Way to many people complain about the balance change of augmentation Evokers, but I think they are fine. 640 ilvl and if I manage my ebon might and prescience good, then on a good trash pull with CDs up (more specifically breath of eons and tip of the scales) I can push almost 2m DPS, NOT including the buffs I’m giving my DPS.
Way to many people are saying that Aug Evokers are gutted, but I think people just don’t understand how they work or play that class improperly.
Sure ebon might doesn’t buff tanks and heals anymore, but their utility is huge and can have a great impact in higher keys.
The issue with Aug right now is that the spec has been nerfed to the point of being unviable.
Like yes: I have defensive buffs I can toss around to help protect the party. I have a lust, Some healing, and I’m nimble.
The problem however, is that the point of the class is to make the other characters better and because we’re pigeonholed as a dps we need to be able to pump other people’s damage while also doing some of our own and the simple, painful reality is that we can’t maintain enough uptime with ebon on two dps and Prescience to make up for the fact that anyone else would be doing more damage then we credibly can.
Really the only three ways I see them fixing this would be:
Dramatically increase our direct damage output.
Boost ebonmight’s bonus to DPS specs either by directly buffing it or making mastery count for more signifigantly more then it currently does (and by extension potentially making it easier to put points into something other then mastery).
Making Support an actual Pillair spec in it’s own right alongside DPS, Tank and Healer by adding support specs to other classes and thus allowing the spec to be balanced as what it’s intended to be (support) instead of what it isn’t (damage).
Because honestly? Right now? I can’t think of a single reason why anyone would play Aug over Devestation.
They’re currently ranked as F-tier which means they’re bordering on dead/in need of rework.
The mistake is that there is only one in the game and that makes it damn near impossible to balance.
The solution IMHO is to add more support specs to other classes (I would go with Rogue, Mage and warlock to start with since they’re pure DPS) that can offer different Buff options that players can utilize and this would also make it easier to balance them.
adding more supports to the game would just make the balance worse because now blizzard would need to worry about even more classes buffing players every time blizzard designed something they had to take aug into account and its ability to boost not just burst damage but also durability lets say they add three more with buffs they can put on players to boost damage next thing you know you got some sort of exodia fire mage comp that does half the raids damage on raid fights with adds
A Ret pally or Devavoker can manage 2 mil even on a bad trash pull. People say Aug is bad because it takes more work to hit big numbers, when other dps can manage it it 2 or 3 buttons
When it’s a half baked attempt where support never existed in this game before and it was only one spec added… no, they shouldn’t have done it in this instance.
No one is claiming “don’t try new things.” So cut the snark.
But when it’s poorly implemented by itself, all it does is make the game miserable for others. If they wanted to do actual support roles, then they should have done actual support roles. This game wasn’t built for it and they didn’t implement it across the board. They just threw one thing at the wall and yolo’d it.
A support spec was a mistake especially if they aren’t going to expand it. They either need to expand support specs to other classes or rebalance, rework, or just flat remove aug.
Tbh it should have been a tank spec to begin with.
Making one spec of one class the sole pillar of a brand new role in a near 20 year old game isn’t a good faith attempt at trying something new.
Support Spec should have been a back-of-the-box expansion feature of Dragon Flight and should have seen the premier of a handful of support specs for established classes launched alongside evoker’s augmentation spec.
It would actually balance itself out; assuming that player comp isn’t changed going into dungeons (IE it stays at 5 man) you wouldn’t want more then 1 support spec since it means that you’d be trading out reliable DPS for support.
As to Raids there are three ways to balance this
Give the boost a signifigant cooldown (like what we have with Bloodlust) for powerful global effects.
Make the buffs targetted with a strong buff to damage/healing/defense and a reasonable cooldown.
Make the buffs global but have less of an impact.
And of course make it so that certain buffs simply don’t stack.
As to Exodia Comps: You know those existed before right? Like as long as people can share data and run Sims there will always be a perfect META comp for every patch in every dungeon.
I fully believe they purposely made it f tier so no one plays it so that they can figure out what they are doing with it in a later patch whether that be a rework or complete overhaul/change of the entire spec. I suspect come Midnight the Aug will 100 percent be a complete different iteration of how it has played since DF.
Support isn’t a role though. Not in the sense that it provides anything unique. It’s just a DPS.
If you have a group of 1 tank, 2 DPS, and a healer, then add a support. All you have added is effective damage. There is no tangible “Supportyness”, it’s just convoluted damage.
If you tune supports such that group comps are 1 tank 2 DPS 1 heal 1 support then all you’ve done is created a few new DPS specs and overtuned them. Nothing stops groups running a 3rd DPS, or a 4th if we go to 6 man group default. A support doesn’t provide anything new. Just a different way to deal damage.
Agree completely on all parts.
Either devote an entire expansion level effort towards adding support specs or don’t do them. And if you aren’t going to do that, make Aug a tank.