12.1 Devastation Evoker Feedback

In Development Midnight: Curse of Ula'tek Public Test Realm
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I didn’t see a thread for general feedback so I figured I’d make one. I’m generally still in “wait and see” mode, but I have a couple first impressions after testing.

Short summary of below:

  • The spec feels far too filler-heavy outside of Dragonrage/Unbound Flame windows.
  • Shattering Star tier heavily incentivizes running Star Salvo, which means Scalecommander can’t afford to spec into Power Swell – its main source of essence generation – drastically killing the flow of the spec.
  • The final section of our talent tree is too locked in. There is essentially a single correct choice per hero spec because every talent taken is either incredibly powerful or required for the spec to function.
  • Please just baseline Causality already – it has never been unspecced in the history of the class. It’s the defining feature of our spec.

The main and simplest feedback I have is that the spec just does not feel fun to play outside of Dragonrage/Unbound Flame windows. As usual, the spec flows nicely inside cooldowns, and Unbound Flame (DefinitelyNotEngulf) is an interesting change to the apex that helps with essence burst generation after Dragonrage ends.

Once you run out of UF charges, the spec feels like it comes to a standstill. With the previous Azure Sweep tier, even if sweep was basically just a glorified filler spell, it felt ok to press because 1) it was flexible in its use, and, more importantly, 2) it always felt like it was an impactful press. Even if it didn’t trigger an essence burst, it helped cycle Eternity Surge’s cd and did noteworthy damage on its own.

Now that we don’t have Azure Sweep (to be blunt, it just isn’t worth taking without the season 1 tier propping it up), our filler has reverted to Living Flame / Azure Strike. Pressing these buttons feels like you are just throwing away globals if they don’t trigger Essence Burst. They don’t literally do nothing, but they feel like they do nothing. Gambling for essence burst procs with a non-impactful filler is not my idea of a fun rotation.

A big driver for the rotation feeling so empty is the new 2p bonus. I don’t have a lot of thoughts about our tier as a whole right now, but our new 2p being such a massive amp to Shattering Star heavily incentivizes taking Star Salvo. Unfortunately, taking Star Salvo means Scalecommander can’t really take Power Swell anymore. Without Power Swell, the only essence “generation” Scalecommander has outside of just casting your filler spells and praying for procs is from Imminent Destruction, which is not nearly enough to carry your rotation in between Dragonrage uses.

This exposes an essentially permanent issue that Devastation has had since the current talent trees were implemented in that the final section of our talent tree is essentially locked in. Scalecommander can’t take Power Swell because every talent point we could spend on it is being spent on other mandatory talents.

Flameshaper manages to avoid the above issues to a certain extent due to having the ability to take Power Swell (because it doesn’t need Onyx Legacy), along with Essence Well and Titanic Precision, but it still feels a bit feast-or-famine due to the RNG nature of the essence generation. The good pulls feel okay, the bad pulls feel bad.

My request would be for you to adjust the final section of the talent tree to open up the flexibility to take Power Swell (please just baseline Causality, that talent has never been unspecced in the history of the class and is our defining feature at this point), improve our essence generation, or make Living Flame / Azure Strike impactful button presses. I honestly don’t know what you could do to make our fillers feel good to press, so I personally would just prefer better essence generation, but I’m happy to keep an open mind.

11 Likes
Feedback: Midnight Season 2 Class Sets
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I have some thoughts on how they could change things and bring some of the synergy back to Devastation.

Get rid of Strafing run, bring back hoarded power, change Imminent Destruction back to what it was in TWW, bring back the essence cost reduction talent for pyre, remove azure sweep and put lay waste back where it was, bring back Shattering Star as a button and make it give Essence Burst, keep the passive that launches Shattering Stars when you use Eternity Surge but make it so that it doesn’t give Essence Burst, untether Renewing Blaze from Obsidian Scales and make it a button again (that’s really for all Evoker’s not just Dev).

For Flameshaper change Legacy of the Lifebinder so that your red spells do 15% increased damage and healing to your primary target and change ashes in motion so that it reduces the cd time of both of your empower spells not just Firebreath.

For Scalecommander change bombardments so that empower spells mark the targets instead of Mass Dis.

Don’t change the Apex Talents, leave them as they are and then remove the Animosity/Dragonrage extension cap, buff Pyre by 50%, nerf Dis by 30%, buff Firebreath, Eternity Surge, and Deep Breath by 100%, and then give us an aura buff of 2%.

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Dragonrage isn’t even fun to press on its own. Tying our apex talents to it is lame. I like the idea of a big damage ability but not 30 seconds later.

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Section 1: Response to OP
Generally I agree with OP, I do take issue with one of his points.

”The spec feels far too filler-heavy outside of Dragonrage/Unbound Flame windows.”

As fun as disintegrate is, I actually think we need to tone back the amount of time we are actually able to disintegrate. I know and feel it’s unfun to cast living flame filler but I think that it is necessary to the spec and feel it actively hurts the natural highs and lows the spec creates to be super full on resources.

I think we need to have a toning back of things that generate essence bursts. I remember when dragon came out and the essence bursts created by Shattering Star were very important, like to the point where you would cast it on cooldown just for that ignoring the damage increase it put on the target.

In order to have spenders that do huge amounts of damage we also have to have the spenders be rarer. This also would naturally buff dragon rage as a result. The cooldown of dragon rage does 2 things, floods us with resources and gives us mastery at maximum percent. With mastery generally being avoided the main thing that it does is give us resources. If we have too many resources what is the cooldown doing?

Section 2: Criticism and how I would fix them

Empowers:
I feel like the core of the class is built around empowers, yet they have taken a backseat in terms of their own output. They are now (it feels like) only there to make triggers for disintegration to consume with either one of it’s hero talents. I think empowers should be a much larger section of our damage. Personally I would suggest a number between 25-40% leaning to the high end but thats just me. Both are currently a combined 10.1% according to the sim of my character in a 5 min pure single sim

Dragonrage and it’s interaction with Rising fury:
As I discussed earlier Dragonrage gives 2 things Mastery and flooding of resources. This should (especially with the triple pyres) be a period of High damage. Currently though the high damage period comes near the end of this when you get maximum stax of the rising fury buff, followed by a period of % damage (since the rework). Currently I feel this damage profile is counter to Dev’s identity of burst. If a flat rework is not possible I would much rather see a much faster ramp up with a higher end point, that is all contained within dragon rage rather than extending out past the ending of the cooldown.

Unbound Flame:
This ability does feel good (because of again the aforementioned disintegrate spam being fun), but it feels Deeply disconnected from the rest of the kit. This does fix the ability Shattering star had on not being tied to a cooldown and free to use and get big dam for.

Apex talent potential rework:

I feel like dev for its existence has been known as a burst spec. I remember it being known for ripping off tanks because its burst was so high. I think a name change (smoldered fury being my favorite) + a rework that changes the damage buff to the end of dragon rage to the beginning.

Instead of being a ramp up it could be a “ramp down” Giving 20% damage at the start of dragon rage Lowering by 5% every extension. This way we get something besides mastery for when targets are at full health (fixing one of dev’s problems), and we get to reclaim our burst identity

These are all my opinions, I hope that some of them resonate with you.

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Feedback from first weekend ptr dummy dome testing:

  • Apex change is good but Unbound Flame needs tuning and crit support
  • Why do we keep Rising Fury after Dragonrage?
  • Tier set ‘fixes’ Eternity Surge weakness, but exacerbates talent cost problems
  • Many oustanding issues were not addressed; some are worsened by these additions

New Apex: Unbound Flame

This is a great addition with several advantages over Risen Fury:

  • Casting Unbound Flame is more fun than passive essence bursts
  • Avoids proc-munching
  • Reduces the drop-off from losing Tyranny
  • Can be carried into the next pull

Overall, I expect to play 4/4 apex for Unbound Flame in M+ and will get more out of it; currently I am playing 1/4 Scalecommander builds in many dungeons.

It does have a few problems:

  • Direct damage seems low; less than an Azure Sweep with tier
  • Missing “damage increased by critical strike chance” and no haste scaling
  • New bug: Rising Fury is removed at start of combat with a raid boss, which can cause you to get no buff and no Unbound Flame charges if you open with Dragonrage (avoidable by pulling with a different ability first)
  • Rising Fury still persists after Dragonrage

I am not sure why we keep Rising Fury after Dragonrage ends; this encourages spending all your Unbound Flame charges immediately. Unbound Flame is satisfying and sells the “peak” after Dragonrage better than timed essence bursts, but this keeps the difficulty of timing a 55s damage window. This may force you to choose between saving Unbound Flames for an add spawn / damage amp phase and having a stronger Rising Fury window.

This doesn’t solve the problem of Rising Fury’s damage amp being too little (15% for 2 talent points) too late (24s into Dragonrage, with only 8-12s remaining); most of the value is in the extra 20s after Dragonrage and the free essence bursts. In raids, you will still need to time the peak for optimal damage; in dungeons where fights don’t last long enough, you are spending 3 talent points to have Unbound Flame on the next pull.

This is a big improvement, but I would like to see Rising Fury’s value moved entirely inside Dragonrage, with a shorter ramp and larger bonus, or a different mechanic for the middle ranks. Outside Dragonrage, instead of splitting value between Unbound Flame and a limited damage window, more value should be attached to Unbound Flame itself or grant a buff when you cast it.

I would like to see the apex evolve more to focus on Unbound Flame, and more support for it across the spec:

  • Mastery needs a buff; Unbound Flame would benefit from high Mastery builds but our Mastery is too weak to prioritize
  • Flameshaper benefits from Scorching Embers and Iridescence but has no special interaction with Unbound Flame
  • Scalecommander could have it consume Charged Blast
  • Iridescence is difficult to optimize because of Essence Well; casting 2x Unbound Flame after Fire Breath might munch an essence burst, forcing you to cast Pyre instead

New Tier Set: Shattering Star / Causality

Gave some thoughts on the set bonuses in the main thread.

Please remove Shattering Star procs from Scintillation; they are excessive and harmful to Flameshaper’s ability to compete at low target counts with Pyre-focused builds.

Azure Sweep also needs a buff to replace the old tier set; it should still be a good pick for dungeons. This can be paired with a tier set nerf at launch to ease the transition to the new tier.

The remaining issues are all down to talent costing and our resource economy being tuned around Power Swell. I have written extensively about Devastation’s talent issues before:

  • Scalecommander has zero capstone flexibility and is over-taxed by Onyx Legacy
  • Too many Eternity Surge talents all amplifying each other
  • Living Flame talents are non-competitive; pathing to Feed the Flames too costly

Something really needs to change, because if Scalecommander has to pick between Star Salvo (most of the tier value in aoe) and Power Swell, the hero spec dies. It’s not fun to cast 4x Azure Strikes between spenders. Flameshaper plays well with all the Blue talents plus Power Swell, but while I personally love Bue Flameshaper builds, many players don’t. I see no way to afford Feed the Flames in M+ without losing critical talents (Catalyze, Eternity’s Span, Scintillation, and Star Salvo all mandatory).

I second Gilg’s request to baseline Causality and would add Power Swell. You could plausibly delete Power Swell and buff base essence regen enough to compensate; but it works better as a core effect tied to Causality. Both these effects should be baseline, or at least much higher on the tree where they never get skipped and don’t compete with capstones.

Besides tuning essence economy, it would be good to add some separate value to filler casts; Gilg makes a good point about Azure Sweep giving cooldown reduction. We used to get more value from Charged Blast stacks on Azure Strike, Snapfire procs on Living Flame, even meaningful single-target damage from Burnouts. It should feel like you gained something from each filler cast, even if you didn’t gain an essence burst.

Some suggestions expanding on my previous posts:

  • Baseline Causality and Power Swell
  • Baseline Onyx Legacy or path directly to Imminent Destruction without Burnout for Scalecommander
  • Combine Star Salvo and Shattering Star, or remove a talent from the Blue side to reduce the cost of Star
  • Baseline Eternity’s Span; Eternity Surge (and Star Salvo) are worthless without it
  • Add more connections to the talent tree, such as Volatility to Engulfing Blaze and Arcane Intensity to Eye of Infinity (Essence Attunement should be baselined since Dev has 3 essence burst nodes)
  • Reduce two-point nodes; this can pay for more one-point nodes higher on the tree
  • Add a damage bonus to Burnout
  • Grant stacks of Feed the Flames from Living Flame casts
  • Reworked Azure Sweep: casting Azure Strike makes your next Azure Strike deal more damage and hit more targets; stacks and resets after reaching maximum or when you cast a different spell; casting Eternity Surge grants max stacks
2 Likes
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Unbound Flame visual effect could use some improvement. It feels like a copy paste of Engulf, and Engulf was pretty terrible…

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Hover should allow casting everything while moving, including Flame Breath and Eternity Surge.

There was never a reason given why empowered spells are an exception.

8 Likes
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I’m not as technical as some of the other posters in here ( which Blizz should absolutely look at and do their best to understand more about what they are saying ), but I just want Dev to be fun again. I’ve been playing it since release of the class and this is the worst I have seen it. Make my spec fun again please.

2 Likes
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Blizzard should add a spec option for Scalecommander where Deep Breath flying moves forward manually with the W key instead of moving automatically. It would also allow casting Deep Breath while staying in place.

The reason are raid bosses like Beloron and L’ura where the area allowing to move is very limited. The automatic movement makes the Scalecommander spec technically unplayable at these bosses because Deep Breath is part of the rotation.

I am not sure about future boss encounters, but the manual move option would solve a lot of problems at encounters where movement is restricted and positioning is critical.

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July 8th changes feedback:

tl;dr summary:

  1. Wingleader change is big and will take some getting used to, but it’s probably a healthy change – although it makes it feel a bit… unimpactful, especially on single target. Flat cdr might be an alternative.
  2. Fewer Deep Breaths from the Wingleader change directly results in an even worse essence economy for Scalecommander – already the spec’s biggest issue – due to fewer Imminent Destruction stacks. At this point Imminent Destruction probably needs a major buff or rework.
  3. Please give Scalecommander more guaranteed sources of essence generation, or find a way to allow us to spec into Power Swell without losing a significant amount of damage.

The Wingleader change is pretty big and definitely going to take some getting used to, but it’s probably healthier for the spec to be this way even if it’s a bit less interesting. Instead of Deep Breath’s CD scaling wildly based on target count, now it’ll be locked to a more reasonable ~45-55 seconds. My only complaint is that this makes Wingleader essentially irrelevant on single target, and think a flat cdr per empower/mass disintegrate cast might be a more graceful solution. I also think a 45-55 second cd on Deep Breath is a bit awkward on a spec with a 2 minute major CD (I personally think it should just be a 40 second cooldown on all target counts if Wingleader is going to get reworked), but that is a minor gripe that would also be difficult to adjust with Strafing Run in the picture.

Unfortunately, fewer deep breaths also exacerbates the essence issues that I mentioned in my first post. Fewer deep breaths means fewer stacks of Imminent Destruction, so this is a direct nerf to our essence on a spec that already has (in my opinion) fairly substantial essence economy issues.

Imminent Destruction also suffers from issues where it’s possible to have stacks expire before you can use them because the spec simply doesn’t generate enough essence to use them all. This can be avoided by delaying your Strafing Run Deep Breath as long as possible, but I think such a limitation doesn’t make for good gameplay. I don’t think I should be punished in such a roundabout way for wanting to use my second Deep Breath sooner.

This isn’t something that more Essence Burst can fix either. An easy solution to this would be to just increase the duration of ID stacks, but I would really prefer you just increase the amount of essence Scalecommander has so that this isn’t an issue. Normally this would be where Power Swell would shine, but the insanely strict talent requirements in the final section of our talent tree make this not a feasible solution.

All in all, I think Imminent Destruction is in dire need of a major buff or just a rework entirely, OR Scalecommander needs to be given access to Power Swell again without significant tradeoff – which would realistically require Power Swell being moved somewhere else on the tree. The bandaid fixes that can be made to it (e.g. increasing the duration of stacks) aren’t satisfying. There is also the benefit of ID being a talent that only Scalecommander takes right now, so it is a good choice for a targeted buff that specifically affects Scalecommander Devastation. It could be something as simple as increasing our essence generation after Deep Breathing – this would work out nicely with our second round of Deep Breaths coming off cooldown a bit after we leave Dragonrage/Rising Fury, which is where essence starts becoming an issue – but potential changes aside, I feel I cannot stress enough how rough Scalecommander feels essence-wise outside of Dragonrage right now.

The changes this PTR have been pretty solid so far, so I’m looking forward to what you can come up with in future weeks regarding this.

6 Likes
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I like the change (I should, I suggested it). Although it’s a bit bigger nerf to Wingleader than I expected, the damage from lost cdr is mostly compensated by the buffs, and a slightly longer cooldown seems healthier; less disruptive, bigger cast at the start of each pack in a dungeon. It could stand a small buff but shouldn’t go over 4s per cast.

I agree that only .5s per cast makes the talent almost unnoticeable in single-target. Before the nerfs that came with the addition of Strafing Run, the cooldown was ~40s in single-target and ~20s in aoe, starting from the 60s provided by Onyx Legacy. With Strafing Run a longer ~40s cd feels right in aoe, but doesn’t leave room for scaling in single-target. Might be time to redistribute power between base cooldown, Onyx Legacy, and Wingleader, or set up some kind of choice between Wingleader’s aoe focus and alternative single-target value.

I don’t think Imminent Destruction needs a total rework; the “bandaid fixes” should be made regardless. Remove the timeout from Imminent Destruction and increase or remove the timeout on Strafing Run. Extra essence bursts can help, but we need the right amount of essence to consume all stacks of ImmDes during a cooldown cycle, then add essence bursts for more casts in that window.

Testing with Power Swell and Diverted Power feels almost right, but we need a talent point for Power Swell, and Diverted Power is too weak and inconsistent. It should work on a deck of six cards - guaranteeing one proc from every pair of empowers cast - and maybe lean towards earlier procs. Maybe the choice should be Wingleader (aoe) vs Extended Battle (1t) and move Diverted Power to a separate node. Although that might bring back bombardment spreading for extra essence bursts, it would not affect Deep Breath. (Aug might see a choice between shorter cooldown or more resource to extend Duplicate.)

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The cooldown of the second Deep Breath for Scale Commander needs to be looked into as well.

We can use Deep Breath twice per minute, but the second Deep Breath provided by Strafing Run currently must be cast at least 18 seconds after the first one. This creates an awkward rotation requiring to squeeze other spells into 18 seconds + 42 seconds windows. As our empowered spells have 30 seconds cooldowns the cooldown windows don’t fit properly.

It would be better to change Strafing Run so that it simply provides a second charge of Deep Breath unconditionally. Then we would get Deep Breath with 2 charges, where each one recharges in 1 min, and we can use each Deep Breath charge when we want.

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I second the “make devastation how it was in tww” notion

because it worked then, and it was good.

atm the spec neither works, nor is it good

2 Likes
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Engulf should also come back as an active spell.

I dislike Blizzards Midnight class changes to make so many spells passives and procs. It makes the rotations boring and removes the ability hold effective spells back for burst windows.

When I would get Dragonrage in a couple of seconds it would be silly to cast stuff like Engulf before activating the DPS cooldown. But that is what the passive procs do, they waste a lot of DPS because the player has no control when they go off.

2 Likes
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Make dev how it was in Dragonflight.

Before hero talents.

1 Like
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You have that. Flameshaper Evoker.

S1 and S2 TWW Devastation were both great. Those iterations should come back.

1 Like
17

Not much to mention this week, but I did see this interesting change in the Outlaw section:

Killing Spree prefers targets that are not immune to damage or taking less than 5% physical damage.

It would be nice if we could get something similar for Mass Disintegrate. It was particularly noticeable on Vashnik where it was next to impossible to avoid cleaving tumors that hadn’t had their damage reduction removed yet.

3 Likes
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It would be nice if developers would think about making changes like this as systems that apply to all abilities. That might be difficult for a game with lots of legacy components, but the difficulty itself should motivate a pause before giving certain specs special treatment.

I too would like Mass Disintegrate to not cleave immune adds or unkillable skeletons in Pit of Saron. Ret paladins had similar complaints with hammers hitting adds instead of the boss on Mug’zee. I don’t know enough about Rogue to judge why Killing Spree needs this so badly, but I think a lot of classes will have reason to be jealous. Across-the-board smart targeting would be better. Or maybe a different approach to designing bosses; if the adds aren’t meant to be damageable until after a mechanic check then don’t make them targetable until then. Or make them damageable from the start but somehow immune to dying, like Alleria adds, so you have a chance to complete the mechanic before they reach 0% but don’t immediately lose damage when they spawn.

But let’s go with “copy-paste that fix onto Mass Disintegrate” as something achievable in a hotfix and doesn’t seem too much to ask.

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I’ve already mentioned all the significant topics/legitimate issues that I think should be looked at, but it’s a slow day so I figured I’d make a list of small changes that I think would make the spec feel better if they were implemented.

  • Make Power Nexus baseline and either rework it or just make it increase maximum Essence by 1. Now that both of our spenders cost 3 Essence, it doesn’t feel very good having 5 Essence baseline. Having 6 baseline and being able to cast 2 spenders in a row would feel a lot better.
  • Ruby Embers is an incredibly weak talent. It’s unlikely it will see any play next season in standard builds anyway due to its position on the tree, but it could really use a buff, or perhaps a rework into something Pyre related.
  • Onslaught (Scalecommander tree) is kind of a nothing-burger. I understand that it is meant to be mostly a QoL talent for solo content, but I think an Essence Burst would be better than a Burnout, considering how insignificant a Living Flame cast is. Alternatively, give Burnout a buff – which leads to my next point.
  • Burnout feels very weak considering its location on the talent tree. This talent is in the same row as incredibly strong talents like Spellweaver’s Dominance and Star Salvo – I don’t think its power level is up to par compared to the talents surrounding it. At the very least it could increase the damage done by the instant Living Flame.
  • Strafing Run’s window allowing you to re-cast Deep Breath feels too short in a lot of situations. I often find myself delaying my initial Deep Breath cast so that my Strafing Run will be available when I want it. Given Deep Breath’s longer cooldown now with the Wingleader changes, I think it could be nice giving Strafing Run the same treatment as Unbound Flame – where it is usable until the original ability comes off cooldown. The only issue I could see is that Deep Breath’s cooldown isn’t static, so you might get surprised by it coming off cooldown. The alternative would simply be extending the duration of Strafing Run.

I tried to pick things that would be relatively straightforward changes since I understand dev time is better spent on big picture issues. With that said, maybe a dev with some free time will see this list and think it has some good ideas.

5 Likes
20

Blizzard should just provide two charges of Deep Breath, where each charge reloads in 1min. That would provide more flexibility than uneven Deep Breath cooldowns with a 18s and a 42s cooldown messing up the rotation.