It was was an extremely fun ride, but this was always going to happen to augmentation. It’s not even a happy “I told you so”. Honestly knowing what would happen, playing the spec anyhow and getting attached, then having the rug pulled feels like being in a relationship with a cheater that you keep taking back stupidly (the devs) lol. It’s very frustrating.
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Then every change impacts a large number of other specs and its just too much to balance.
This, right here. Some players swear that adding more support specs to the game will “fix” everything—it won’t—and they call anyone who disagrees a troll, a hater, or whatever.
You can’t just add more support specs and expect everything to be fixed. It will only compound the problem. There are too many variables to account for when it comes to balancing. Blizzard will not do this. It would turn into a never-ending game of whack-a-mole, trying to “fix” whichever support spec is broken because it interacts with “X” and “Y” class when using “Z” at just the right time. There will be spreadsheets dedicated to tracking these interactions.
Just call the experiment unsuccessful and move on.
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It doesn’t matter, the community can never be satiated when M+ is limited to 5 spots. Now everyone is calling for VDH and Disc Priest to be nerfed. Sorry Jan, your class still isn’t FOTM even after Aug was gutted.
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Blizzard just needs to revamp Aug for it to have a meatier core rotation with its buffing aspects being just a minor part of its toolkit (such as Priest’s Power Infusion). One thing they could do is have the Augmentation draw power from its allies to buff itself most of all i.e. keeping the ‘we are stronger together’ vibe with the spec.
It’s a shame because I was so excited when Aug was announced and it’s just such a clunky and boring spec to me. It plays about as fun as a healer’s DPS rotation.
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I wouldn’t call you a hater but support specs properly thought out, and with enough of them, do have a valid place in MMOs. The first thing you would have to do is think about who the spec is supposed to be supporting, and I don’t mean tank/healer/DPS, I mean melee/ranged/physical/magical/etc.
When you start breaking it down it becomes easier to ensure “ok this supports buffs caster/magic DPS, while this support buffs physical” etc. To make it actually work for multiple supports you have to embrace the fact that some utility will simply be stronger for specific classes/rolls and then design around it.
That said I do agree that “Blizzard will not do this” because they have shown they are not willing to put serious effort into class design anymore. We pretty much have exactly what are classes are going to be and all they will do is tweak numbers and maybe add/remove a random ability here and there as oppose to actually thinking and making serious changes at the design level.
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They don’t. We have raid buffs and we don’t need a class centered on that principle alone.
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Been saying for a while that Aug should have been the melee or tank spec… full support specs don’t work with retail complexity.
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They never worked for vanilla either. There is a reason they kept taking away support stuff from paladins and shamans.
It seems they had to relearn that lesson once again.
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What you’re describing is current era shamans and paladins vs back in the day they were almost completely centered around supporting groups.
I totally disagree with augmentation being clunky or boring though. Learning to manage ebon might and pre took a little getting used to, but I feel like the spec is pretty fluid and super rewarding
but it’s not rewarding in any sense outside of spreadsheets. Buffing the right targets doesn’t feel good.
You only witness the end result.
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I’d wager that the vast majority of the player base would much prefer aug being simple and chilled, reworked as bliz sees fit. As always, it’s the 1%ers who want the complexity and depth that makes many classes seem very casual unfriendly, which is bad for the game. High skill ceiling is fine so long as the skill floor isn’t too far behind. This was always a big issue with aug
Sorry for all the crazy edits. I was originally gonna reply to Martyrofsand yesterday, and came back today to reply to this one and made a big mess lol.
Eh it’s more than just the buffing for me. There’s mitigation through spells and talents some of which are available to prs and dev, but with time skip I get to use them more. I can burst down tricky trrash packs or boss adds if want to. I can use breath of eons for offense while giving most of the group a 30% health shield. I’ve never had so many different trinket choices before.
Also you can definitely see the payoff in real-time. When you’re managing your buffs and CDs correctly the encounters just feel more smooth for the whole gorup. Or when you BOE during execute phase and the boss just goes from like 3-5% to instantly dead when the damage hits lol. Or when raid group is split and the side with the Aug is burning their boss way faster or when a bunch of caster adds need to be interrupted and it’s no problem because you can cast two Upheavals and have tail swipe. As my gear got better during dragonflight I could definitely feel it getting easier and easier to keep might up with more mastery and crit . You can definitely see th +1s go to +2 or +3 secs or when Prescience crits for 5% crit instead of 3%.
IDK maybe i’m alone in this but I thought Augmentation was pretty damn close to perfect (as well as the Evoker hero class overall) and it sucks getting gutted because of what it’s POSSIBLE for the like top 1-5% of players to do with the spec, but that’s not an issue that’s unique to aug and a whole other conversation in itself.
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