I normally don’t post but I wanted to bring attention to the changes to evoker in 10.1.
I typically don’t care about buffs or nerfs to classes but when those buffs or nerfs negatively affect the gameplay of said class, that’s where I kind of get annoyed. It feels like zero thought was put into these changes.
Clipping - Rather than fix the millions of bugs the spec has, they ruined the playstyle by making it more stale and removing any min/max opportunity with disintegrate clipping and Dragonrage
Dragonrage & mastery - With Dragonrage now lasting 34 seconds instead of 38 seconds minimum, this directly makes us even worse during execute phases. Execute phases are some of the most important windows during a boss encounter in my opinion and making us even worse than we already are during it is just a slap in the face. I was expecting maybe a mastery change/rework or something but that doesn’t seem to be coming. Additionally, being at max resource during Dragonrage all the time is cringe. Should add an ability that uses essence that is only castable during Disintegrate (with Dragonrage up) so we can spend our essence.
Imminent Destruction - The change to this talent makes no sense considering we want to use Deep Breath when mobs hit ~30% because of the way our mastery works and the talent associated with deep breath (tyranny). With the current change, we will be using Deep breath at the beginning of the pull before casting empowered abilities which would ruin any tyranny deep breath synergy. Also potentially having to deep breath in single target just sounds cringe.
Causality - The causality redesign makes it so while you’re channeling disintegrate, your empowered abilities cool down 100% faster. That means you get more cool down reduction from the talent if you DONT take natural convergence (20% faster disintegrate) and have less haste. It actually hurts us to take a talent that’s supposed to help us. Causality now scales negatively with haste.
Single target - Much of these changes affect our single target which is already on the low end of middle of the pack (if you look at logs/statistics). Overall, according to some sims that were run, these nerfs end up being a 9.4% nerf which would put us on par with Demonology warlock single target (pre-buff). Blizzard… you’re literally buffing a spec that’s suffering on single target but you’re going to nerf a spec that does mediocre single target to be on par with a spec that is being buffed because of poor single target. Nonsensical.
Threat - with the addition of Raging inferno, our threat will be absurdly high. Even more so than it already is. This needs to be addressed. This talent is probably the only change I like and no it’s not because it will do a lot of damage. It just seems fun and I like firestorm as an ability and the synergy between firestorm and pyre is nice. I like synergy.
Final thoughts - there will be no thought process in how we use any of our abilities anymore. We will slam our cooldowns on cooldown the entire fight. We will have much much much worse single target with the changes and no evoker staff. The playstyle will feel much worse and slower with no clipping to try to fish for dragonrage extensions. Some of the talents will no longer synergize with each other. We will have less dragonrage up time which hurts us even worse during periods of the fight where we’re already doing much less damage overall to everyone else. Do I see any devastation evokers being played in the race to world first again? No. Does this matter? Probably not but it would show that there are better and more fun specs out there. Maybe add another single target ability to the game or something.
Reference video:
