Evoker's limited range: Megathread

Classes Evoker
82

100% agree with all the posts about the weirdo range. It doesnt excel in any particular fashion to justify the limitations on the spec. There needs to be a trade off. Disintegrate needs to be doing insane damage to warrant the limited range and channel time, and it just does not.

The current devs really did not think the devastation spec through with regard to pvp. A one trick, 2 minute CD is not a spec. I have personally never had even the smallest issue killing evoker outside of that burst window: a window that will be going bye bye in DF because no insane scaling anymore.

Which means what does the spec have?

Why would anyone ever play it over a more mobile mage or a super tanky lock? This is my literal conundrum atm and i want to play and be excited by this class, but it feels very much like handicapping myself to play it in pvp.

There are always going to be a handful of obnoxious r1 players who claim because they made it work (you know, with voice comms and the same team for 10 years) that the dps spec is amazing. No it isnt. If 99.99% of the entire wow population cant play it to even moderate ratings, its bad.

The entire dps spec is being hard carried by its giant burst atm. Its really awful design imo for everyone involved. Being one shot by a skill less boom CD sucks and being the one to do that is only fun for so long, and its going away soon ANYWAY so im going to play a spec that just spams living flame and disintegrate at 25 yards while some hunter plinks away doing 3x the damage from 40+. Ooookay.

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83

I hope Blizzard does succumb, by just making all our abilities standard melee range, since we’re obviously melee casters with more ranged flexibility than most melee, and maybe making it more in our face will stop all the weird entitlement that we’re somehow supposed to be a ranged class (probably not, but one can dream). Excited to see the changes in whatever expansion comes after Dragonflight!

84

As it stands I’m just avoiding the class. I think playing as Preservation is just more frustrating and less fun than a 40yd healer, regardless of how OP they are now. I understand that notion, that some people think we should “get used to it”. I really do, but I think it’s boring–and I think when the masses return on launch and get to 70, they’ll hate it too.

I feel more mobile as a Mistweaver actually, so I’m planning on gearing that spec (it’s hella fun anyways) Hopefully they tweak the range thing before the second raid season at least but I’m not that confident after the whole covenant fiasco in SL, where they didn’t “succumb” or admit flaw until… years afterward.

I’ll be back to Evoker but if beta is any indication I just cannot play a “mid range” class when the game seemingly has no place for them in high end play. It’s worth noting that 70 scaling makes a lot more sense, and tames down the throughput of Evokers quite a bit. So you can’t “make up for” less range with insane damage and healing numbers.

I think actually being level 70 will add a lot of perspective for folks on why the range thing is such a terrible idea.

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85

This guy can see the future of evokers

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86

I think the PvE range is fine. There should be a PvP talent or something to increase the range there.

87

I’ve done every Fated boss twice (or more) on Evokers, preservation on one server and devastation on another. I’ve done PvP, M+, Gathering, and even a bunch of legacy content. Pushing 100 hours on live in all forms of content.

I have some tea to spill re: mobility.

Current raids: I can’t reach players. I can’t reach bosses. I can’t reach adds. I can’t do boss mechanics that require ranged and melee to split unless I’m in a PuG with 8 other Evokers who know we need a third mid-range group. I hear DF raids are more built around Evoker, but unless they’re tossing out almost 20 years of raid designs, this will continue.

PvP: I can’t escape. I can’t peel. I have a few stops on ridiculously long cooldowns. Including my interrupt and my stun (when talented). My defenses are laughable, and if I’m far enough away to avoid gap-closers, I can’t hit enemies or heal allies. Many battlegrounds have features like cannons or adds on walls that I cannot hit no matter how well I play. They’re. Just. Out. Of. Range. I can’t contribute to significant objectives in group play. Lovely.

Gathering/open world: sometimes short range is a boon. When I’m trying to not pull more things so I can drop combat and mount up? Love the short range. Except for one problem: all my burst can cleave really far. Deep breath has a minimum range. Fire breath has a long cone, which can pull through LoS, extending your time dealing with mobs. If I empower fire breath, my next living flame cleaves, sometimes pulling adds from anywhere within 25 yards, even if they aren’t in combat. This is really the worst of both worlds.

Legacy content: Raids, dungeons, world quests, questing, you name it, legacy content has a real hole for Evokers: no pull ability. If this is a problem in legacy content, you’d better believe it’ll be painful when you’re leveling/gearing and you can’t pull select mobs because if you’re close enough to pull with a Living Flame, you’re close enough to body pull by mistake. Targeted pulls are an important part of solo play at all levels, and Evokers are the only class who don’t have at least one good single-target pull.

And for anyone who thinks I could make up for the lack of range with mobility: you’re dead wrong. Most of the kit requires you to turret and fire. The little bit of mobility from various talents may help with getting around, but they just can’t make you reach objectives designed to be a challenge for classes with 40+ yards as their range.

It’s not enough to craft new content around Evokers, because the 18 years of content is there, and we want to be able to enjoy the game in our own way.

This is especially true for rated BGs, because unless I have a full team on coms, I’m a liability, no matter how high my damage or healing is tuned, because there are just too many things I can’t do.

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88

Yeah, honestly The limited range wouldn’t bother me if we could move while casting everything besides empowered spells. And if they moved the second hover a little higher up in our class tree. And made it so disintegrate took one essence per tick instead of all three at once. Class would be :pinched_fingers:

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89

I’ve played nothing but ranged since 2007. My devastation dracthyr almost has a 1500 m+ score for season 4. I haven’t tested raids yet but so far I have all but completely adapted to the range. I genuinely don’t notice it at all. That being said, I’ve never healed in that same amount of time. Since players, especially in raids, can be much more spread out and unpredictable, I’d imagine people who rolled heals are going to have to be much more creative with all the movement and time abilities (hover, rescue, group move, whisk away, etc.). But I can’t speak to that.

So far I’ve been a hardcore warlock for years and years and this is the first time I will be maining a new class and it’s because Devastation is truly super @#$_&-+ fun. Again I don’t notice the ranged limit at all.

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90

M+ Range is fine, generally the team is always close together Dps and Healing, I’ve hit 2100 IO. Occasionally I’ve had a few range dps move out of range, generally I just tell them to get a little closer or literally rescue them into a more suitable position, it’s just going to take some time for players to remember Evokers limitations.

Raiding and PvP is where the flaws really shine bright in your eyes. On Beta doing Vault of the Incarnates, it’s doable, but the issue is Evokers both specs are going to have to work twice as hard as every other spec to achieve the same results.

This is exactly what should happen and has been suggested several times on the Beta forums. With the addition of making both specs 30yds baseline.

1 Like
91

Hello Blizzard, the range of Evokers needs to be fixed and you may want to hurry! We only have 2 days left! Get on that! Please and thanks!

In PVP, it’s completely unfair. If you don’t think so, imagine if one class had a range of say…70 yards. Imagine if that class was bombing on you from Lumber Mill while you were at Blacksmith! You good with that? Because that’s how the short range of Devastation feels, like everyone else is bombing on you from worlds away.

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92

Hard to believe they’re going live with it. Gonna create a lotta fuss when DT damage normalized at 70.

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93

The irony is the lead developer for Evokers was smugly mentioning how VoI is designed around Evokers in a recent interview. If being tailor made for our class results in “Doable”, heaven help us trying to do literally everything else in the game.

The last line in your statement is what speaks volumes. The biggest shotgun blast to the stomach Evoker has is for all the range we miss out on, we don’t even perform outstandingly in that reduced area. If at the very best we perform about the same as other healers and DPS in our 25-30 yard bubble, what is the actual bloody point of our range tax? We are practically a melee class with cast times at that point.

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94

Agreed. Being a major sales pitch for the new expansion, you would think their shiny new class would come out the gate raring to go and ready to wow the playerbase. Demon Hunters were ready to rock out of the box back in their introduction. So much so they required a fair amount of tuning (to varying degrees of success) but you cannot deny they did everything Blizzard said they would do.

Evoker doesn’t even perform remotely close as advertised. We have been sold the idea of a medium range but highly mobile class. This is a game where classes like Monks, Druids and BM Hunters also exist. Not only are those classes eclipsing us in what is supposed to be our strong suit, they do so at full range. Which brings me back to my number one issue with the crippled range; Why? It isn’t a counteracting balancing factor to some torrent of unrivalled damage or healing capability. I would say at best both our healing and DPS is “Okay, mostly”. Not mind blowing but decent which actually isn’t a bad state the be in. The problem is there are both healers and DPS which do this level of DPS/Healing, if not better and also doing it while being more mobile than the supposed mobile class and doing so at full range. The supposed balancing factor of our inferior range is to remedy a problem that simply doesn’t exist.

Amen to this. In PvP, Devastation is virtually a melee class with cast times and every caster weakness you can imagine.

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95

I completely agree that it needs the 40 yard range. Im annoyed with the shorter distance.

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96

One of us! One of us!

It’s the same sort of tone deaf they keep apologizing for. The class has more problems than range, it’s just undercooked, no pun intended. I think primarily what’s needed is caster range–but it lacks a cohesive design direction altogether. I don’t even think Blizzard knew what to do with them so they just gave them heroism and a strong raid wide buff so people would at least want one and called it a day.

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97

The 25y range is the one major sticking point that ensures that I won’t main the class. The damage priority is good, movement and survivability are acceptable, but when I’ve played 40y spellcasters since TBC the shift to 25y is really noticeable.

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98

i dont really play ranged at all, but 25yrd range, i wont even get to a priest, mage, lock hunter shaman druid with out being killed

1 Like
99

Considering there’s games that have been made with less than 3 people, I doubt making a video game or patching games is as hard as you make it out to be. Even a game like No Man Sky which has probably more complex coding wise has less devs than WoW. has devs.

Also if it takes so much dev time and skill to increase a classes spell range 10-15 yards they should probably find a different career.

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100

That’s kind of the problem. Essentially a ranged class that can be kited

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101

I think if they are going to keep the 25 y, they will need to give evoker some spells to get into melee range, just like melee classes. They need to give a v.embrace like spell but hostile, to fly to enemy and damage them. I would give them another fly ability that would teleport you to the enemy and stun him 40 y away. Another for silence. Another could be a root. They could chsnge our actually root to make us fly while we root so we get closer. Anyway, i think there are many ways to increase gameplay while keeping and half melee half range spec.