You should be using hover after an azure strike, burnout living flame, shattering star or any other instant cast. This way, the half global lockout from using hover happens during your natural global cooldown, and is nullified. If you don’t know how to pre hover then eat damage I guess.
2 Likes
Hover has a cooldown. That means that it’s not always available. That means that casting it when it’s not necessary will make it unavailable when it’s necessary. That means that casting it preemptively is likely going to waste it.
2 Likes
Hence what I said earlier, pick and choose the moments to pre hover and the moments to drop damage. If your dragonrage extension hinges on channeling disintegrate for a few extra seconds, pre hover.
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How do I choose the moment?
Make hover works for empowered spells and I’ll be good
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By looking at dragon rage and then looking at the cooldown of your empower spells.
You are aware that Dragonrage has a 2 minute cooldown and usually lasts 38 seconds, right? And that we exist outside of that time, right?
Seems like interesting changes for M+ and maybe some for raid, but I don’t see a lot of promise for PvP. Perhaps I am missing that?
[Edit]
Imminent Destruction changes might be useful?
Dragonrage in PvP is going to be super hard to extend via Dis. I am curious if we will just spam pyre during dragonrage in PvP to help extend it? I can see that working in BGs when people are stacked, but 2s, shuffle, and 3s? Might not be great.
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Guess we’re ignoring the fact that we’re talking about how movement can impact cooldown reduction and dragonrage extension by interrupting a disintegrate channel in 10.1.
Dragonrage will last 18 seconds, extended twice by 4 seconds. Subtract 2 globals for casting dragonrage, and then your first empower spell, and you have 23 seconds to reduce that empower enough to cast it again.
You basically need 5 fully channeled disintegrates in 23 seconds to get extensions 3 and 4. You can recast disintegrate after tick 3 and not lose any ticks, effectively cutting its channel time down. You only need 10 seconds of free casting in a 23 second window. If somehow you can’t accomplish this, 1 hover charge can cover 5 disintegrates if you got lucky procs, or 4 disintegrates and 1 instant (probably burnout living flame to proc 2x essence burst with leaping flame).
Extensions 3 and 4 are basically free, and if you’re fighting some boss that has a 100% movement requirement, 1 charge of hover has you covered. IDK if we should be talking about extensions 5 or 6, since I don’t know how possible those even are given the new patch on ptr. Previously, it was pretty much impossible, but now haste and lust can lead to more reduction.
Although I don’t dislike this, I think it’s fair to give the Evoker at least one talent in the general tree to improve Hover and not interrupt spells, as mages have with Shimmer, this would also lighten a bit the bad state of Devastation in pvp.
What I can say from the little I’ve tested is that if you have a good streak of Essence Burst after using DB you just lose the effect if you use it on ES, if you use it on Pyre (it which seems to be the intention) you still get something out of it.
look at the battlefield, look at abilities, track CDs and buffs, handle button overload depending on which build you use, etc, etc. For things like these, addons became necessary and even mandatory. There’s no reason to make things unnecessarily complicated in a game, there should be no need to have addons that help you keep track of all these things just to calculate the appropriate time to use Hover until you get used to the timing so that then they destroy the pace in the next patch, it should just work like Shimmer.
They don’t even play the class. Don’t feed the troll, ignore the troll.
The bottom line of the talent tree looks great with this new changes for me, the only complaint I still have with this tree is that Pyre is F_boring and situational (AoE only), I don’t understand how it is our main ability, it needs something that makes him useful in every situation, something that makes him worth casting it in ST at least once in a while.
That being said, none of these changes will affect the spec performance in pvp 
Shimmer doesn’t last 10 seconds.
The only thing mandatory is eyes. The default ui can be configured to show everything you need to maintain dragonrage except boss ability timers. Not that pre hovering is really even necessary to get 4 extensions because you will be getting extensions 3 and 4 with 4-5 seconds left on dragonrage. So there is a bit of room for general error and wasted globals.
3 hovers may be enough (barely) for PvE IF you know the fights well enough, but it certainly isn’t for PvP.
Does any other caster or ranged or ANY class have so little room for error?
I’m saying that not only does gameplay outside Dragonrage matters, you seem to ignore how crippled devastation is by fight mechanics outside of hover for no other reason than “well it can last most of a dragonrage if you save it.”
Never mind that, why are you so adamant that Hover needs to interrupt spell casts? That it needs to be removed by looting or interacting with things? That it needs to not allow to cast empower spells on the move?
3 Likes
With the new changes, I think it’s a step in the right direction but there are some more talent pain points I’d love reevaluated.
Ruby/Azure Essence Burst: Please combine into a single talent. Having these separated, especially when the spec is built to work around essence burst as one of its pillar mechanics seems like a waste of an additional talent point.
Remove Imposing Presence and just make Quell 20 CD second baseline. If you want to keep this a choice node, maybe make it so we have to choose between Inner Radiance as it currently is or something that can provide a shield on us instead. Maybe casting a LF, VE, or EB on ourselves shields us for a portion of the heal done stacking up to x% of our max HP.
Essence Attunement should just be baseline at like level 64 or something. I think Hoarded Power should replace this talent position.
Move Honed Aggression to where one of the current EB talents is, probably where Azure Essence Burst is.
Make Titanic Wrath a 1-point talent for the 15% instead of 2.
Make Heatwave a 1-point talent for 40% instead of 2.
Just remove Power Swell and Iridescence. Both see next to no play. PS is just a horrible talent, especially for its location. Iridescence just isn’t strong enough or interesting enough to warrant being a capstone. Maybe Iridescence can be changed into the mobility talent we have all been wanting. Make it so this talent makes DIS castable while moving when using an EB proc without the need for Hover and make Hover also allow both empower spells to be cast on the move. I think this competing against the other capstones would make for a hard choice but possibly a worthy one. Ideally, I’d rather see this happen as baseline but they seem to be super resistant to opening up our DIS casting mobility reliance on Hover.
I think Power Nexus should just be granted baseline at like level 68.
This one may be a hot take many wouldn’t like, but I think with the change to the new Feed the Flames, Firestorm should be removed as a talent. The free proc from the new FTF benefits from Raging Inferno and I doubt it would be worth hard casting or taking Snapfire over raging inferno in practice. I would rather see a few things shifted here.
- Remove Firestorm and replace it with the new FTF.
- Move Raging Inferno to be the capstone where FTF is currently.
- Remove Snapfire altogether. Replace it with something that further augments the FTF + Raging Inferno combo.
- Remove the location of Onyx Legacy and move it to where Everburning Flame currently is.
- Swap the new Imminent Destruction with Font of Magic. Imminent Destruction should feed into Onxy Legacy since both are Deep Breath-based talents and this path synergy just makes way more sense.
- Move Catalyze to where Hoarded Power currently is.
- Move Charged Blast to where Catalyze currently is.
- Move Eternity Span where Charge Blast currently is.
I’d love to see Draconic Legacy and Inherent Resistance combined and buffed to give something like 10% stam, 8% magic resistance, and 15% leech. Daconic Legacy could be switched to a defensive talent. Something that reduced the CD on Obsidian Scales, grants a 3rd charge or makes leech overhealing apply an absorb shield.
Make Renewing Blaze castable while stunned.
Make us immune to ground effects when flying over them with a Deep Breath.
Make Source of Magic baseline with a 1-hour duration.
In addition to this, there are other issues we still need to address:
- Our survivability issues are still very much a problem. Some of the suggestions above address this, but I’d like to see more options regardless.
- I’d love to see something that can speed up gameplay. The reason I like the Dragonrage clipping minigame is that it makes things feel fast, it’s like an energized version of the spec.
- Threat. FIX OUR THREAT ISSUES. THIS IS MANDATORY.
- Mastery. We need a way to offset the pitiful damage we bring at the most crucial parts of the fights outside of Dragonrage.
5 Likes
and the evoker doesn’t have 40 feet range or barriers or and inmune that heals or instants cast that hit hard 
Yes and no
Hover is not the problem in pvp, the problem is having to use defensives in a preventive way to not die even without being bursted, the problem is the base toughness of the class
Overall i’m pretty pleased with the direction we’re going with the most recent batch of changes. More is needed. I still think we need a talent that gives 2-3 seconds of hover whenever you consume essence burst. Could be a choice talent with your 2nd charge of hover.
Also, while moving away from the “clip every cast for maximum CDR” gameplay is healthy, we’re left without any complexity now. I’m not sure where i would add it back in, but something is missing. Now the rotation stays pretty much the same whether you’re in dragonrage or not.
I think dragonrage should have a stat boost or something attached, baseline. Right now i have the shadowgem. I use that whenever i use dragonrage, and it feels good to have an absurd amount of crit during dragonrage, it makes it feel like more of a powerful cooldown.
Hover needs to be either 10s duration and 15s cd, or 15s duration and 20s cooldown. If we are going to be sitting and channeling most of the time, we need hover most of the time.
2 Likes