All I can say is meta will always be meta and people will feel like its required. The spec still shines but people want it ripped to bits still.
As soon as Augmentation came out people were like “omg fffppp he stol my m+ spot drrrr! nerf that lil runt!” and slammed the door on the spec.
Honestly though I feel like in calling for nerfs they slammed the door on any future support specs and any new type of support specs blizz may have been cooking up.
Aug made m+ one shot kill BS easier for groups and it was a lot of fun pre nerf and made you hit like a truck. It made your M+ runs more successful in general. WHY HATE THAT?
A different group comp dynamic was forming: Heals, dps, tank and support and it was the freshest thing to enter the game since sliced bread.
Imagine a Demon hunter support spec: brander- imbues your party with tattoos surging with fel energy etc etc
Alot of hybrid dps could of also got a support type of spec, maybe even rogues a bard spec.
But now all that is probably thrown out the window because of the “Nerf aug crowd”
Now Im going to give all you complaining nerds a noogie! rolls up sleeves
Boils down to Blizzards terrible class balance and poor planning. Follow that up with a community who refuses to call it out for what it is and thats where were at.
In lower keys I’m always scared of having an Aug for this reason.
I don’t trust both of the other 2 dps to be decent enough to make it worthwhile. Having 1 of your 2 other dps be a potato when you have an Aug is painful.
I intended to play exclusively Aug for a long time on my evoker before doing pres; even i would switch to dev for lower keys because I knew it’d be a slog trying to carry the dps for some of them pugs lol
Especially on like the first boss in cot for the adds lol
A good Aug after TWW changes has an overall contribution (aka including the lighter bar) that should be pretty close if not 80-90% DPS (assuming they’re good). It’s not as abysmal as it was in DF when a second DPS sucks.
Yet I still see Augs very much essentially performing mid and getting a pass for it.
TWW has brought a lot of Augs power back into itself but there are so many awful ones.
The problem with Augmentation is that it is the only specialization that can serve it’s role. It can never be weighed against other class specializations of equal value. This reduces Augmentation to a binary wheres it’s role is either valuable or not valuable.
Therefor the solution isn’t to nerf augmentation because there isn’t another specialization that can act as a baseline to bring it in tune with. The solution is to create more specializations that can serve as a unique support DPS similar to but not exactly like augmentation.
Support specs were always going to be a balance nightmare. When Aug is strong it’s just not Aug being in the meta, it’s also the specs that benefit the most from Aug. It’s not just Aug being the meta pick, but also shaping the meta picks for the other 2 DPS.
Same goes for Power Infusion, but to a lesser extent. Some specs just benefit a lot more.
Yet the meta specs changed from fire mage and shadow priests who everyone said was due to their insane synergy with Aug to now enhance shaman and frost DKs who were both dumpster tier last expansion.
Yup and instead of actually fixing classes/specs on the back end all they did was nerf the couple outliers and then wonder why they are performing so bad a patch later. Meanwhile Aug also get nerfed hard which just drops the whole spec range down a couple tiers.
Both classes got a re-work though, and at least in terms of Frost Dk got nerfed hard. Then they have to circle back and buff everything over an over to bring it back to low tier( well least in terms of Raids)
Yes. Enhance is much better this expansion for a few reasons. 1 is they actually use Ascendance which gives them a strong 2 minute cooldown for Aug to buff. And the number 1 reason enhance sucked last expansion was the mass trash pulls while enhance had target capped AoE, which isn’t as much of a problem in TWW.
