally, spend your heroic resource on your heroic abilities, and if you happen to be sitting at 2 (or 4) Ferocity, enjoy the bonus. It’s good, not great – not something to play around. I ranked Growing Ferocity at B tier for both Berserker and Reaver; the Storm Wight has some good options and some worse ones, but overall it’s a low-impact feature.

Each table builds around a particular maneuver – usually knockback or grab. Keep an eye on which one your subclass rewards, because that nudges your default maneuver choice.

Level 1 Aspect Features

Your subclass gives you an aspect feature at level 1, and the gap between them is significant.

The Berserker gets Primordial Strength: whenever you damage an object with a weapon strike, the strike deals extra damage equal to your Might score (useful for breaking terrain, though that’s rarely what you want to spend a strike on). The big part is the rest: whenever you push another creature into an object, that creature takes extra damage equal to your Might score. This is the heart of why I call the Berserker the damage subclass – every Fury gets a lot of force movement, and the Berserker converts it into damage more efficiently than anyone.

The Reaver gets Primordial Cunning: you’re never surprised, and whenever you would push a target with force movement, you can slide them instead. You can see the parallel – both aspect features augment force movement, but one turns it into damage and the other turns it into positioning utility. The ability to convert pushes into slides is enormous for setting up AoEs and lining targets up.

I ranked both Primordial Strength and Primordial Cunning as S tier. They’re the kind of abilities you build around, and they define your Fury’s playstyle in interesting ways.

The Storm Wight gets a beast-shape feature plus Relentless Hunter, which gives you an edge on Track skill tests. The Track edge really isn’t good; almost all your value comes from the shape feature. It’s better than the kits the other classes are getting, but not so much better that it makes up for those S-tier aspect features over on the Berserker and Reaver.

Level 1 Triggered Actions

Your subclass also determines your triggered action, and these vary a lot in quality.

Berserker: Lines of Force (A-Tier)

Lines of Force triggers when a target within melee range (so you must be adjacent) is force-moved. The effect: you can select a new target of the same size or smaller within distance to be force-moved instead. You become the source, determine the destination, can push the target, and the force movement distance gains a bonus equal to your Might score.

What this really does is two things at once. First, it completely cancels one instance of force movement directed at you. That alone can be enormous – being force-moved off a cliff or out of position can make or break an encounter, and reliably negating that is valuable on its own. Second, there’s a riposte built in: you take the force movement you canceled and redirect it at an enemy, plus distance equal to your Might score. You can even spend 1 Ferocity to add twice your Might score instead.

Some of my peer reviewers thought A tier was too high here, given how restrictive it is and the fact that “augmenting force movement” feels like a small payoff for a triggered action. But to me, guaranteeing the cancellation of one force-movement instance when you position properly is enough to make it impactful, and the riposte is gravy. I love Lines of Force, and I’m keeping it at A.

Reaver: Unearthly Reflexes (A-Tier)

This is a more standard triggered action of a type a lot of classes get. Unearthly Reflexes triggers whenever you take damage: you take half the damage from the triggering effect and can shift a number of squares equal to your Agility score. You can spend 1 Ferocity to reduce a potency effect by one.

This is a tanking-and-maneuvering ability that gives the Reaver a ton of durability. I also give it A tier, but it’s a much better A than Lines of Force in my opinion – especially on a Fury that wants to absorb a lot of damage. It costs no heroic resource for the core effect, and on a frontline brawler, halving incoming damage on a trigger is incredible.

Storm Wight: Furious Charge (C-Tier)

Furious Charge triggers whenever you lose Stamina and aren’t dying: you gain temporary Stamina equal to your Might score and can enter your animal or hybrid form. If you spend 1 Ferocity and you’re not dying, you can spend a recovery.

This also gives you tankiness, a bit like Unearthly Reflexes – but Unearthly Reflexes doesn’t cost you heroic resource for its main benefit. Furious Charge is a fairly weak triggered action by comparison. I give it C tier. It’s a clear disadvantage relative to what the other subclasses bring at this level.

Mighty Leaps

All Furies get Mighty Leaps: you can’t roll lower than a tier 2 outcome on any Might test made to jump. In practice this gives you a guaranteed +1 to the length and height of your jump, letting you reliably traverse vertical terrain and clear horizontal obstacles like pits of water or acid. It’s good – not huge, just a solid maneuverability tool – but we’ll take it.

1st Level Signature Abilities

Let me just say it plainly: Brutal Slam gets picked something like 95% of the time on Fury builds, both for me and my players. And it’s easy to see why.

Brutal Slam (A-Tier)

Brutal Slam is a single-target melee strike: you deal your damage plus Might, and you push the target – push 1, push 2, then up to push 4 on a tier 3. As we’ve already established, the Berserker and Reaver are incentivized to push; they get all kinds of augments to how far they push and how much damage that pushing deals. With a Berserker pushing targets into objects, Brutal Slam ends up doing a lot of damage for a signature: the initial hit, plus pushing into objects, plus pushing into other creatures. If you’re a Reaver, maybe you’re sliding instead. It synergizes so cleanly with the rest of the Fury’s kit that it’s the obvious bread-and-butter pick. A tier.

The other signatures are mediocre by comparison. Hit and Run gets you a slowed effect, which is good, but the slow only lands on a tier 3 and targets Agility – compare that to the Elementalist’s slowed effect that targets Reason at all tiers, which is far easier to land.

To the Death

I want to flag To the Death, not because it’s especially strong, but because it illustrates a core Fury design element: lots of abilities let you take damage in order to deal more damage. For To the Death, you gain two surges, and the target can make an opportunity attack against you.

The reason these abilities exist, I think, is to give you a way to bring those frustrating HR riders under your control. Remember, taking damage procs your good rider, and procing it on your own turn instead of waiting on the Director is genuinely nice. And To the Death trades efficiently: two surges for the price of a free triggered action’s worth of damage taken. Since one surge is usually worth about the same as a free strike’s damage, you’re getting roughly twice what you give up. Good trade.

But here’s the rule of thumb to carry forward: most of these “take damage to deal damage” abilities don’t trade this well. They usually trade one-to-one – damage taken to damage dealt – and that is almost always a bad trade for the heroes. If you play a few Draw Steel encounters, you’ll notice monsters tend to have lots of Stamina but deal less damage, while heroes have fewer hit points but deal a lot. So a one-to-one trade does a low percentage of enemy health and a high percentage of your health. Not worth it. Keep that in mind as we go.

1st Level Heroic Abilities

There are lots of interesting choices here. I’ll hit the standouts.

3-Ferocity: Out of the Way (B-Tier)

This deals damage and a slide. The slide alone isn’t worth much more than just casting Brutal Slam, so if you only want damage, save your 3 Ferocity. What’s interesting is that when you slide the target, you can move into any square they leave, and if you take damage from an opportunity attack by moving this way, the target takes the same damage.

Formulaically: if you’re flanked by two enemies, you can proc one opportunity attack per 2 value of slide. Slide 2 procs one, slide 4 procs two, slide 6 procs three. By level 10, the damage this adds for 3 Ferocity is absurd – you can flat-out nuke a target by procing it multiple times. The catch is the one-to-one trade: all the damage you add, you also take. That’s why it’s B tier. But if you build a lot of temporary Stamina or healing untethered from recoveries, that trade starts looking attractive, and Out of the Way becomes something worth building around.

3-Ferocity: Tide of Death (A-Tier)

This is probably my players’ favorite ability in the whole class. My brother used it in my early beta tests and got instantly hooked on Draw Steel.

You move up to your speed in a straight line, can end that movement in a creature’s space and shove them to an adjacent unoccupied space, and make one power roll that targets each enemy space you move through. So you deal damage to every target space along the line, and on the final target you deal extra damage equal to your Might score for each opportunity attack you triggered during the move. The Might-per-opportunity-attack is a one-to-one trade, but you can mitigate it – with damage resistance or immunity, or by running it through minions, who have low free-strike values, so your Might out-scales their retaliation.

It’s a fantastic minion-clearing ability, and it scales out of control with damage bonuses because they apply to every target you pass through. Pile on speed and weapon damage and you’re slashing through a whole line of minions before landing a big strike at the end. Just a really fun ability. A tier.

5-Ferocity: Thunder Roar (S-Tier)

This is one of the best 5-cost abilities in the game. It does exactly what you want to be doing in Draw Steel.

Thunder Roar is a 5-by-1 line within 1, and the goal is to catch multiple targets – I aim for three or four. When I’m hitting that many, I know it’s an efficient spend for 5 Ferocity. Each enemy in the area takes damage and is pushed, resolved one at a time starting nearest to you, and they can be pushed into other targets in the same line.

Let me walk through the example from the video. Picture three enemies conveniently lined up. On a tier 2 result, each takes an initial 11 damage. The first target is pushed 4; with 0 stability, 3 push remains when they collide, dealing 3 to themselves and 3 to the next target. The middle target likewise takes its 11, gets pushed, and collides on both sides. By the time it resolves:

Initial damage: 11 x 3 = 33
Collision damage on the outer targets: 3 + 3 = 6
The middle target colliding with two neighbors: 6
…for an additional 12 total from pushes.

That one ability dealt 45 damage. Against a minion squad at first echelon, that can wipe the whole squad. The key insight: the most damage lands on targets in the middle, so if you’re focusing one target, sandwiching them between creatures is ideal.

Thunder Roar deals damage, force-moves targets, and clears minion squads – almost always worth the 5 Ferocity as long as you’re hitting three or more. I ranked it S tier, and I consider it one of the best 5-costs in the game.

5-Ferocity: Make Peace With Your Gods (A-Tier)

This is a self-targeting free maneuver: you gain one surge, and the next ability roll you make this turn automatically obtains a tier 3 outcome.

Numerically it’s not a lot – you won’t get nearly the damage of Thunder Roar for the cost. The big draw for me is predictability. Knowing you’ll land a tier 3 is huge when you’re using it to apply a debilitating condition. If a tier 3 guarantees a dazed lands on a priority target, Make Peace With Your Gods suddenly looks very attractive. The only reason it isn’t picked more is that Thunder Roar is just so good. A tier.

2nd Level

This is a very subclass-dependent level: you get an aspect feature, you choose between two subclass-provided 5-cost abilities, and that’s the meat of it.

2nd Level Aspect Features (All A-Tier)

I gave all three of these A tier; they’re consistently strong.

Berserker – Unstoppable Force: when you use the charge main action, you can use a strike signature or strike heroic ability instead of a free strike, and you can jump as part of your charge. Charges aren’t adding much damage; what they add is mobility. Charge moves your speed in a straight line on your main action, leaving your move action free to advance – effectively doubling your speed and letting you blow past the front line onto priority targets. For a melee-bound class, that reach is really important.
Reaver – Inescapable Wrath: a bonus to speed equal to your Agility score, and you ignore difficult terrain. Comparable mobility to Unstoppable Force, and ignoring difficult terrain also lets you shift more reliably, since difficult terrain blocks shifting. As a Reaver, you can essentially always shift.
Storm Wight – Tooth and Claw: at the end of each of your turns, each enemy adjacent to you takes damage equal to your Might score. This is my favorite of the three. It pairs beautifully with a grab-centric build – grab targets so they can’t break away, then chunk them every turn. It always procs as long as you end your turn next to a target, and if you end adjacent to several, it’s a multiplier.

2nd Level 5-Cost Abilities

Berserker gets Special Delivery and Wrecking Ball, both B tier. Special Delivery is the classic comic-book “fastball special” – you vertically push a willing ally up to four squares (ignoring their stability, no collision damage to them), and at the end of the movement they make a free strike dealing extra damage equal to your Might score. Adding vertical mobility is cool, especially with a flying Fury, but for 5 Ferocity it just isn’t a lot. Wrecking Ball lets you move your speed in a straight line through mundane structures (including walls), destroying squares and leaving difficult terrain behind, while making a knockback power roll against each enemy you move adjacent to. Smashing through terrain to create chokepoints is the kind of thing I’d love to play with, but again, for 5 Ferocity it’s just not offering enough.

Reaver gets the level-2 5-costs that really make the subclass stand out:

Death… Death!: a melee strike dealing damage and targeting Presence, potentially dazing and frightening a creature. This is exactly what you synergize with Make Peace With Your Gods to guarantee that tier 3 – maybe even spend the surge to boost the potency. If you land dazed and frightened on a priority target or solo, that’s a tremendous amount of disruption, and they’ll have to bleed Stamina cleansing it (one condition per turn, taking damage for it). Amazing single-target control.
Phalanx Breaker: a main action where you shift your speed and make one power roll targeting up to three enemies you move adjacent to during the shift, dealing damage and Agility-weak dazing. Because you can’t be blocked by difficult terrain while shifting, this very reliably hits three. It’s the same effect as Death… Death!, but no longer single-target.

I give both of these A tier, but honestly they’re a high A. This crowd-control package is what makes the Reaver shine for me.

Storm Wight gets Apex Predator and Visceral Roar:

Apex Predator (B tier): a melee strike dealing damage and Intuition-targeting slowed; the target can’t hide from you, and you can follow them with a free triggered action when they move. The stickiness is fine and the Intuition-targeting slow is good, but for 5 Ferocity it’s not enough.
Visceral Roar (A tier): a 2-burst affecting each enemy in the area, applying dazed and dealing your primordial damage type (useful for exploiting damage vulnerabilities). AoE dazed is great. The one drawback is it’s Might-targeting, and the targets you most want to daze tend to have high Might – but the burst means you’re catching enough creatures to make it worth it.

3rd Level

This is the last level of Echelon 1, and it’s a big one. You get another aspect feature and your 7-Ferocity abilities.

3rd Level Aspect Features

The Berserker’s Immovable Object is the standout. You add your level to your effective size for the purposes of interacting with creatures and objects (lifting, being force-moved, and so on), which lets you push and grab larger and larger targets – core to your whole strategy, so you basically need it. On top of that, you gain a stability bonus equal to your Might score. Stability is an important stat and you just get a flat bonus to it. I rank this a 3 on my feature scale (highly tactically impactful).

The Reaver’s Nature’s Knight and the Storm Wight’s See Through Their Tricks I rank a 2 (tactically impactful, but not highly so). Both are mostly out-of-combat utility – sensing hidden animals and elementals, double edges on searching for hidden creatures, discerning motives, detecting lies, gambling. The double edge to find hidden creatures has some in-combat use against hiders, but most fights you won’t see it. Stability, by contrast, is always useful. Immovable Object is a meaningful advantage at this level.

7-Ferocity: You Are Already Dead (S-Tier)

This is so powerful it’s the clear must-pick at this level, and it makes the other choices nearly obsolete.

It’s a melee strike that deals no damage, but: if the target is not a leader or solo creature, they are reduced to zero Stamina at the end of their next turn. (If the target is a leader or solo, you instead gain three surges and a melee free strike against them – not worth 7 Ferocity, in my opinion.)

The real play is against elites and platoons. You hit them with this early, then find a way to cancel their next turn – teleport them far away, lock them down, whatever – and they instantly die having done nothing. The damage this represents scales extraordinarily well with the field: the higher-level the elite, the more value you extract. I rank it S tier, and it might be the best 7-cost in the game. It’s at least a top-five contender.

For completeness, Face the Storm is the interesting alternative: a self-buff lasting the encounter where each creature you melee with below-average Presence is taunted, and abilities you use against creatures you’ve taunted deal extra damage equal to twice your Might score and increase potency by one. It’s a genuinely cool taunt-and-punish package. I just almost never use it, because You Are Already Dead is so phenomenal.

4th Level (Echelon 2)

Fourth level is quick – it’s the start of Echelon 2 with the usual increases. You raise your primary attributes up to 3. You get Damaging Ferocity, which improves your first HR rider so you now gain 2 Ferocity when you take damage instead of 1 – and since that’s the good rider, it’s exactly the one you want improved. You also unlock the 8-Ferocity tier of Growing Ferocity, which is mostly negligible; you should almost never be sitting at 8 Ferocity unless you’re running a very specific strategy. Spend your HR early.

Then you get Primordial Attunement and Primordial Strike, which might as well be one feature. Attunement lets you sense whenever an enemy has an elemental damage immunity or weakness (acid, cold, corruption, fire, lightning, poison, or sonic). Primordial Strike lets you, as part of any strike, spend 1 Ferocity to gain one surge that must be used for that strike, with the bonus damage being any of those elemental types of your choice. You can see how they pair: one senses the weakness, the other reliably exploits it. The Ferocity cost means it isn’t a no-brainer – if the target only has damage weakness 1 or 2, it’s probably not worth the Ferocity – but even just sensing the weakness is good, because your teammates can exploit that information too.

5th Level

You get an aspect feature and your 9-Ferocity abilities.

5th Level Aspect Features

The Berserker’s Bounder stands out again. Your jump distance and height double. Height is genuinely hard to come by – everyone can jump 1 high, and a tier 2 (guaranteed for Furies thanks to Mighty Leaps) adds another, capping you at 2. Bounder doubles that to a reliable 4 high, which starts to feel like flight. You can grab a target, jump, and drop them for damage (cheesy, but go for it if you like). Bounder also reduces fall height for the purpose of damage and landing prone, and keeps you upright when you land on another creature. All-around good.

The Reaver’s Unfettered lets you end any restrained condition on you at the start of your turn, plus a double edge on escape tests. Combine it with an ancestry feature that grants slowed immunity and you effectively cannot be locked down. I originally rated this a 2, but on reflection I’m bumping it to a 3 – it’s honestly that good.

The Storm Wight’s Stormborn lets you and allies within 5 squares ignore negative effects from inclement weather, and use a first-level Conduit’s fortunate-weather feature. In the vanilla game, inclement weather doesn’t do much, so I rank it a 2. (In my games, where I homebrew a lot of debilitating weather effects the Director can spend Malice on, this would be a clear 3.)

9-Ferocity Abilities

Debilitating Strike (A-Tier): a melee strike dealing solid damage, Might-targeting, that slows. Might-targeting and slowed alone aren’t worth 9 Ferocity – the payoff is the rider: while slowed this way, the target takes 1 damage for every square they move, including from force movement. Land this, then force-move them around, and a melee-only target now has to crawl back to you while slowed, taking damage every square in both directions. You lock them in a movement hell where they bleed damage and waste turns.
Rebounding Storm (A-Tier): single-target damage and push. When the target would end the force movement by colliding, they take collision damage as usual, then are pushed the remaining distance back the way they came, and the effect continues if they collide again. (You could theoretically build an infinite loop by sandwiching them between two creatures; I’d just reduce the push by 1 each collision to prevent that.) Against a low-stability target, with a force-movement build you want to be running anyway, this ends up dealing a ton of single-target damage for the cost. I love it.

6th Level

You get Primordial Portal, a subclass choice between two 9-cost abilities, and some out-of-combat utility I’ll skip.

Primordial Portal

As a main action, you touch a magic source of elemental power and create a portal to Quintessence. Then, with a main action, you can teleport yourself and willing creatures within 10 squares through it onto a safe island of Quintessence, or back again. You can maintain a number of portals equal to your Might score.

What’s a “magic source of elemental power”? Honestly, I have no idea – it’s a Director call, and that makes this swing between very strong and very weak. My interpretation is something natural and magically significant: a magical tree, a magical lake, not a mundane version. The reason I rate it well is the in-combat cheese: create a portal, teleport your whole team out to dodge a round of aggro, then teleport back in for your turns. Mostly it’s an out-of-combat tool for fleeing a fight gone south, but that aggro-dodging trick is real, and it gets more powerful at higher levels (we’ll reference back to it).

6th Level Aspect Abilities (9-Ferocity)

The Berserker pattern holds at this level: great features, mediocre abilities. Avalanche Impact (jump your max distance, power roll against each adjacent creature where you land, push 3) would be good as a 5-cost but is weak at 9. Force of Storms (single-target damage and push, then a chain-reaction push of each creature within 2 squares of the target) is niche; B tier.

The Reaver gets Death Strike and Seek and Destroy:

Death Strike (C-Tier): a free triggered action when you reduce a creature to zero Stamina with a strike – you target an adjacent creature with the same strike and power roll. That’d be good if it weren’t 9 Ferocity. If you killed with a 5-cost move, you’re now spending 9 Ferocity to repeat a 5-cost move. It’s just not efficient. If there’s a clever use I’m missing, let me know in the comments, but it reads as bad to me.
Seek and Destroy (S-Tier): a melee strike where you shift up to your speed first, then strike, dealing damage, Presence-targeting, and frightening. If a non-leader/non-solo target is winded by the strike, they’re reduced to zero Stamina, and you frighten another enemy within 5 squares with below-average Presence. It’s an instant execute, and I love instant executes. Nine Ferocity is a bit expensive, but against elites – who carry a lot of damage and reward you for cutting their turns – the value justifies it. I rank it S tier, though I could see a high A.

The Storm Wight gets Pounce and Riders of the Storm:

Pounce (B-Tier): a melee strike with Might-targeting grab; shift up to 4 squares bringing the target, and while grabbed they take twice your Might at the start of each of your turns. There’s a lot of initial damage, but I designed something similar as a 5-cost elsewhere and it’s good there – at 9 cost, it’s just okay.
Riders of the Storm (A-Tier): a 3-aura maneuver lasting the encounter; each enemy in the area takes twice your Might at the end of each of your turns. Between this and Tooth and Claw you’re racking up serious end-of-turn damage. On top of that, you and allies in the area can fly while the aura is active, with an out-of-combat summoning option. This would be S tier if it didn’t cost so much; at 9 Ferocity, it’s a strong A.

7th Level (Echelon 3)

Seventh level is the start of Echelon 3, and there isn’t much to discuss – you get the typical echelon increases and not much else specific to the Fury. Onward.

8th Level

You get aspect features and your first 11-Ferocity ability.

8th Level Aspect Features

These are mostly “more of the same, but strong.” The Berserker’s Strongest There Is lets you roll three dice and pick two on Might tests, and adds your Might to knockback force movement – boring but very strong. The Reaver’s A Step Ahead does the same for Agility tests and disengage shifts (whatever, to me). The Storm Wight’s Menagerie lets you use all Storm Wight kits, swap them on a Respite while still doing another Respite activity, sense animals within a mile, and roll three-pick-two on Track tests. Decent.

11-Ferocity: Relentless Death (Must-Pick)

This is the one. Overkill (a melee strike that zeroes minions and winded non-leaders before damage, then overflows excess damage to a creature within 5 squares) is decent for clearing minions, but it’s outclassed.

Relentless Death is a main-action self-buff: you shift up to your speed, each enemy you move adjacent to takes damage equal to twice your Might score (about 8 at this echelon), and you make one power roll targeting each of them. You gain 1 Ferocity for each target that dies. Then the execute thresholds: any target with Stamina 8 or less dies outright; on a tier 2, Stamina 11 or less dies; on a tier 3, Stamina 17 or less dies.

It’s a massive AoE execute that farms even more Ferocity as it goes. This is a must-pick – so much better than the alternatives that I take it every time. It might be one of the best 11-cost abilities in the game. Absolutely phenomenal.

9th Level

You get Harbinger of Primordial Chaos and your subclass 11-Ferocity abilities (the book lists one at 9, but I believe that’s a typo).

Harbinger of Primordial Chaos lets you create a temporary source of elemental power as a Respite activity, lasting 24 hours, usable with Primordial Portal. The interpretation question is whether the source is stationary or something you can carry with you. If you can carry it, this is game-breaking: you’d always have access to the teleport-out-and-back aggro-dodge, and combined with any out-of-order turn effect it’d be unbelievable. For that reason, as a Director I probably wouldn’t allow it to be portable. Keep that in mind.

For the 11-cost abilities: both Berserker options are B tier – you know the gist by now, Berserker abilities tend toward mediocre, so I won’t dwell.

The Reaver gets Primordial Bane (S-Tier): a melee strike dealing okay-for-the-cost damage, then you choose a damage type and the target loses any immunity to it and gains weakness 10 to it – with no save. Overriding immunity and slapping on weakness 10 with no potency check is incredible. (I originally wrote this down as A tier, which was a mistake – it’s S.) Another reason the Reaver is so good.

The Storm Wight gets Death Rattle (S-Tier): a 3-burst dealing a low amount of psychic damage, with a scaling execute – at tier 1, every minion in the area drops to zero Stamina; at tier 2, that plus one winded non-leader/solo; at tier 3, every non-leader/solo is winded and the minion/winded executes apply. In fights against multiple targets, this is a flat-out fight-ender. Insane ability.

The fact that the Reaver and Storm Wight both get S-tier abilities here is a real weakness for the Berserker – nothing it gets is comparable.

10th Level

Tenth level is its own echelon in Draw Steel, and the Fury delivers.

Primordial Ferocity is your final HR increase: the first time you take damage each combat round, you gain 3 Ferocity instead of 2. You also unlock the final Growing Ferocity tier, which by now isn’t important.

Chaos Incarnate makes you a master of elemental forces. You gain immunity to a damage type of your choice (or your kit’s type, if you’re a Storm Wight) equal to twice your Might score – about 10 at this level. There are fights where it won’t trigger, but here’s the good part: when an elemental, or any creature whose abilities deal acid, cold, fire, lightning, poison, or sonic damage, first becomes aware of you with below-strong Presence, they’re frightened of you. Frightening enemies at the very start of combat is excellent. It also upgrades Primordial Strike so you can spend up to 3 Ferocity for up to 3 surges on a strike – useful for securing a kill or guaranteeing a potency, though for exploiting a weakness you only ever need one surge. Situationally very good.

Primordial Power is the big one. It’s an epic resource: each Respite, you gain Primordial Power equal to the XP you’d otherwise gain – the class’s replacement for XP once you’re maxed out, so you stay incentivized to keep getting victories. You can spend any amount as a free maneuver to end one effect on you per Primordial Power spent, and you can spend 3 to create a portal to Quintessence without needing a source of elemental power. At this point, Quintessence portals are completely broken: as long as you have 3 victories in a fight, you can teleport off the map and back at will to dodge aggro. Ending debilitating effects on yourself is also strong this late in the game. It’s not the best XP-replacement mechanic in the game – some classes get better – but calling it merely “good” undersells how impactful it is.

Closing Thoughts

That’s the Fury in full. A frontline brawler that delivers exactly what you want in a Draw Steel encounter – efficient killing and relentless force movement – through a deceptively simple kit. Its heroic resource, Ferocity, is genuinely my least favorite in the game thanks to all that chaos, but the heroic abilities you spend it on are good enough that I forgive it.

My takeaways: lean Reaver if you want the strongest overall package and the best crowd control (it’s a hair ahead of the Berserker, which is the better pure-damage pick and a perfectly defensible choice). Take Brutal Slam as your bread-and-butter signature. Lean on Thunder Roar as your workhorse 5-cost, snag You Are Already Dead at 7, and look forward to Relentless Death at 8 – it’s one of the best 11-costs in the game. Throughout, build for force movement, because every subclass rewards it, and remember the one-to-one trade rule of thumb whenever an ability offers you damage in exchange for your own health.

For my ability-by-ability rankings across all ten levels, check the spreadsheet linked in the video description. And if any of these takes struck you as controversial – I know a few will – I’d love to hear your reasoning in the comments.

The next class in this series will be on its way soon. Stay tuned.