Animosity can no longer extend Dragonrage beyond 16 seconds

EVOKER

  • Devastation
    • Animosity can no longer extend Dragonrage beyond 16 seconds.

Quoted from WoWhead. Since dragonrage lasts 18 seconds does this mean we have to wait 6 seconds with using fire breath because we might not get the benefit from Animosity? I don’t really get it, is the idea that we’re supposed to use dragonrage and then use deep breath right after? If we spam pyre we don’t really benefit from Causality. Honestly this change is baffling to me, I can’t make sense of it. Did they do it because we extended dragonrage for too long?

EDIT: I think I read it wrong, I thought the duration couldn’t be extended beyond 16 seconds, but they mean you can’t benefit for more than 4 extensions from Animosity?

The extension is a gimmick anyways, it distracts from the fact our mastery still sucks booty.

Forget the extension bandaid, fix the mastery.

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This is not as big a deal as it might sound/you’re making it out to be.

It’s just meant to eliminate a 42 second d-rage when you have spoils/pi/lust. If you weren’t getting those, this likely changes literally nothing for you.

They’ve been anti-disintegrate-clipping since season 1 and this is just another change along that line.

It also helps them balance the spec as a whole.

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It means it is now capped at 4 extensions, totaling 34 seconds, which is the expected result anyway.

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If you want to enforce a certain length on Dragonrage, then just set it to that duration.

Giving us an extend talent and setting it at the bare minimum (even a naked evoker can always guarentee 16 seconds) is just making our cooldown cost two talents.

There is very little skill expression as Devastation Evoker. It is an extremely simple spec with very little skill needed. Getting extra Dragonrage extensions is really the only thing that makes how good you can press your buttons matter, so removing it is seriously dumbing down the spec. Extra extensions is also one of the best parts of the new hero talents since the interactions with Flameshaper and Scalecommander pretty much guarentee a 5th and 6th extension.

This is an awful change, either make dragonrage 34 seconds baseline and give us a new talent, raise the cap, or walk this back entirely. Please don’t kill the hype on hero talents with arbitrary changes like this.

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It’s mostly a nerf to our bloodlust and our trash pull dragonrages. It’s an oof.

I mean, you’re not wrong here, but the skill expression for dev is positioning, encounter knowledge, and mobility/defensive CD management. It’s why you see so many threads from people that want more range for the DPS specs.

Getting an extra set of extensions isn’t really a skill thing at this point though, it’s just a lust/pi/haste buffs thing.

I agree with you that they should just make the duration though (or at least the extensions from animosity) into d-rage itself and give us a new talent.

Very dissapointing change that directly impacts how satisfying it is to play the spec. The lack of explaination only enforces that Blizz doesn’t understand how big of a change this is to the spec.

It’s not a big change to the spec.

It should just get baked into d-rage at this point though and give us a new talent in animosity’s place.

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The things you list for skill expression of evoker are relevant to everything, it’s not an exclusively Dev or Evoker in general thing. Position is slightly exacerbated because of range, which, despite your assertion that it isn’t a problem in a lot of other threads, is still not a fun “limitation” placed on us because of our mobility. As an aside to this, progressing mythic fyrakk as Aug and doing seeds because Aug is very tanky and well suited to holding them in P3 highlights what the range issue really is, because I agree it is mostly fine for Dev (unless you have to do mechanics), but it is awful for Aug.

While it may not be particularly complex or skilful to extend dragonrage beyond 16 seconds, it is the ONLY exclusively dev bit of skill expression we have. This change just takes that away, because as mentioned, you can get a 16 second extension when naked. This just seems like a completely arbitrary change. Now we take 2 points for our CD for what? It will always be the same length regardless of target count or situation. Effectively this just takes a talent point away from us.

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I guess you now fire breath before using dragonrage with this change, especially in aoe.

No it’s literally not. If this were the case everyone would be playing the spec at 90%+ as long as they got the extensions on dragonrage.

I don’t know what to tell you if you genuinely believe the skill expression of the spec boils down to this and nothing else. The main extensions this affects are in aoe and mashing pyre and AS are not skill intensive.

The variance charts for the specs DPS on WCL have a LOT more happening than just “people who got full extensions” and “people that didn’t”.

Things like spacing empowers with this tier, consuming your iridescence procs (and not consuming then with the wrong spells), timing reviewing blaze for max Scarlett adaptation abuse, and most of all using hover well for maximum uptime/ not getting outranged are equally if not more important than getting one more set of extensions on d-rage.

It’s also not skill expression to press buttons a little faster because you have externals. I’m not saying the class takes a PhD (though none in wow do anymore), but there’s more to it than getting two more empowers during dragonrage.

This likely happened because the hero trees introduced methods of extending it beyond what blizz wants on the whole.

Do I think they needed to cap it how they did? Probably not. Is it a massive deal? Also no. It may also be a side effect of changes that we haven’t seen yet-- we’re still in alpha.

Sure they are, but if they were as relevant to others as us than all of those classes forums would also get 4+ threads about the range per week, and they don’t.

I don’t see why not, especially in aoe. Plenty of players are already doing this.

Although this change reduces Devastation’s ability expression, I think it is a positive thing as it reduces the need for high acceleration values, PI, Fury of The Aspects. Of all the things devastation needs, I believe we definitely need a complete mastery overhaul.

I suspect this is coming in TWW.

The fact that they’ve been moving us away from our mastery, but have the Conduit of Flame (10% crit to targets over 50% HP) talent in Flameshaper makes me think there may be a change coming.

Although this essentially equals out to a 5% crit buff, it once again frontloads power and strengthens the effect of current mastery, which seems to be what they’re moving away from.

I could very well be wrong, but based on repeated mastery nerfs, this is a curious talent if I am.

the modified/improved version of the Tier set from season 2/4 would be a great mastery. interaction with our empowered spells, interaction with Dragon Rage.

I agree, but it’s kind of already baked into flameshaper so I doubt that happens.

yes, it’s difficult, but they could change Flameshapper’s talent, or simply have both.

This will bridge the skill-gap a smidge That third extension was stressful to chase. Dragonrage will feel a little less hectic.

I disagree with the idea people have that the duration of dragonrage should just be fixed. On the basis that it would make it a very boring cooldown to play with.

The cap we added for Animosity was primarily to help keep the extension gameplay healthy and not reliant on effects like Power Infusion.

Love having our cd AND talent points balanced around a super toxic ability of another class.

Please dear god just remove PI from the game.

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I still say leaving it be a 25% haste boost for the priest casting it, but make it like a 3% boost when applied to anyone else is the best short term solution.

But as long as stuff like Aug is in the game, PI ain’t goin nowhere.

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