Devastation Mastery Nerfed for 10.1.5, base damage increased

  • Mastery: Giantkiller reduced by 20%. For example at level 70, 180 Mastery rating now grants 2% Mastery (was 2.5%).

  • All damaging abilities increased by 6.5%.

Basically less damage at the front and more in the back.

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Not so much of a Gaintkiller anymore.

Giantwounder.

Gianthurter.

Giantslapper.

Giantverbalabuser.

Would have preferred if they just reworked it slightly tbh rather than nerfing the stat, although I think this is a good design direction.

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No more 630k fully buffed fire breath crits, but better sustain? I guess that’ll be ok.

Maybe at the beginning of a Tier or Season…but this is Mid Tier when we have already started gearing…

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They’ve made a ton of poor changes to devastation but this one isn’t that bad. It’ll clean up their damage profile in between dragon rage windows a bit.

Blizzard please just remove this stupid broken mastery already. Broken in the bad way

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I honestly wouldn’t have minded if they took it further than they did, but at least we’ll be doing slightly higher than tank damage at the end of encounters now.

I don’t think it’s going to actually dethrone mastery as our best secondary stat. The difference just won’t be as large.

Idk I think its fine

A band-aid fix, really. The entire mastery needs to be removed and replaced with something actually viable. You are never going to be able to properly balance something with a design like Giantkiller on either end of the scale.

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They just need to make things more consistent and keep shaving off some of the high end. It was suggested in the past that essence burst should grant full mastery benefit. Maybe you could also make empower spells have full mastery benefit as well. By adding more ways to get benefit from mastery outside of dragonrage, you can reduce the high end without negatively impacting dps.

I’d be okay with more mastery windows, but I’d really like more interactivity with other stats.

Having haste-based CDR on some abilities, for example, would make for more interesting stat choices. Maybe replace +2s Shattering Star with guaranteed crit on next cast. idk.

Problem with ever being able to choose not mastery is that it’s so deeply engrained into Dragonrage. With low mastery levels our burst CD has so much less value.

What I could see working is something like the chance to proc Essence Burst scaling with critical strike chance, and then Dragonrage having another modifier where critical strikes from Azure Strike and Living Flame grant two charges of Essence Burst. So now you’d have a choice between maximum peaks and valleys and burst with mastery, or you could go crit and have a more consistent flow of damage, and with that change to Dragonrage it would still scale with the CD somewhat so you’d spend less time building and more time spending.

Haste I think already does quite a lot. It interacts with spell CDs because more Disintegrates/Pyres per second means more procs of Causality means more empowered spells. It also already means more Burnout procs, and in fact double-dips on that with Catalyze. It also also increases our generation of Essence Burst somewhat. Maybe Dragonrage could be added to Causality so that its CD scales down with more haste. Increase the base CD to compensate.

They could also simply add some other flavor to dragonrage. Which people have been asking for.

Doubt we’ll see it changed in a fundamental way until next expansion. They will almost definitely finish this expansion out at least attempting to refine what exists. However, if they fail I imagine changing Dragonrage will be the centerpiece for reworking the spec for next expansion.

I don’t like the current mastery tbh, it sucks on low hp bosses such as in halls of infusion. It’s nice on shielded bosses, but it shouldn’t be a thing imo

dude so blizzard never does anything right the first time and for sure this is just gonna f the whole class up and we are gonna have to wait until the next season for them to fix it. so its probably rip devoker . the blizz devs that change evoker couldnt even finish a mythic +10 so they got no clue how to play the class which is why they keep giving us retarded talent tree setups . leave evoker alone unless your going to make it better you idiots

I miss this Mastery, now Dev is just useless without the giant killer niche… it was nice it being the only class with the “opposite” of an execute phase.

The design of our mastery is almost as bad as pointlessly necroing this thread.

It was poorly designed, created threat issues forever, and makes the spec feel awful later in fights.

This comment makes zero sense. There was never a time where dev was taken explicitly for this imaginary niche you think it created.

Mythic experiments and Tindral were probably the closest we got to the mastery creating a niche, and we would still be strong in those encounters because of it.

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