Yeah there were two separate times I was chasing during Rashok last night and mechanics were like ‘yeah nah f off mate’ and I won’t completely miss the playstyle, I can’t lie.
Devastation needs nothing to get extra extensions in the war within except functioning fingers. Hero talents and tier make it completely free.
This change kills the only interaction left that requires skill for Evokers. VERY bad change.
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When I first heard of the hero talents I was super excited for each of them and the potential D-rage extensions that both Flameshaper and Scalecommander have to offer for devastation. I completely forgot about the nerfs… then I got into the beta and have been wondering why my D-rage hasn’t been extending on my 5th/6th empower spells until I read the Animosity talent and remembered.
I am more upset about the fact that the reason for the nerf is for us to “not be reliant on effects like Power Infusion.” Our hero talents no longer require us to be reliant on those types of effects to hit the break point of getting our 3rd extension.
I certainly hope that we are able to get some of the mastery scaling we lost back from seasons 2/3 in compensation for this HUGE change.
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The reason for the nerf was actually made clear this week with the datamining of the tier set.
6-8 extensions would be possible with the tier, which would be obviously broken.
What they do after season one when we get a new tier is going to be the real question, but as it stands now the change makes more sense.
It’s only a big change in AOE, where many extensions were arguably too easy and too strong.
People are being overly dramatic about this change.
Season two will be the time to worry if a new tier comes and there’s no compensation for losing it.
In fairness, spamming AS and burnout procs while clipping disint (while also getting pi and lust) is not all that skillfull, and extensions in aoe certainly don’t require skill.
Obviously I’m not turbo pumped about the change, but I understand it with the tier and I’ll reserve concern until we hit season two.
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I agree with you that devastation is too simple, and it ends up being uninteresting due to the excess of simplicity. However, I believe that other changes need to be made to the spec to change this. This change in animosity alone does not make the class much more complex, at least from my point of view.
The majority of the skill expression of the spec comes into play managing mobility and our defensives productively, which really doesn’t start to differentiate skill much until high end content.
Honestly a pretty solid design imo, as less skilled players don’t feel the impact of not playing perfectly when they aren’t punished as much for not managing hover/scales/VE/blaze well.
I particularly like how Devastation works, but it would definitely be nice to have something more to play with. However, I don’t think this should be our burst, especially considering people who play with higher Ping and therefore have a greater difficulty in using time to their advantage.
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We will though, hero talents add a decent amount of skill expression.
definitely. This makes me optimistic, especially because overall I really liked our talents.
I’m the type of person who argues that not all classes and specs need to have such a big learning curve, sometimes simply getting into the game and blowing things up without so much difficulty is all that some people want.
Agreed; as much as I’m a min/max slave, I’m of the opinion that the delta between the skill floor and the skill ceiling shouldn’t be massive.
Basic understanding should get people about 75% of the way there, and getting from 75.1% to the top parse is where the fun happens for people that care.
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Really sad the nerf. The evoker Essence is the DR extension
Where we can post this to Blizzard read 
No, it’s not.
Spamming AS and burnout procs and clipping disint during lust and pi for one extra extension is not the essence of the spec.
Extensions took zero skill on AOE.
It’s borderline degenerative gameplay that they neutered in season 1 and barely exists in a way that this nerf will affect now.
It would have been especially broken with how our season 1 tier would have interacted with it in TWW.
Skill expression is added by the hero talents that is much less degenerative and has far more expression.
Throwing tantrums about it before we even see how balance, tuning, and the spec as a whole shapes up in TWW is pointless.
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I enjoy evoker BECAUSE it is one of the few more simple classes left. If they are to bring in more complexity, please Bliz, don’t make it more than a couple of % of damage increase so that those of us who enjoy the more simple gameplay can continue to do so.
If you’re not doing high end content, any class can be as simple as you want it.
I feel the same as this. Extending dragonrage is the core fun of the entire class for me. Not just Devastation. If you don’t make it higher, I’m just going to another class and forgetting my dragon ever existed.
This change is super disappointing. I honestly think Blizzard doesn’t understand Devastation’s appeal. Spending essence to get CDR on our empowered spells, which in turn helps us further extend our uptime for Dragonrage, is a core pillar of Devastation’s identity. At this point, they should honestly just remove Causality and Animosity from the tree entirely and make them baseline. If they did that, then the new talents planned for the left side of the tree would at least have more of a fighting chance of being taken. But even that is overly optimistic because the left side of the tree’s viability is entirely dependent on whether Firestorm is worth it, and aside from Primalist Council, it’s not.
To the community managers who do read this, please pass this along: Its great that the devs have taken steps to address some of devastation’s issues i.e. threat. But your priorities at this point should be fixing Firestorm, not nerfing Animosity to compensate for a spell used by a different class.
They nerfed animosity because it would be absolutely broken with the season 1 tier.
I’m glad for the change. I feel skill expression can lie elsewhere than losing a bunch of damage cuz I had to move some or i wasn’t the PI target or I’m playing with Americans or whatever the like. Scalecommander hero tree looks like it’ll give some different forms of skill expression that feel more natural than weird clipping shenanigans, so I’m really looking forward to it.
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On one side, I am really glad that we aren’t that reliant on having PI to do well. However, the idea that OUR class should be changed because of ANOTHER classes ability is an underline problem and mentality that is NOT healthy for the game.
I believe that classes should not be balanced around a “what could be” situation. It just emphasis even more that PI should be rework instead of Animosity. However, since Blizzard likes to move forward with this, I think that adding more “weaving” rotational spells to the Evoker would help the expression of skill for more players. Which is what I think they are doing .
People keep saying this, but it’s not the real reason for the change. If it were, it would have happened this expansion. It’s happening because of our tier for next season.:
Evoker Devastation 11.0 Class Set 4pc- Eternity Surge's cooldown is decreased by 5.0 sec and it now grants Essence Burst.
With this tier and the right talents, we could easily get 6-8 extensions.