Devastation changes in 10.1 [UPDATED 4/18]

Classes Evoker
1

4/18 update

4/4 update

  • EVOKER
    • Devastation
      • Developers’ note: Thanks to the invaluable feedback from all of you, we’ve made further changes to Devastation’s talents. The bottom section of the tree has been significantly rearranged, and has fewer 2-point nodes. Causality has been iterated on, maintaining the goal of rewarding fully-channeled Disintegrates, but addressing the concerns with how the new design would have interacted with Haste. Finally, some under-used talents have gotten partial or full reworks to introduce new build and playstyle options.
      • Causality has been redesigned – Disintegrate reduces the remaining cooldown of your empower spells by 0.5 seconds each time it deals damage. Pyre reduces their cooldowns by 0.4 seconds per enemy struck, up to 2 seconds. Causality is no longer a choice talent.
      • Font of Magic now also causes your empower spells to reach maximum level in 20% less time.
      • Everburning Flame is no longer a choice node with Feed the Flames.
      • Feed the Flames has been redesigned – After casting 12 Pyres, your next Pyre will explode into a Firestorm. Does not trigger from Volatility bounces.
      • Imminent Destruction has been redesigned – Deep Breath reduces the Essence costs of Disintegrate and Pyre by 1 for 10 seconds after you land. Now a 1-rank talent.
      • Lay Waste is now a 1-rank talent (was 2 ranks) and damage bonus increased to 20% (was 15%).
      • Burnout is now a 1-rank talent (was 2 ranks) and its chance to trigger is now 16%, the former 2-rank value.
      • Scintillation is now a 1-rank talent (was 2 ranks) and damage effectiveness is 60%, the former 2-rank value.
      • Power Swell is now a 1-rank talent (was 2 ranks) and the duration is 4 seconds, the former 2-rank value.
      • New Talent: Event Horizon – Eternity Surge’s cooldown is reduced by 3 seconds. Choice talent with Eye of Infinity.
      • Eye of Infinity has been redesigned – Eternity Surge deals 15% increased damage to your primary target.
      • Arcane Vigor has been redesigned – Shattering Star grants Essence Burst.
      • Snapfire’s chance to trigger Firestorm increased to 15% (was 12%).
      • Raging Inferno’s Firestorm radius bonus reduced to 25% (was 50%) and Pyre damage bonus reduced to 20% (was 25%).

Continuing the discussion from Dragonflight Embers of Neltharion PTR Development Notes:

Pleased they acknowledge the goofiness of dragonrage’s current playstyle. Not sure what to make of the rest of them until i see them in practice.

Strange that they’re making Feed the Flames useless in ST, but i suppose it balances out with how they’ve changed Causality to only work with disintegrate.

5 Likes
2

do not like these changes. outside of feed the flames our other 2 capstone talents are super boring so redesigning feed the flames into a MT option instead of an ST one sucks.

disintegrate added a unique flavor that did more for the class than the 25 yard range (which WE DO NOTHING WITH SO JUST MAKE US 40 YDS). deep breath is a cool situational spell but shouldn’t be forced onto us for every fight it’s another windwalker tiger palm charge situation that they just fixed.

6 Likes
3

also if you wanna fix something with the evoker play style, make empowering spells feel more beneficial. currently we only empower in aoe, there should be more talents and interactions with our empower spells

6 Likes
4

Why is Feed the Flames being changed from Essence Burst to Pyre? Essence Burst means we could pick a single target or multi target skill/rotation. With this new version it means we HAVE to use Pyre to reduce our empowered spells fast enough to fully extend Dragon rage? Will that not significantly affect our single target damage/rotation while in our Dragon rage window, and for a spec that has single target damage issues?

I think this is a big step in the wrong direction.

While I do understand it I am also not super happy about the Animosity change, without the current Disintegrate/Pyre bug of not being able to cast when you have the resource and its off CD. (Yes I get Dragon Rage is longer now also, I do not think that will compensate well).

To end on a good note Causality is exactly what Devastation needs, there are a considerable amount of fights where Eternity surge is far behind Fire Breath on time reduction, even when used back to back at the start of Dragon Rage.

5 Likes
5

Side note Titanic Wrath should be 1 point for 10% not 2 for 7.5% and 15%.

3 Likes
6

I’m thinking Causality and Feed the Flames should just be one talent, and they should give us something new to replace one of them.

There is no reason we need two talents to add CDR to both of our spenders. Part of the charm of evoker was being decently flexible when it came to adapting to single and multitarget scenarios. This makes it so you’d need to take talent that’s useless in ST for the same flexibility, and the reverse is true for AoE.

With the change to FtF i see everburning flame becoming dominant. While Eye of Infinity becomes entirely useless.

5 Likes
7

They also seem to have changed Engulfing Blaze a bit. Living Flame now does 25% more damage (down from 40%) and its cast time is incrased by 0.3 seconds (down from 0.5)

It seems like Ruby Embers will be more of a contender in the future.

8

Isn’t the Feed the flames change good when combined with the Causality change? Now Causality is all you need to reduce the CD of both Fire Breath and Eternity Surge. So we are free to take a different talent for ST. So I’m not following the complaint about that change?

5 Likes
10

Were taking both these talents anyway except for cleave builds. The changes amount to a similar amount of uptime on dragonrage and removes a clunky mechanic. I can’t support the notion that chaining disintegrates adds ‘flavor’. I’m glad it’s going away.

All the changes on the PTR sound great to me. I’m looking forward to it.

3 Likes
11

These are bad change for pvp, adding the nerf to crit damage. Devastation is dead for pvp

4 Likes
12

The Animosity change has me more curious. DB + ES will now extend DR by 8 seconds instead of 12. They baked that 4 seconds into the initial DR cast but I think most decent Devoker get 2 extensions in so that means we lost 4 seconds on the duration… unless the other changes are expecting to make it easier to extend more than twice?

13

Wouldn’t this be offset by no longer wasting globals on 1 tick disintegrates? In theory you’ll now be getting full cast disintegrates for 36 seconds.

14

Probably? That sounds logical to me. I guess we’ll have to see after testing.

1 Like
15

Just don’t take Feed the Flames anymore people. Causality is the single target talent as it now effects fire breath too, not just eternity surge.

I dig the change, as it opens up more options on the bottom of the tree.

In my opinion, buff power swell so it’s not boring.

16

Well. I tried to hang in there but seeing these changes just tells me they really aren’t ready to make this class cohesive and fun. I really wanted to like this class but they are going down a dark road in their design choices. So I guess it’s time to just put it in the bin and hope they get it right eventually.

17

I’m not sure what to make of these changes yet, but one thing is clear to me…. The issues we actually have been complaining about fell on deaf ears, unless this is just the start of the changes.

  • Bug fixes mentioned - no.
  • Mastery rework or an execute to offset - nope.
  • Changes to how Disintegrate consumes essence so we don’t instantly burn 3 only to have to move when Hover is on CD the moment you started the cast because a random swirly resulting in a lot of wasted essence (and damage) - nah.
  • Allowing Disintegrate and Living Flame to always be castable while moving and changing Hover to just a Fel Rush type dash - in your dreams.
  • Better defensives/survivability - you’re a funny lizard.

EDIT: After reading the changes, I like them the concept but I know concept doesn’t always translate to worthwhile gameplay. Personally the clipping isn’t and issue for me. It’s actually kinda fun.

9 Likes
18

If feel that this isn’t going to have the effect they want it to and it’s going to make clipping the channel pretty much mandatory to avoid any gaps in the bonus unless your latency is perfect (or someone makes an addon that calculates the perfect time to recast).

While I don’t really have a better solution off hand, I think that tying the reduction to the actual damage pulses would be more likely to push players in the direction they want & is more intuitive.

Edit: I just did the math on this.

This still creates a counter intuitive situation for the class.

The maximum CDR for disintegrate channels is 50% of the actual CD time (15s). Assuming a starting duration of around 23 seconds (rage(18) → surge(+4-gcd) → breath(+4-gcd)) that means we will need to fit 6.5 fully channeled lasers in the burst window for a second round of casts. With my current haste my channels are 2 seconds start to finish. This means that for every full cast I reduce the CD of the two empowers by 4 seconds. This means that to get the full 50% reduction I would need to cast 7.5 disintegrates. To get that many casts I would need 4 essence bursts, which means 4 other casts during the window. If we assume these are azure strike that’s +5s at my current haste. We can reduce down to 6.5 casts here as a result.

If I had 0 haste the channel time is 2.4s. That’s 6.25 disintegrate casts. Each laser reduces the CD of the spells by 4.8 seconds. The GCD would be 1.5 in that case, and you would need 3 essence bursts (or 4.5s) which reduces the overall laser casts to 4 and a bit. While the dps is lower in this situation (showing haste is still good) it creates a kind of back-flow where you have to work harder as you get more and better gear to get the same result.

To summarize that mini-thesis: Getting more haste will make dragon rage extensions feel worse to play than right now. My off the cuff thought of tying the reduction to the damage ticks instead seems like it might actually be the right call if they want to prevent us from clipping channels because no matter how fast you cast the number of ticks stay the same.

4 Likes
19

The return of Divide and Conquer will significantly strengthen our 1-minute go with Deep Breath. Especially with the Imminent Destruction rework.

That being said, something needs to be done about our survivability. The Ancient Flame change is still super awful.

6 Likes
20

What they’re trying to avoid is 1 tick clips just for the CDR. Clipping is still fine as long as you’re doing it right because the duration still carries over to an extent.

21

What are the stats on devastation like how many people actually play it. I hit max on mine first and just go so bored and had to reroll. Would be interested to see how many people main it.

All perma rewards in this game are transmog and you cant even use it on the new race was a big thing on top of the lizards looking a bit weird .

2 Likes