Could someone explain what the devastation opener should look like for single target and aoe?
I’m reading guides trying to perfect it, but I’m getting conflicting information 
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It depends on your trinkets and build. For a pure single target it depends on what you’re fighting. For raid bosses it’s generally preferred to open by popping your trinkets and dragon rage along with tip the scales with fire breath for those juicy 1 mill + crits. This is so you’re likely to be able to use the same abilities again after two minutes during the same fight. On dungeon bosses it may be better to hold your dragonrage and trinkets til the boss is about 80% to get the most of your mastery for as long as possible. And of course you should always try to use your big cooldowns during lust/fury/hero, which on raid bosses often means on pull.
The aoe rotation is about the same as a raid boss except it’s all about pyre rather than disintegrate. Pop everything and spit pyre until you can’t spit pyre no more while making sure you extend your dragonrage with your empowered breaths. Especially fire breath, which is a surprisingly large contributor to your overall AOE damage. Always start with a fire breath before beginning your pyre spam because spamming pyre on large groups resets your empowered breaths faster AND fire breath will cause your next two pyres to do extra damage, assuming you’re specced for it to do so.
Be sure to never use deep breath during dragonrage since deep breath always has max benefits from your mastery, meaning deep breath does not benefit from dragonrage at all.
Hope this helps.
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Don’t use your TTS on breath until the second one in an opener to maximize dps.
For those that aren’t aware, you can pre-TTS before a key starts and it’ll reset the cd, so you can get thicc openers with either double TTS FB’s or use it on your ES if you want.
This is not better, you just risk not getting a second drage. It is rarely better on a raid boss because of fight/lust timings.
You can check lorrgs.io for when the best evokers are using their CDs on specific encounters when in doubt.
If the packs are going to die, you still want to deep breath before they do.
Preheat’s guides give the overall most current information, I’d stick to those since the rotation guides let you select talents you’re using, which will alter rotations.
Generally though, in ST you want to open by precasting a living flame at around 2 seconds (if you’ve got ancient flame talented, 3 sec if not).
If you’re using nymues, use it next. Then you dragonrage. If you are just using a non-gcd steroid trinket like spoils, pop it with your dragonrage.
Once you’ve hit dragonrage, rank 1 FB > shattering star > ES > disintegrate until you can’t.
Use burnout procs on LF and if you don’t have them use azure strike for the essence burst, and continue your disintegrates with this loop, being sure not to overcap on essence burst.
When you’re ready to really micro the opener, check out the guide’s section on clipping and chaining disintegrate.
Tip the scales on your second FB-- this gives you maximum value out of your waning trinket buffs. Make sure to use S-star before eternity and not after so you don’t waste iridescence; blue charges on non-disintegrate blue spells.
For aoe, as mentioned above the rotation is basically pyre spam instead of disint, but generally max your fire breath and make sure to check the guides on what mob counts you want to max empower eternity surge for since you don’t always want to (if the guide doesn’t have it, I know it’s pinned in the devastation channel of the evoker discord).
Again, I’d recommend sticking to the preheat guide but this is enough for getting started.
Happy to chat in game as well if you want more info.
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I’m only posting here to make a point. You asked why I don’t ignore you and this is why. This was a great post, filled with accurate and useful information, this post was the maximum helpful it could possibly be and if the OP doesn’t thank you then I will - Thank you, I think a lot of people would benefit from reading this post.
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Asking for and getting help doesn’t need to be like pulling teeth…even if some people act like it does sometimes.
Thanks so much!
I’ve been having trouble with shattering star and the 4p set bonus in particular.
I’ve read a guide that said to space out fire breath and eternity surge in order to get full value out of the set bonus.
Something like:
Fire Breath
Disintegrate
Disintegrate
(Living Flame procs for Iridescence: Red)
Shattering star
Eternity Surge
Disintegrate
Disintegrate
But I’ve also read guide that say to use fire breath and surge back to back like you said. So I’m just kinda confused.
And then once I’m dpsing, do I hold shattering star for eternity surge, or just fire when it’s ready and not worry about it?
During dragonrage, the tier gets blazing shards the whole time so you don’t want to space them out.
Outside of dragonrage, you’ll want to space empowers by 5 seconds to get maximum value.
Send SS on CD, unless you’re capped on essence/essence burst stacks or unless it’s just about to sync up anyways, but generally you just want to star on cd and follow it up with disintegrate chain.
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