I think that anyone paying any attention to WoW right now knows that Augmentation is going to be seeing some changes before next season starts. After a week of playing with them, I have some thoughts on how to do it.
Ebon Might should be redesigned. Instead of the current proximity buff, which can create some weird incentives for positioning, and can, like all external DPS buffs, create some friction in (less coordinated and mature) groups, make Ebon Might raid wide, but at a lower value. Assign EM a pool of main stat based on the Evoker’s Intellect. Lets say it’s 50% of main stat, and the Evoker has 10,000 Intellect. So 5,000 main stat is spread across the raid. In a 20-player raid, that’s 250 main stat. In a 30-player raid, it’s 167 main stat. In a 5-player dungeon, it’s 1,000 main stat.
Make Ebon Might more difficulty to maintain, but reward players for keeping it up as long as possible. Perhaps the Ebon Might pool could start at 10% of the evoker’s main stat, but grow over X seconds to, say, 75% if the buff doesn’t fall off. There is very little room for skill expression with Ebon Might now, and reworking how you keep it up, could help with that. If it’s going to be 100% uptime, you might as well just make it an aura buff. Make it stronger, but shorter, and reward good play. And maybe if they keep it up for Y seconds, when it falls off, you get some other buff for the raid as a reward.
Instead of all the buffs granting stats, which are difficult to track and can create group composition issues, make some of them proc damage based. Any time you’re adding stats to a player, there will be big swings in value. I like the idea of selecting the right player in a raid for a buff as being a means of skill expression, but stats can be limiting, particularly in 5-player content. Having some of the damage be proc based, meaning when they do some attack, there is a chance to proc extra damage with an ICD, you can more easily use that on anyone, making it less punishing for not bringing the exact meta comp to your keys.
Augmentation Evoker buffs should not be able to stack. As it stands now, I think we’re going to see like 10 Augmentation Evokers in the RWF if things don’t change. The numbers we’re seeing in coordinated raids are insane. Just go check out what the top parses for Heroic Aberrus look like right now. Preventing stacking will help with this. Other buffs do not stack (i.e., Windfury, Battle Shout), so this wouldn’t be unreasonable either.
You have to allow in-game damage meters to show their performance accurately. Groups do not understand how this specs work. Yes, over time, that might change, but needing to log a raid or key to see if the Augmentation Evoker is AFK is not great. Particularly in keys, where logs don’t show until the key is done, it’s really bad not having access to this information.
If Blizzard is committing to making this a support spec, i.e., they won’t nerf all of their group buffs in favor of personal DPS, these ideas might help. Frankly, I expect we will see the buffs be gutted over time in favor of more personal DPS for the Augmentation Evoker, since it’s current iteration is going to be impossible to balance, but only time will tell.
I would count that as a positive thing. Maybe there should be a way to allow a second without it being goofy, but right now, you really want many, and that’s bad.
I think it works fine. If anything it should prefer people in your raid group first. I think the main issue here is 25y range on prescience, and the inability to tell the game who to buff without having to find the same 2 raid frames every 20 seconds.
No ty. It’s already annoying to maintain in scenarios with lots of movement. In PvP it’s even worse as everything constantly runs out of range of eruption. It feels extremely punishing to miss a gcd as is, it shouldn’t get worse.
Blistering Scale, Inferno’s Blessing, Prescience (+fate mirror), and Breath of Eons already do this.
They should be able to stack, but needs diminishing returns to prevent extreme values, unless they can solve it by preventing multiplicative scaling. Stacking 20 of the same dps spec doesn’t scale multiplicatively either, so neither should auvoker.
For sure, it should prefer people in your party/raid. 100% agree.
My single biggest issue with it is that some classes benefit way more than others from the various buffs that Augmentation puts out, and that’s going to make those specs way more powerful, and therefore more in demand, that all the others. Augmentation seems like a catalyst for a more rigid meta, which I think is a bad thing, particularly in keys.
There could be a way to satisfy us both here. There can be a choice node with an “easy” yet weaker version, and a “harder” yet stronger version. I feel like the skill cap is really low on Augmentation, and it needs more than it has now. With Ebon Might being as bonkers powerful as it is, it seems to me like it should be more challenging to maintain. But if it were weaker, it wouldn’t such a big deal IMO.
I think from a power level, stacking with DR might be ok, but I feel like that wouldn’t be very fun. Maybe make the buffs party wide buffs, like Windfury Totem, so you can have more than one, but they have to be separated. Everyone gets full fat buffs, but only one at a time. I don’t really like things that are party wide instead of raid wide, because it creates some annoyances with organizing groups in a raid, but leaving it as it is on live obviously is problematic. Perhaps there is a more elegant solution than either of us have come up with, since I’ll admit that I don’t think either is perfect.
I dont think they are stacking, but are over riding each other. An evoker gets EM, then uses Em, this new one is stronger. Now a 3rd uses Em, so on and so forth. I know this is mostly semantics, but people are having a very hard time understanding Aug to begin with i think its important to make sure to make his distinction. But…
The continual over riding with a strong version, indefinitely, is definitely an issue and I am surprised they didnt think of this. Like, why would that not be one of the first thing the players try. One of the core aspects of game design is after developing a mechanic going through the process of trying to break. And this should have been at the top of the list as one of the most obvious questions: What happens when there is more than one?
This one doesnt? I thought it was just a Vers stat boost.
The bessed way to address this is:
remove close as clutches debff for raid. Why is this neccessary.
Aug buffs only effect their group.
This makes it so that top min/max scenario, its only good to have 1 aug per group.
so 20 man with 2 tanks, 3 heals 15 dps, having 3 Augs is all you need. If you also make it so that EM cant stack, this would make more than 3 augs redudant rather than 4 augs for every 1 dps. (Although this sounds fun, its not healthy for the game)
Well thats my bad but if they were over riding it would have. It would just have a ramp up time.
They Augs target each other and each one cast Em on their designated target. Em Overrides any copies are out. The last aug targets the DK with an EM that has been buffed multiplicably (or is that exponentially) by 18 other Augs.
First EM = 1k, second 1.5k. etc.
Im not sure which would have a stronger effect, but niether way, neither of these two scenarios should happen.
This is what I am refering too. I am under the empression that this is what is happening.
It kind of sounds like its both. Which way worse than just one of these happening lol.
Thats a literal infinity loop and tells me that in my guild me and the other augs should always make sure to EM each other so that the everyone else constantly get super versions of EM.
What is happening in the video is that since Prescience dictates your EM target, all of the Aug players in the raid are putting prescience on the two UH DK’s in the raid. This makes sure that when they all cast their EM, it stacks onto those two players.
So, currently, me and my Aug mate are targeting different people to spread Pres, in reality we should be droping it on our UHDK or FDK together since it stacks and give them a super opener…
Either way, this is bad.
Can you imagine something like a 3v3 with two augs talented to keep up and buff something like a uhdk, enhance, demo, boomkin?
Im really surprised this wasnt thought of to begin with, nor hotfixed immediately.
Yes, you should 100% be prescience/EM’ing the same targets to stack it and get max value.
It was thought of, and has been asked in interviews. They likely will do something about this going into .7 or at the latest the next tier, but it makes sense to get a benchmark for where they want it to be balance-wise in this patch, where hall of fame has already closed and they can observe how it performs relatively risk-free.