Breath of Eons is a talent/spell for Augmentation Evokers which replaces Deep Breath and “accumulate[s] 21% of damage dealt by your allies affected by Ebon Might, then critically strikes for that amount as Arcane damage”. However, if a creature under the Breath of Eons effect dies early it doesn’t detonate for any amount, it just dies and you get no extra damage from the breath debuff. This seems like an oversight or a bug - enemies which die before the breath debuff expires should still trigger damage for whatever they’ve accumulated. This would be consistent with a similar ability Arcane Mages have, Touch of the Magi.
Edit: I realize now that the detonation only affects each individual mob, but that still means that mobs dying before the debuff expires don’t take any damage from it. This could either be replaced with a raw damage modifier (like Execution Sentence), or they could reduce the debuff duration and increase the echo% accordingly.
It’s really disappointing to have a strong ability (Deep Breath) replaced by something that could potentially do no damage. Worse, it creates a scenario where you want to cast Breath of Aons on all mobs, then get your team to dps but not kill any mob so that they actually detonate.
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Breath of eons isn’t an aoe detonation, so it makes no sense to compare it to touch of the magi when a more fair comparison would be execution sentence.
I mean the idea is you use it at the beginning of pulls and not at the end like deep breath. When things will live to see it go off.
And you do get something, even for one that doesn’t go off. You still get 6(?) seconds of ebon might.
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It’s 5 seconds. Even using it at the beginning of pulls, there’s mobs that will die before the ~11 seconds are up that wont contribute anything. For example, the first pull in Alge’thar Academy included pulling a large amount of mobs next to the tree boss. A lot of those plants die before 10 seconds and would give nothing.
Outside of Mythic plus, many mobs in low level dungeons die quickly, especially since tanks aren’t competitive there and pull modestly (1 or 2 packs).
If you’re only getting a buff extension from this, then it’s no longer a real AoE spell. It loses that key feature from Deep Breath, and takes away reward from aiming it through many enemies.
For the Execution Sentence comparison, that spell actually has one big distinction - the enemy target takes the increased damage as it occurs, not all at once at the end of the debuff:
“A hammer slowly falls from the sky upon the target, after 8 sec, they suffer 30% of the damage taken from your abilities as Holy damage during that time.”
Making Breath of Eons behave like Execution Sentence is a good idea/solution though, since there would not be damage lost if an enemy dies early.
This needs to be changed i wanna see sparkly gold bombs go off when people die
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If things are dying before your breath goes off, you’re either timing it wrong or your group is overgeared for the content you’re doing.
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that is really no excuse…
Sure your timing should play a factor but the pace of killing things inside a dungeon is not completley in your control.
doing dungeons at the moment im often just too slow to do all the buffs for each pull before things die.
Also we are still a dps class and this is an area where we should be able to put out dps as well.
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There’s a difference between excuses and reasons.
The entire point of this spec is to coordinate cd’s with your group. If things are going to die before the debuff expires, then you timed it poorly.
The tooltip says nothing about going off when something dies, nor has it ever lol.
Communicate with your group to not immediately lay into the mobs if you really want to see the damage go off, the timing is completely in your control.
The spec has been out one day, would you not think it’s more reasonable for you to get better at the buffs and timing than Blizzard redesign an entire spell and gameplay loop because it was challenging to get max value from on day one?
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we are not all playing mythic plus…
have you never pugged a dungeon?
thats not how this game works.
seriously what are you even arguing against, more damage?
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So what? A dps should be able to use their big cooldown to nuke mobs in content they overgear. This is one is designed pretty poorly IMO.
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Literally every dot class in the game has this exact problem in easy content. It’s not poor design, it’s literally just what happens when things get giga nuked.
Which sucks and no one likes, and is probably why spriest, moonkin, and now affliction have all gotten options to improve their ramp up time in lower/easier content.
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They still lose an outsized amount of damage if adds are dying as fast as it would take for an eons to not detonate, it’s just how some specs interact with easy content. If I’m doing open world or easy dungeons on my rogue, I know to just spec sub because assassination won’t get value with how quickly things die.
I’m not even sure what design is being suggested here, but if it’s that things detonate when they die, are they detonating for 1 hp plus everything overkill? Are they exploding in aoe where things currently don’t, even at full duration?
If they had to tune around a change like that, it would make this spell weaker in content where it is fully expiring to design around it just to make it feel easier in faceroll content. That makes no sense.
Oh personally I agree about the detonating thing, it doesn’t really make sense and it was never suggested in the wording of it that it would happen.
I just think that having a dps with a 3 minute cooldown that does nothing, like not just “losing an outsized amount of damage” but literally absolutely nothing, in easier content isn’t great design.
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I think balancing a support class based off of timings and coordination, specifically for easier content, would be the poor design. If you want to explode mobs, we have literally one of the best dps specs for that in the game in devastation.
Not all specs need to do all things.
Well the game has these nifty things called talent trees where they can make options for different types of content. For example, moonkin is a bit painful in low keys, but you can change your talents so that instead of having one really strong 3 minute incarn, you have a weaker 2 min celestial alignment that also frontloads damage, plus convoke on a 1 min timer for quick burst. Those options are bad for high keys, but they work better for the timing in low key pugs.
Options. They could have easily made a choice node that allowed breath to do something damage related quicker while also leaving the 10 second version there as the better choice for higher content; instead of just the defensive choice node.
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You mean sort of like the talent point for overlord that casts 3 eruptions (all of which aoe as well) when you cast breath of eons so it does a bunch of dps upfront itself instead of having to wait for the detonation?
Sure, but that doesn’t change the functionality of breath at all. So you get a 3 minute cooldown that casts 3 fairly weak spells while the main function of the actual spell still does nothing.
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All of our spells are fairly weak spells by design… If you made a powerful aoe spell it would be abused for add burn phases for sure.
I don’t understand why if the content is easy, and we have a spec that is amazing for crushing it, we need to even have the argument that aug needs more options but every spec needs to do everything IG.
So your thought process is that Aug should only be used by people playing high levels of content?
I mean I get it, I agree that there are also other specs that don’t do well in easier dungeons. But that doesn’t make it good design. Especially for aug when its a new entirely unique spec design that will have people at all levels of play interested in trying. Its not like a rogue switching from sub to assassin, aug is a completely different style of spec.
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