Yeah, flame shaper is dooty. Scalecommande though makes devastation even more fun. People complain about the mid range combat but with scalecommander and hover, with deep breath on a min cooldown that resets my hovers, I am always moving and casting.
Flameshaper is currently performing decently on the PTR. It isn’t fixed design-wise, but its interactions on there are making it incredibly bursty.
Please refer to the latest post on the PTR forums from Gilgvoker:
Reply #10. It goes into substantial detail about the current design decisions behind Devastation.
Brewmaster monk also
Blizzard balancing team only cares about around 5 specs. Every other they dont care or are actively trying to hinder like brewmaster and disc priest
Dev is the lowest preforming spec in M+, the damage is terrible and it’s not boring to play. You have to combine your abilities damage amplifiers or lose 20-35% of your damage with a rotation that extends 7+ seconds to execute, even with perfect play you will never out dps something like a Ret pally who presses 4 buttons and dumps 3mill+ dps every 30 seconds.
Your 2min “Big damage” CD just gives you access to 100% of your mastery and some essence procs which is a joke. It provides minimal benefits by design, say a Fire mage who can combustion every minute or less and gain a stat that not only guarantees crits but also amplifys their rotation and mastery.
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So you finally admitted Dev has poor M+ tuning compared to essentially all other specs in the game. Which by default makes it “garbage tier” by comparison.
So far on PTR I’m not impressed with scale commander, no one who has played it and posted on ptr forums says it’s better than it’s current iteration which wouldn’t really be so bad if the spec wasn’t already so neglected.
But maybe there is some hope for flame shaper as a Dev hero tree in M+ for season two.
Just give up.
Evoker from a design perspective is a failure. I hate Devastation in The War Within. What a disgrace.
It’s definitely very boring to play lol.
You are also comparing them vs ret, which insanely over tuned right now and considered one of the top dps.
It doesn’t help you are mostly mashing disintegration beam more often than not.
There isn’t a lot of depth to the spec. Cds or not.
Few things:
No, I didn’t say they have poor tuning. They have been middle-of-the-pack all expansion and they tend to do much better boss and priority damage, just they don’t have the best one-button AoE in the world. They still have better damage numbers than a lot of classes.
Second, it’s an off-meta spec that shares a role/class with a meta spec, most people pushing the highest content think, “Why take Dev when we can take Aug for this comp? Why take Sub rogue when we can take assassination? Why take Elemental shaman when we can take Enhance? Why take an Affliction lock when we can take Destruction?” Since Dev doesn’t stack well with Augmentation, it’s very often a one-or-the-other choice and when paired with classes that are tuned very high, Aug wins out and if you aren’t running the Meta comp, you’re trading damage for a fraction of group survivability and one extra AoE stop.
Next, if you define your tiers as “Anything not S-tier meta comp is garbage tier” then you shouldn’t have a voice in balance. Things should be equal, if Dev is roughly in the middle performance-wise, then it gets by as a ‘balanced’ spec and while others may be undertuned or overtuned with the usual FotM push is done by using the most overtuned stuff that works together.
Finally, if you think Essence bursts are useless, that explains your performance. Essence Burst is your damage, that glowy stuff that makes your spells free not only lets you cast them more, but it also buffs their damage so while the mastery portion of Dragonrage has been mediocre since our Mastery was dumpstered back in DF S2 and S3, it still provides a decent benefit for a very, very long time. Mage Combustion lasts for what, 12 seconds? Dragonrage lasts for 38, and while it’s active you have pretty much free access to 15% bonus damage pyres and disintegrates (including Mass Disintegrate), on top of the mastery bonus, on top of the free spells bringing those empowered spells back for more mass disintegrates which means more bombardments, etc. If you want a ‘weak’ 2 minute CD, Marksmanship Hunters have had probably the limpest 2 minute ever.
All my homies hate trueshot.