Feedback on Preservation Evoker Hero Talents
Chronowarden combines a number of powerful effects which synergize well with each other, making each more powerful in turn. Combining huge buffs to both of our empowers, large amounts of cooldown reduction and passive haste, increased essence burst generation and a 25% chance not to consume either essence or essence burst when we cast our primary spender, I wonder if there is another healer hero tree that comes even close to this level of power. Our other tree, Flameshaper, certainly doesn’t.
Flameshaper focuses on buffing our Dream Breath and Emerald Blossom abilities. Enkindle is a 20% buff to the direct healing of our essence spenders, which makes Flameshaper our preferred tree for Emerald Blossom builds, and Engulf buffs, feeds off, and redirects our Dream Breath healing in a number of ways.
Travelling Flame extends Dream Breath’s heal over time on its target by 4 seconds (8 minus the 4 that Consume Flame consumes), and spreads a 16s dream breath to a second target, for a combined 20s of dream breath heal over time. This is equal enough to dream breath hitting one additional target, a 20% buff to the ability if Dream Breath is not being echoed.
Consume Flame detonates dream breath on a target, doing the equivalent of 12s of DB healing instantly as an aoe heal, reducing beyond 5 targets. I don’t know the exact details of this scaling, but its doing about 53% of that on 20 targets, which will be the relevant figure most of the time in mythic raid. 12 seconds of the HoT effect is about 60% of the full value of dream breath itself, which makes this a 60% buff when both CF and DB are hitting 5 targets. On 20 targets, its a little more than twice that strong. If I could make one suggestion for this ability unconnected to any other changes, it would be that targets who are fully overhealed not contribute to this scaling. This tech has already been rolled out for Invigirating Mists and several healing cooldowns, and it’d be a good fit here, too.
Neither of these buffs to dream breath scale when we echo the ability, further cementing Flameshaper as the Emerald Blossom tree.
The last time Emerald Blossom was a meta playstyle, you could expect blossom to do about 20% of your healing, and dream breath to do 10%, with a bit of variance, but we’ll use these as our average. This would make Enkindle a 4% throughput increase, Travelling Flame 2%, and Consume Flame up to 12%.
We then have the choice to lean further into one of these by choosing between Fan the Flames and Expanded Lungs. FtF doubles the remaining effect of any Enkindles when we use Engulf, while EL is a flat 20% buff to Dreambreath’s healing.
With Dreambreath and Consume Flame representing a combined 24% of our throughput, EL is something like a further 4.8% increase. I’m not going to guess at what a reasonable uptime on FtF is if you’re trying to deliberately play into it in your burst windows, but the trouble is even if you assumed it was buffing 100% of your Enkindle healing, it’s still only a 4% buff next to EL’s 4.8, and for much more work. My final thought on this node is that this feels like a relatively small amount of power to have to choose between, especially when you contrast it with everything Chronowarden has access to. Chronowarden’s buffs scale multiplicatively with each other, while Flameshaper buffs two unconnected parts of the toolkit, and still makes you pick favourites.
Remaining throughput increases include
- Titanic Precision, a very small buff to essence burst generation. At 25% crit, we have to first ignore the 20% of living flames which proc an essence burst naturally, in that remaining 80% we have a 1/4 chance of a crit, which garners us a chance to roll the dice a second time at 20% odds. This results in an 80% chance to take a 25% chance to succeed on a 20% chance, or a 4% increase to essence burst generation from living flames, getting slightly better or worse at higher/lower crit values. Comparing the value here to the levels of essence burst generation in Chronowarden is laughable.
- Lifecinders, an extremely cool node which makes Renewing Blaze act as an external, mirrored on ourself
- A small crit chance increase against targets below 50% health.
- The direct healing of Engulf itself.
I’m not going to try to attach an exact figure to the value of these nodes, but they won’t represent more than an increase of a few %, if that.
A best case scenario for the Flameshaper tree puts it at maybe a 20-25% throughput increase for an emerald blossom playstyle. A lot of this depends on damage patterns being favourable, as flameshaper does not offer as much flexibility as Chronowarden will. I’m curious how that compares to other healer hero trees, but it’s significantly less than Chronowarden represents. This is further compounded by Chronowarden focusing on an echo playstyle, already the stronger option.
Important Chronowarden nodes are Chrono Flame, a variable buff to Living Flame’s healing and damage scaling with our recent healing done to the target, Reverberations, a 30% buff to Spiritbloom’s healing, Double-time, which maxes out at a 60% buff to Dream Breath, once you have the crit to support it, Afterimage, which casts 3 Chrono Flames each time you use an empower spell, and Golden Opportunity, which gives Echo a 25% chance not to cost mana or essence. This also works with Essence Burst.
Starting with Afterimage, this talent more than doubles the number of living flames we are casting. Setting aside the direct healing, which is not insignificant, this is a massive increase to Essence Burst generation. Golden Opportunity doubles down on this, making all essence and essence bursts 25% more valuable for Chronowarden. So chronowarden applies more echoes, then buffs the empower spells we use to consume those echoes. Then it gives large amounts of passive haste and cooldown reduction, allowing us to do all of that more often. There’s a feedback loop here, which is very different from Flameshaper, which chooses to focus on buffing two aspects of the spec that have almost nothing to do with each other. It then further makes you pick which of these two things you want to focus on, where Chronowarden lets you walk away with everything in the candy shop.
I won’t lie, Chronowarden sounds incredibly fun. But that’s too strong, right? I’m not even going to try to put a numerical value on the power of this tree, there are too many compounding multipliers, but I’d be shocked if it was less than a 50% throughput increase. I suspect it might be much more than that. If someone smarter than me has done the math, I’d love to hear the number you came up with.
As for where to begin balancing this tree, I have a few thoughts. One thing it does that I really like is make it so you actually want to be echoing your empower spells as often as possible. I find this preferable to echoing Reversion, or echoing Lifebind any time you want more burst healing. Most of the time, the choice I want to make as an evoker is whether to echo Spiritbloom or Dream Breath. That feels right to me. So I’d be worried if nerfs to these spells led to a change in that behaviour. If the effects of Reverberations and Double-time can be scaled down a little without upsetting that balance, then that would be fine.
Chrono Flame and Afterimage are at the core of this tree, so I wouldn’t want to see them altered too much, but one option would be to reduce the number of flames Afterimage casts, or reduce their effectiveness, or even their chance to proc essence burst. The cooldown reduction on Temporal Burst is at just the right level to feel good and impactful, without being overpowered. It might give you some needed flexibility on where you can use your cooldowns, but it’s probably not going to allow for a full additional use, unless a fight is really well suited to it. Golden Opportunity on the other hand I think is both really strong, and also one of the options that would impact playstyle the least if it was removed.
Instability Matrix could be another worth looking at. It represents a lot of healing in a best-case scenario, but there will also be situations where we cannot take advantage of the cdr and must hold an empower for the right time to use it anyway. I don’t think this node can take many more nerfs before it stops accomplishing the thing it sets out to do, but removing it might effectively tune down the top-end potential of the tree while having fairly minimal impact on most players. Adapting constantly on the fly, never knowing exactly what spell you’ll have available at any given moment of a fight sounds really fun though, so I don’t want this to be taken as a criticism of the node’s design. Preservation can be played very reactively, despite being a ramp healer, and this leans into that aspect of the spec in a really cool way.
If none of these talents are candidates for removal, or if reducing their power would undercut their reasons for existing, then the last remaining option is positioning more of Chronowarden’s powerful options on choice nodes, so you cannot have access to all of them at once.
Chronowarden isn’t strong just because the numbers in the tree are big, its strong because its very well designed. I’m not aware of any public statement about what power level is being targeted for hero trees, so I’ve focused my feedback on how to nerf Chronowarden, because my assumption is that it’s an outlier. If instead Flameshaper is considered too weak, it might take a leaf out of Chronowarden’s book and find ways to build more synergy between the aspects of the kit it focuses on. Even simple things like Engulf granting essence burst, Dream Breath triggering Fluttering Seedlings, or Fluttering Seedlings applying x seconds of dream breath to their target, would go a way towards closing the gap by tying the two halves of this tree back together. Even if Flameshaper isn’t being looked at for buffs, more of this sort of design would bring it closer to the levels of flow and cohesion found in the Chronowarden tree.
Hero trees don’t need to represent the same portion of a spec’s power when compared between classes, and as the newest kid on the block, with the least history of established gameplay, investing more of our power and playstyle choices in our hero trees than average isn’t inherently an issue. As long as hero trees are balanced within classes and classes are balanced against each other, it’s all good.
A final note on the visuals of the Flameshaper tree - the spell effect on Consume Flame is pretty underwhelming. When I first heard about the ability, I’d pictured a big fiery bloom, almost a scarlet aeonia type effect, for any who are familiar with elden ring. Instead Engulf looks like an off-brand Pyre - less interesting, if anything, as it lacks the swirly chromatic effect - and Consume Flame is a weak splash of red that’s almost hard to notice. There’s an effect in the game already when you enchant a headpiece with the Incandescent Essence, which I don’t think is being used for anything else, which is close to what I envisioned. Visual flare is a big selling point for hero trees, and I think Flameshaper is lacking so far.
I have some additional thoughts on the future design direction of the spec that I’ll try to get into quickly.
Quality of Life
First, some housekeeping. Stasis doesn’t reset on a wipe. Neither does Obsidian Scales. Nobody wants to ask their guild to wait 50 seconds for their cooldowns to reset before they pull a boss again, this is QoL stuff that would be simple to address but massive for the player experience, going well beyond evoker players themselves.
Range
People are going to mention the range issue a lot, so I’m not going to spend too long on it. The stated fantasy for preservation evoker was a short range healer whose healing is strongly positional, but who also has the toolkit to reposition as needed. I would conjecture that this ‘highly mobile battlefield medic’ fantasy is already accomplished, and best accomplished, in the directionality of our important abilities, such as dream breath, dream flight, and temporal anomaly. Quickly repositioning to find the correct angle for one of these is fun, in a way that strafing left and right trying to find where that one hunter has hidden himself just out of range is not.
Outside of these directional abilities, and when we are not doing distinctly dragon-y things like breathing magical healing fire from our mouths, the fantasy of evoker is a spellcaster, like any other, and it’s not clear why this spellcaster apparently lacks the proficiency to cast at ranges that are simple for everyone else.
If the thematic and class-fantasy reasons for having a shorter range are already better accomplished in being the only healer with a focus on directional ‘frontal cone’ healing, then the short range itself is left as something superfluous, frustrating, and only having the effect of limiting evoker’s viability in certain content. I would like to see evoker’s range increased to the standard 40 yards.
Flexibility while ramping
I think Evoker should retain some healing options while we are setting up for a ramp that will not consume the echoes we have already applied.
Its not a bad thing that echo ramps are high-commitment, that is the nature of ramping, but evoker ramps can be more punishing than other ramp healers, at least in specific ways, because echoes are one-time-use in a way that discipline’s atonements or a druid’s hot effects are not. If you consume those echoes at the wrong time or with the wrong spell, either accidentally or as a last-ditch effort to keep another player alive, the ramp is over. Disc priest doesn’t have this limitation. If you need to stop in the middle of applying atonements to cast power word: life or a defensive penance, the ramp is affected, maybe delayed, but not in such a strict pass/fail manner.
The other big difference is that discipline ramps are contained, having a clearly defined start and end point, in a way that evoker ramps, in practice, are not and do not. An evoker ramp might look like pressing temporal anomaly, applying echoes, casting living flame to generate more essence bursts and to wait for some of your essence to regenerate, then casting more echoes, potentially all the way up until temporal anomaly can be cast again, and then consuming those echoes for the damage event you’d planned them for. Where Discipline knows how many atonements it is applying before it ramps, and therefor the ideal time to begin, the number of echoes we can get out can vary, and so it is often correct to simply start as early as possible in order to maximise this number. The Golden Opportunity node in the Chronowarden tree will only make this more true.
This leaves up to 18 seconds at a time -the duration of Echo- where an evoker cannot reactively heal anyone, except by casting echo itself. And when one ramp ends, the next might begin immediately.
I’ve been using raid examples for the most part, but these issues might be even more pronounced in mythic+. Applying echoes to a full party takes time, but the damage doesn’t stop to let you do so, and there are no other healers to pick up the healing while you are still setting up. Damage profiles like a powerful dot on one person leading into a large aoe can be difficult for evokers to respond to, because at a certain point before the aoe happens we need to give up on healing the afflicted player in order to stand a chance at healing everyone else. If we must resort to healing them, now our echoes are gone, and the effort was wasted.
I’ve seen suggestions as to what abilities might best fit the bill here, particularly buttons like Emerald Blossom and Engulf, each of which have their own pros and cons. It might also be that an entirely new spell is instead the best way to approach the problem. Regardless of implementation, a button we can use to quickly react to unexpected damage without upsetting our pre-planned ramp sequences would go a long way towards rounding out the gameplay of the spec.
