I wouldn’t even bother playing dev this season as the pressure to swap specs depending on the level or what the group wants would be frustrating. Devokers are expected to know both specs or get no invites (or kicked), which is unfair.
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I pay to play a game wherein I am supposed to be able to do whatever content I want with whatever class/spec I want, not to play how others want me to play. No one has any right to tell a player they can’t play this or that content because they aren’t using what is “meta”, party leader or not, because you cannot tell someone how they have to play if they want to do something, that’s called being toxic and that is abusing party lead status and honestly this is one of those times when no one can morally justify this kind of attitude. It is both morally and objectively wrong for someone to tell you what you have to play if you wanna be able to join them in something.
TL:DR I agree with you, it isn’t fair.
It’s probably way worse for y’all than I am thinking because you are also a dps role. Holy/Disc, I play what feels best for the group and didn’t get asked to swap this whole patch. I guess it helps that the difference between holy and disc (both perceived and actual) is much smaller than the perceived difference of aug and dev.
Perhaps not as bad as one would think, considering Dev and Aug roll with different stats and different embellishments so gearing/playing both specs effectively is generally a no-go unless you go through the process of gearing both as if gearing two different roles.
Normally when people see priests in S3, they expect healer because Shadow isn’t nearly as powerful as it was with the nerf to PI and the set changing their entire playstyle (still waiting to see if the Psychic Link un-nerfs helped enough) though between the two healer specs, Disc pulls ahead for a few of the same reasons as Aug (The survivability increase to survive things at ultra-high keys).
When people see Evoker, they default to thinking Aug because there are so many of them because of how S2 went so a lot comes to perception of “Dev not aug so dev is bad” which is mostly just BS which I seek to disprove with every key I run. Gotta be the change we want to see.
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You don’t want Devastation Mastery to be good. When the stat is good it massively limits how good the rest of Dev’s kit can be due to how strong frontloaded damage is in general.
If you’re doing 50-100% increased damage frontloaded, that means your backloaded damage is going to take a hit to balance it out.
Personally speaking, I’m of the mind that nothing Pres/Dev does is so good that it justifies the lower range that Evokers inherently have. I’d rather they bring them up to the standard 40 yards and then work from there.
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They need to increase our range and only do that. Because of my shorter range mechanics that force movement can be really unfair and sometimes getting closer or staying close so I can hit with my spells just isn’t possible and no other casters suffer this.
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staying close so I can hit with my spells just isn’t possible
When do you encounter this issue, and is it a self-inflicted one due to poor positioning?
The justification for a shorter range is that Evokers have high mobility.
But so do plenty of classes which also have a 40 yard range, Hunters have 100% uptime with 40 yards and the game still chugs along fine despite it.
The positional requirement on stuff like Evoker breaths is already a handicap, no need for a further one with an inherently shorter range.
Honestly just swap to Prevoker and have 100x the value. Great healing + utility and pull over 70k DPS.
The most insane Prevoker I’ve seen this season could hold 85k overall dps and still have 110k hps in an 18 Rise I did with my 460 frost mage.
My 476 disc priest can’t get anywhere near 70k overall. Maybe if she had augery and beloros
The primary fight that happens on is Nymue, given the stationary boss with many ‘soak circles’ spread out through the arena, more than half of the spawn points would put an evoker at a range where they cannot damage the boss so they are a ranged that can’t really play by the same rules as other ranged when it comes to soaking without losing a substantial amount of damage.
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That is not your job to soak. It would be like expecting melee to soak stuff 40 yards away.
And yeah, when Mastery was our best stat, it was our best stat by a MASSIVE margin to where you were looking at 100~120% damage amps from Mastery during Season 1 (and we had a lot less secondary stats at <420 ilvl) so the damage profile was a constant and sharp downward slope throughout an encounter with massive plateaus jutting up from dragonrage uptime (which was its own beast with Bloodlust+PI+Disintegrate clipping to get nearly minute-long dragonrages on SINGLE target). The nerfed mastery making other stats viable is probably one change I agree with simply because damage swing from 1~50% outside DR to 100~120% in it was obnoxious.
Except Evoker isn’t really a melee, it is still a ranged class. We can soak some of the circles while remaining in range but not all of them so is a matter of doing ‘what we can’ rather than completely ignoring the mechanic entirely.
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yes, exactly. You can soak more than melee, but less than a full ranged class.
Nope, I understand well how to position myself, but various circumstances can force my hand to move further from the boss when approaching would get me killed due to various factors.
I would say a Balance Druid or a Mail Wearing Shaman (which btw, Shaman spells have a 40 yard reach…) it isn’t fair to make Evokers restricted to 25 yards, Preservation doesn’t have it as bad as they get an extra 5 yards on at least Living Flame.
Spiritwalker’s grace vs Hover.
The spec just feels kinda barebones compared to something like Preservation with all of its tools am I right? Feels too basic. It’s got the whole fire and frost type damage thing going on but feels like it could use a little something more.
What if you could breath a whole area down with an azure aoe blast and stun/freeze mobs for cc/control? Or even just slows?
Also why not an aoe/multitarget disintegration option? Maybe 3 mobs can have a disintegrate beam instead of just one. Channel the other two beams with the wings or hands.
Azure Strike, Disintegrate and I believe Eternity Surge all apply a slow.
They do but there is no cool overhead breath super cool attack. I want to fly above man and just go BOOOOOOM you’re frozen dooods!
They really sucked at making Devastation a cool dps spec. Need to go back to the drawing board a bit imo and revisit the entire tree next expansion.
Tbh Aug and Preservation are what make this a true Hero Class as its dps spec is an afterthought.
Btw does anyone use Firestorm still? And is it possible to make the aoe just follow packs of mobs?