I disagree. The point is that your damage comes from the group, and all the pros and cons that come with that. If you don’t enjoy that playstyle, there are a myriad of other selections to be made. There is only one option for Support players at present. Let’s not take that away by turning it into just another DPS.
Especially when most of the negative reaction is just coming from people that don’t understand a playstyle that falls outside the traditional WoW paradigm.
Lol it’s more so that it’s breaking specific classes, I.E. shadow priest and mage, which I predicted would happen. Which is why their making their own damage higher and lessening the amount of damage their buffing to bring things more in line. Any sort of buff class in WoW just isn’t going to work well, given stats works very differently each class and spec, and as seen with the above it breaks them due to that fact.
Counterpoint: Completely chicken out on support and make augmentation a standard dps spec. If you wanna play support, then role healer.
Or turn it into a caster tank. That’d be cool too
Play games other than WoW. Healers are not “support” in the RPG sense.
Only in the literal dictionary sense.
Which also makes tanks and DPS with utility “support” if you play the semantic literalist.
Maybe they making it slightly easier for Aug Evoker to handle solo open world stuff 
That’s for Devastation. Or simply suffering through it, if you’re stubborn like me. Augmentation is for augmenting others.
Can you give some examples? Cause most RPGs I’ve played the healers are the support.
You are acting like they ditched the group dps buffs altogether and made it a pure personal dps spec now.
After the changes, the main focus of Aug will still be support and buffing your group. There will just be a minor shift in the distribution.
I’m a person who never swaps out of my healer spec, I know all about “suffering through it.” Doesn’t mean they can’t buff it up a little. Same goes for healer DPS for open world. Nothing wrong with it.
Slightly shifting some of the power to the Aug won’t suddenly stop making them a support class. Take a deep breathe.
A group with an aug should be doing significantly more dps than a group without one, otherwise why bring one?
I don’t care if they’re mandatory in high keys. Right now, and as of every other patch, there’s a meta that’s near required in high keys to begin with, so this isn’t anything new.
And no, I haven’t actually played aug yet. I have the UI set up for it but I play Devastation.
You say this but if you look at Raider IO right now (and can take your pick for 15/20/25) guardian aren’t nearly that represented as Prot war was. But yes they’re in a better spot.
Ppal and VDH are kings.
IDK, I primarily played enchanter and bard in Everquest and I’ve been playing these games about as long as you have. If not longer.
I prefer support and was glad to see this one added.
Now just add mana regen to them and we’ll be golden.
People that are hating on it this ferociously are just mad their groups don’t have one.
I think prot paladin are good enough for most people to not bother rerolling.
The entire first like 10 pages on IO is guardian lol. It’s definitely the push high end meta tank.
let’s be honest for a sec, there’s nothing “supportive” about aug rotation, you just use your buff and then spam damage rotation that instead of dealing normal damage increases buff duration
Effects of aug spell are supportive, but gameplay is exactly the same as dps
That’s the whole thing, though:
A. They’re overpowered.
B. People are only playing them because they’re overpowered.
For both, like you said, if it wasn’t the case… then why?
All levels of empower spells are supposed to have some use (even if it’s something obvious like Eternity Surge’s “how many targets are available?”), but if the extend scaled with empower level and the cooldown didn’t, then it would almost always be wrong to do anything other than max empower. I think making the extension independent of empower level is the right call; it allows you to make that choice based on something other than “what gives me the most uptime” (since that’s a tie).
Why do you feel forced to only use low empower levels? If it’s just “the mobs are tightly grouped so a bigger area is useless”, well, that’s the intended design of Upheaval, to empower it if you need a bigger aoe and not if you don’t. Just like Fire Breath’s is “do I need this damage NOW or is a DoT just as good?”
The lead dev for Evokers has stated in interviews that is Blizzard’s goal for Aug. The fact that a new type of spec needs more extended tuning to actually hit that target is why they released it mid season. This is very likely not the last time Aug will be hotfixed this patch, and there is another whole minor patch before the next season too. Hopefully the volatility of changes will settle down sometime before 10.2.
They can’t do that until there are more specs capable of filling it. And even if they could do it, I’m not sure they should, because the role might be underpopulated. It’s bad for a role to be underpopulated and also mandatory; that’s sometimes a problem with some of the existing roles.
Supports need to be optional at least until there is a good variety of specs that do it (which will take years of development regardless of whether it’s overhauls or fourth specs) AND proof that there is an adequate supply of players willing to play it, which the experience of other MMOs suggests may never happen.
If they’re still OP (in 5 man) after these nerfs then they should be nerfed again. I’m not saying that because I hate the concept or the gameplay, but just because I believe the game should be balanced. But there are a lot of people who do hate the concept, as this thread proves, so Blizzard needs to be careful who they listen to and rely as much as possible on objective evidence.
IT’S OKAY
Blizzard’s got this.
(Their answer was to nerf Brewmaster damage.)
Ahh! Seen that now, fair point.
I feel dumb for giving up on Guardian now, I got KSM then quit last season.