So, after three years away from the game, I finally resubbed for TWW. And lately, one thing I’ve been doing is leveling an Evoker, since I was curious about it but didn’t get to play it, since I missed out entirely on Dragonflight. I was kinda looking forward to it. A hero class that lets me be a draconic engine of destruction? I gotta check it out! Picked devastation as my spec, because of course I wanna devastate stuff! I wanna feel like a kaiju when I level, baby!
And then I got killed by a half dozen wolves.
…Is Evoker supposed to be this squishy? I don’t think it’s supposed to be this squishy. I’m assuming I’m not playing it right. Maybe Augmentation would be more my jam?
I dunno. I’m just a noob Evoker, looking for some tips from you pros, I guess.
I have a cast sequence macro for scales, blaze, bloom and embrace. 2 protects, 2 heals. It’s the one button, I hit it 4 times and my survivability goes way up. While learning it has been wonderful.
Put them in an order that suits you, test and change as you like.
It’s important to understand that Evoker is a purely caster class, which means that ideally you should try to avoid close combat as much as you can just like you would with the cloth classes. Devastation is a good spec to level in, perhaps even the best unless you want to heal dungeons, and it is extremely capable, but you have to learn to utilize your Hover. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that if you’re in combat you should be hovering since it allows you to be mobile for most of your spellcasting. That mobility combined with other abilities of the class such as the slow provided by your ice spells will help you keep your distance as you fight.
You might feel very fragile, but once you get more practiced at staying on the move and using the best spells in any given situation you’ll find that Devastation evoker (commonly referred to as Devoker) is very good at soloing content.
As somebody who routinely wants to throw their mouse into the drywall when a Preservation Evoker chain glides themselves to a town/city to avoid PvP combat I can assure you Evokers are not squishy.
I do love my devastation evoker, after their introduced into the game they have been my favorite specialization for 4 years now, crazy mobility (that makes them not that squishy), huge splash damage, tough control of opponents, which aspect of the game is more interesting to you PVP or PVE?
I’d suggest not relying on a macro like this, especially since the spec has very little button bloat. It takes a lot of the value out of these spells to just mash them.
Do what makes the game fun for you, but I highly suggest if you NEED a macro like this, that you put blaze before scales.
Unless you’re for sure going to die from incoming damage, reducing the damage taken with scales while blaze is up reduces a LOT of the potential healing you get from it.
Devoker is fine as long as you have room to maneuver but in tight spaces (hallways/caves etc) you’ve got problems.
Switch to Augmentation if Dev is too squishy, Aug is a tank compared to Dev.
On tier 8 delves I was having issues with getting trucked by some of the bosses, then I decided to try Augment. and it was so much easier it was silly.
To explain Devastation Survivability:
Renewing Blaze is your friend if the damage is coming and isn’t a one-shot, it massively boosts your survival by healing any of the damage you take over time, say if you have 5 million HP, and something is going to hit you for 4 million, if you hit Renewing Blaze before the hit, the first tick will heal you for 500k and you’d continue to be healed until the 4 million has been undone over 8 seconds. Less of a savior if you are taking one-shot damage or several high damage hits instantly and that’s when we get to
Obsidian Scales. 30% damage reduction flat, which goes up to 40% for Scalecommanders. This is the button you push if you’d otherwise by one-shot by the incoming damage or if you want to help out your healers handle incoming damage. While using it with Renewing Blaze is possible, it is usually only recommended to do so in super-emergencies, like if you’re tanking a boss after the tank died, having both running can reduce the incoming damage and help keep you alive assuming it isn’t the point of bosses one-shotting with melees, combining them otherwise tends to be overkill in a lot of other situations in PvE. Getting two charges for this in the General Tree is pretty much a requirement to be able to use them more liberally.
Next we have our self-heals, Verdant Embrace, Emerald Blossom, and Living Flame. While normally using living flame to heal also falls into emergency situations, verdant embrace and emerald blossom are just quick and potent instant heals with relatively short CDs that you can use on yourself or others, they can help supplement things as extra emergency buttons like healthstones and health potions or just to top off during more hectic, high damage moments.
Then we got Hover and Landslide. The best way to deal with incoming damage it to not get hit at all, if you’re feeling overwhelmed in pulling too much, just hover away, toss out a landslide, then feel free to heal a bit and pick off targets one at a time until the root wears off.
You can’t play Evoker if you don’t learn how to kite. You can effectively distance yourself from the mobs you’re fighting for at least 30 seconds, and use your defensive cds preemptively if you’re caught. If you try to face-tank as an Evoker, you’re going to get splatted; our mail might as well be cloth.
You gotta kite. You have short range and more armor than a plate wearer, but you should still be kiting things to death. Because your self sustain kind of sucks outside of renewing blaze.