Feedback: Evokers

[Linxy]

This thread is dedicated to leaving feedback on Evokers in Midnight. Look in this thread and in the Midnight Alpha Development Notes for adjustments and bugfixes made throughout the testing period.

Please note that off-topic or inappropriate posts will be strictly removed.

Apex Talents

Many Apex Talents are available for playtesting and may be selected using specialization tree points in the final specialization tree node. The current User interface (UI) is temporary for playtesting purposes and will be replaced with a final UI later in development. As with any test cycle, we will be adding more Apex Talents to the test over time and not all will be available with the start of the alpha test.

To help us refine Apex Talents, please consider the following questions as you playtest:

• How gameplay-impacting, exciting, and fantasy forward is your Apex Talent to you?
• Are your Apex Talents and new Hero Talents meeting the approachability goals laid out in our Combat for Everyone in Midnight article?
• Are there cases you would consider not selecting your Apex talent?
• Does the Apex talent disproportionally favor a particular talent build or Hero Talent tree?

For feedback regarding the changes on making the combat system more approachable for players of all skill levels, leave your feedback in the Combat Approachability feedback thread.

Thank You

We greatly appreciate all your feedback and are very excited for you to test out all the changes in Midnight!

[Linxy]

Augmentation

The goal of Augmentation’s changes is to simplify Ebon Might targeting in raid environments. Since it now applies to all members of the raid, there is no need to micromanage who it should go on. There will still be some buff management gameplay with Prescience, which will continue to have a smart-targeting option for those who do not want to swap targets between enemies and allies frequently. Overall, this should make raid gameplay much smoother and similar to dungeon gameplay.

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Destruction

Devastation is one of our simpler caster specializations and we feel most rotational spells and talents already align with our approachability goals. In Midnight, we’re removing Shattering Star and Firestorm and adding some fresh talents in their stead to continue to evolve gameplay, including a talent that allows Deep Breath to be used a second time. We’re also updating Flameshaper talents by removing Engulf and having the keystone grant an additional charge of Fire Breath with some gameplay around managing Fire Breath’s damage over time effect.

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Preservation

Preservation’s gameplay has always revolved around planning large healing moments and rotating a series of powerful cooldowns to deliver healing. We would like to simplify the planning gameplay by lowering the number of cooldowns they are juggling and by changing one of their largest healing combos - Lifebind. To compensate for lost power, their bread-and-butter healing spells will be more effective, particularly Emerald Blossom, Verdant Embrace, and Dream Breath. We are also making several quality-of-life adjustments: Dream Breath’s range is increased to 40 yards, Dream Flight now protects the Evoker while they are in flight, and Evokers now have the option to talent into a ranged version of Verdant Embrace. The end goal is that Preservation’s style of delivering healing is more intuitive and easier to pick up, while still being unique and Dragon-like.

[Camael-chogall]

While I haven’t been able to play with the APEX talents as of yet, and I’ll definitely need to play more before I throw down a big review, I want to say that Evoker did not need pruning–Engulf especially.

The spec just feels worse in every way now. Setting up big Engulfs was fun and engaging, and we simply don’t have it now. Shattering Star change is fine IMO, but please give us Engulf back.

[Vehy-tichondrius]

Or at least make the Disintegration “engulf” effect more dynamic and engaging. Maybe give us another DoT to consume and juggle.

[Xaphania-moon-guard]

Going to keep this brief, as I only play Evoker as an alt right now and there are people more qualified than me to give full feedback on all the changes.

I would love if you could reconsider removing Spiritbloom from Preservation. Even if it is not strictly necessary for it to exist within the context of all the other changes to the spec, I still think it is one of the coolest spells that Preservation has, and I would really miss it. I like the flexibility of being able to send it at rank 1 as an emergency single target heal, or at max rank as a big AoE smart heal, especially combined with Tip the Scales to instantly save multiple people from the brink of death. Also, the animation of the flower blooming in your hand while you empower it is gorgeous.

#SaveSpiritbloom

[Ledolgas-malganis]

Please consider making Source of Magic a group buff or remove it from the game. It is not fun. It is only annoying when you don’t get it.

I love the new dream flight absorb shield but perhaps it should last briefly after landing? Not a lot… maybe a few seconds or so to allow re-positioning.

I don’t know if this is a bug or intended… but currently when you cast Merithra’s blessing with Echo on the target, you only get the base reversion but not the echoed reversion.

[Utevoker-thrall]

About Preservation Evoker,

Being a Pres evoker since it originally dropped, and having the pleasure of teaching literally hundreds if not thousands of people about this silly yet amazing spec I was really worried about the Removal of Emerald Communion, Spiritbloom, Lifebind. Engulf however I’m extremely HAPPY to see gone. After being able to play the spec for a week, and the new changes I’m very pleasantly surprised about how we simplified the spec, cut down on buttons, but yet kept preservation still preservation. The spec as whole feels much more flushed out, our apex talent adds to the core of preservation, and we still have choices and interactions to play around which is what makes pres, well pres.

THE GOOD
Engulf’s removal was absolutely crucial to fundamentally change the spec, and healing in general. I could not have been happier seeing this gone as it’s heavily dominated the spec the entirety of TWW

BLOSSOMS BUFFS, in tandem with the changes in 11.1.5 where blossoms could no longer echo, the changes of Twin Echo’s and Field of Dream make this button somehow satisfying to press which has not been the case almost ever for evoker. For those reading this, you need to try it out and keep an open mind. This allows for some very flowy hybrid gameplay that gives us healing between our ramps, and allows us to add more buttons to our core. It FEELS good to press now… which before it never had! Might need someway to make it better for M+, but we can limit test that when we have harder healing content in beta.

Flameshaper, Everything this tree has to offer on Alpha right now is what makes preservation so unique and a standout spec to me. 2 charges of both our empowers that heavily interact with our kit and fuel our playstyle has been such an awakening for me. Just going through alpha with some people last night and constantly throwing out big empower spells, having tons of essence bursts from essence well and leaping flames, and a healthy amount of proc with merithra’s blessing felt like i could never stop just keep playing the spec and just never stop doing large amounts of healing. I cannot explain currently just How satisfying Flameshaper Preservation evoker is to play right now. Not only that, Flameshaper enables 3 playstyles currently which all have their own niches. I’m extremely happy with flameshaper.

Call of Ysera rework. Going into alpha our biggest concern was Dreambreath being pushed to the forefront of the spec, and Verdant Embrace being pushed to the forefront of the spec. Our worries thankfully where heard and Call of Ysera is just a passive now. This enables so many new gameplay loops and is EXTREMELY healthy for the spec in both M+ and Raid. For M+ it allows us to “react” to damage with upranked Dreambreaths if we choose, instead of having to VE first and then hold a long empower cast. For raid it takes away from the stress of needing to do another thing at all times for another thing, this also allows us to now look into potentially echoing Dreambreath as a solid suitable option. Overall extremely good change, feels amazing, plays amazing.

APEX TALENT I cannot stress enough about how almost perfectly our apex talent adds to the core and fundamentals of Preservation Evoker. Merithra’s Bloom has so many interactions currently when it comes to echo, you can echo the full effect and watch all these bolts bounce around between your allies and it looks amazing. Not only does it look amazing it adds another layer to our spec. Another button, it just overrides reversion, in our arsenal that fits and flows so perfectly with preservation.
The node that buffs Dreambreath and gives us a gaurentee’d proc of Bloom is really what does a lot of the heavy lifting. Being able to put out a big dreambreath ramp, or just small one and knowing that after you are gaurenteed to be pressing a reversion (merithra’s bloom) and watching it heal your low allies is something so satisfying that i cant explain in words. not only this but we have Dreambreath, as flameshaper, on 2 charges of a 20 second CD. It fits so wonderfully. Though it has its bugs, like consuming both stacks of your reversion, doesn’t store in stasis, bounces are giving temporal compression stacks.
The reversion node however is more of a strange cookie. It’s very simple to play around, and in M+ its a perfect addition to preservation, however in raid I worry about being reversion dominating our core playstyle. Giving your group 4% dr and 4% damage reversal for a total of a 8% damage swing (16% with 2 reversions since it echos) is a scary thought to think about when it comes to raid when we have such amazing other choices such as Dreambreath or Verdant embrace. All things are great in moderation, including reversion.

Current gameplay on alpha for flameshaper preservation feels satisfying. We have choices in what we do, how we heal, what we control, which brings me to:

Concerns
I’m going to try to do this in biggest to smallest concerns, so to start we need to address,

Chronowarden

With the removal of SB this hero tree has fallen from grace. The tree heavily relied around our empower spells, namely spiritbloom, and their interactions with Lifebind for healing. With those 2 main things essentially going away, it tries to have Verdant Embrace pick up the slack, which on paper doesnt sound horrible. You could do be VE ramps, instead of SB, like we did back in Abberus. However, this falls flat immediately when consume flame exists for flameshaper and does the same thing but better. Outside of that, the tree add’s almost nothing in terms of healing. Its a big DPS focused tree which is fine for M+, but if you ever need healing, as a healer, this tree is not going to help you in almost any way. The core and identity of Chronowarden is struggling and i fear in its current state it cannot compete to flameshaper in any context outside of just straight damage. Even with the call of ysera increasing our Living(chrono)flame by 50% at all time the spec still falls since flameshaper has 2 charges of our now main empower dreambreath, on a 20 second CD, and flameshaper MASSIVELY buffs Dreambreath. Talents like Double-Time also are caught out as flameshaper at base has increased duration of Dreambreath as just a stand-alone talent instead of needing to crit.
TLDR, Flameshaper adds to Preservation and makes it feel better as a healer, Chronowarden is currently a dps tree that as of current date does not really help or add to preservations gameplay. I wonder if almost maybe having this tree bring back Spiritbloom could be an option. This is supposed to be the “empowered focus” tree and currently it’s getting beaten heavily by flameshaper.

So far the changes have added many new good talents, such as Twin echo’s. But we still have many “dead” nodes that will never see play. Empath currently will never be used, the spec relies even more on essence bursts than ever currently, and giving up DB cast on either tree is very hard since they both contribute to essence burst gain. Just essence gain, and not a lot of it, feels pretty boring and i hope to see a meaningful choice arise there.
Same goes for Nozdormu’s Teachings. Since the dawn of time all of us preservation folk have tried to make this talent work in many creative ways, but it struggles to work since Reso sphere is just core to the spec, it fundementally allows preservation to function. Nozdormu’s has always been a great idea to think about but it’s never done enough. Reso sphere allows us to go wider with our ramps in raid and M+, allows us to spread reversions for lifespark, goldenhour, graceperiod, and now our apex talent and allowing us to keep our normal echo’s for our most powerful spells like DB. It’s just hard to envision how to make Nozdormu’s beat out something so flexible and core to the spec as reso has been. This is not asking me for a nerf to reso, weve seen what happens when reso gets touched. See s3 dragonflight for more details.

Tempo-charged. It’s a very hot subject right now for the preservation community, more often than not this talent feels punishing vs rewarding. It’s currently hard to build up enough Temporal compression stacks, if not impossible, as flameshaper for the amount of empower casts we have. Yes we always gain from this talent, but there is always that feel of dread like “it could have done more” Not only that, the talent doesnt work on echo’d empower spells, so if we go into a Dreambreath heavy season we have to essentially build up 4 TC stacks between our 2 dreambreaths on a 20 second CD and are incentivized to not cast Firebreath during our ramp phases. Which is rough since Firebreath now adds A LOT to our ramp phases with essence well and leaping flames.

Font of power has a power struggle now with Spiritbloom being gone. Font of power is used for 2 reasons. Spiritbloom, and Upranking Firebreath since it gains massive damage from Life force mender. In raid this talent never really was taken, and now never will be. For M+ it’s much easier to drop this talent and it leave the middle of our tree kind of dead as power nexus is also a talent we will never be taking. We have much better things such as Golden hour, new blossom talents, 10 seconds off Dreambreath, TA. All these amazing points to be spending our talents on, and the middle of our tree does not do anything for preservation or even have a meaningful choice like exhil burst, flowstate, or Time dilation choice nodes do.

Energy Loop is a TBD kind of talent right now. With the removal of EC our mana economy has the potentially to be rough with increased casts of Dreambreath. This talent not only is nerfed on alpha in terms of the mana we gain from it, but also is just significantly worse mana wise vs just casting a blossom with essence burst. the spell doesnt give enough mana, and it’s in an extremely competitive area for talents. The bottom of our tree has SO many options and its hard to justify Eloop even if our mana is bad.

The New VE choice node. at first glace this is such an amazing choice node for preservation, more ve’s or the choice to not fly! absolutely! however the talent is… struggling… to find its place right now. Wings of Liberty has niche lifebind scenarios for m+ only . It also was good for big stasis combo’s for Flameshaper with Call of ysera needs, but that is gone now (thankfully). Dream sim has potential for Chronowarden, but it is just struggling heavily on its own. I think that Wings of liberty having some interaction with lifebind, or it increases lifebind duration for M+ could be beneficial as a meaningful option for preservation, but i understand that we are trying to steer away from lifebind being our main healing focus for that content type.

Titan’s gift is an interesting one, its a semi powerful talent, just in an extremely hard place to pick up. It 's a lot more meaningful now vs alpha as we are incentivized to use blossoms a lot more with the amazing addition of twin echo’s and the Field of Dreams rework. I wonder if there is a world where it gets taken out of the bottom section of the tree and having it be another meaningful choice for those daring to use it.

The damage discussion. Evoker’s damage is currently heavily gated behind 2 things. a 2 point node at the bottom of the tree, lifeforce mender, and Chronowarden. I know a lot of people worry about more tiers of evoker being absolutely bottom of the barrel in terms of healer dps in raid, but then on the flip side being by far the most dps centric healer in M+. It’s very polarizing, to swap between the two. for reference you can go to logs and statistic healer dps. you can see this LARGE GAP in preservation evoker damage, and that simply people playing chrono for fun. Or people trying to heal as flameshaper. You can toggle it to dimensius and see that evoker is just 1/3 1/4 or even a fifth of other healers damage.

The Rewind CDR node seems very out of place now. I’m all for 2 minute rewind, but for the sake of the game and CD’s I wonder if that is just too much. But talent spot is a very high gateway talent since Time of Need and Energy loop are much harder pickups/not worth at all. I wonder if moving CDR to a capstone area, or just making rewind baseline a 3 minute CD could be a healthier choice and add/move a meaningful choice to artificers’ current area.

Lastly some smaller interaction things

Twin echo’s would benefit vastly by allowing it to stack to 2. In our current design space there is no world where we can spend our mana and essence on emerald blossoms. We will be heavily incentivized to use them on bursts. More often than not we get 2 stacks of essence burst. So in this world we have a choice to casts 2 blossoms, and miss out on our twin echo’s proc. Or we cast echo and we miss out on an extra blossoms cast, which would have gave us that extra echo cast. So we are essentially just missing out on using the capstone, or missing out on an entire blossoms cast, and that feels bad.

Along with Twin echo’s it would be neat if the extra cast of Echo would work with Temporal Compression to make up for stacks we are losing out on AND if it could give us 2 stacks of Ouroboros. This would lead for another meaningful decision in the spec tree.

The change of having Renewing Blaze being baked into Obsidian scales is very concerning for not only pres, but all of evoker. We are reducing the damage, on top of healing it back makes us just immortal in a lot of cases. and we can pair that with having our deepbreath/eons/TD make the damage we take over 10 seconds staggered. This might lead to some very… unintended… ways of soaking mechanics.

The current new class tree isn’t yet implemented so I will make another post on that when i see it. I’m very excited to see what’s coming.

Well, this post is getting a little long so ill cool it down for now, a lot could change with having more difficult testing grounds. Overall I’m extremely happy with preservation evoker FEELS to play and i can’t wait to see what we continue doing to make this spec even more unique, amazing, and perfection to play. Most of all, we as a community feel heard as preservation and I’m so thankful for that.

I apologize for any grammar or spelling errors I spent a long time writing this all out.

Thank you for your time,

YouTee

[Gilgvoker-tichondrius]

Hey yall,

Starting off by saying my perspective is strictly from a devastation, almost strictly mythic raid POV. There are some bugs that are messing with the flow of the spec quite a bit right now, so I’ll leave my thoughts on that for later once those are fixed (although Scalecommander & especially Strafing Run feel quite nice right now despite not having an apex talent, so good work on that ). For now, I’ll focus on UI stuff (I hope this is an ok place for that) and general class stuff, particularly the changes made in the most recent build.

UI Stuff

I’ll start by frankly saying that while I fully believe that you guys can get a decent, functional design for nameplates/cooldown tracking/boss timers ready for launch, I think your goal is a bit too ambitious. What you’ve accomplished so far is certainly SIGNIFICANTLY better than what the default UI has been capable of in the past (and this should be recognized and praised), and if the default UI is all we’d had for the past decade+ of playing, I would have no issues.

With all that said, that unfortunately isn’t the case, and it’s impossible to make up that much time in a single expansion’s development cycle; not in the sense of functionality, but customization. Everybody’s UI is different, and you simply won’t be able to make a UI that everyone is satisfied with without putting an obscene amount of time into it now, and more importantly, in the future.

I’m sure you’ve heard all this and plenty more enough times already, so I’ll give an example that will serve as more targeted feedback at the same time.

First: please add ticks of channeled abilities (Disintegrate) to the default cast bar. Thank you.

I have (currently) 3 issues with the new default nameplates:

1. Bombardments (Scalecommander) isn’t tracked on nameplates. This is a very large issue.
2. Fire Breath is currently being tracked under the “Shared CC” category, so it shows up to the right of the nameplate instead of above like other debuffs do. This isn’t a huge issue but is annoying.
3. Landslide isn’t being tracked under the “Shared CC” category.

Regarding the cooldown manager, I have three issues/requests:

1. Dragonrage isn’t a trackable buff, which is a bit silly considering it’s our major cooldown. This is a very large issue. Edit: It’s come to my attention that it is tracked on Dragonrage’s icon on the Essential Cooldowns bar. This seems a bit roundabout, especially if I don’t want to use that bar (I only want to track my Dragonrage duration, not its cooldown status). I would much prefer it be on the tracked buffs bar as well.
2. I would appreciate having dynamic locations for tracked ability icons rather than static locations. It doesn’t look nice having a big gap between icons because the two buffs currently active are set as the icons on opposite ends of the bar. Also, let us create more bars/move individual icons.
3. I don’t like that a bar is the only option for tracking buff duration.

A couple other general requests:

1. Give us an option to add time remaining to our debuffs on target/focus frames.
2. The “number on cooldowns” option doesn’t track the remaining cooldown for abilities that have multiple charges unless you have used all charges available. E.g. if I have a charge of hover available, it will not show the number for the cooldown of the other charge. This might be a bug?

While basically all of my concerns will be addressed if the above points are addressed, I think they reveal the larger issue that I’m concerned about: we are now fully reliant on you to add things that are missing, or fix things that are incorrect, or allow customization in ways that make things more aesthetically pleasing, not to mention any accessibility issues. While the UI changes remain a big focus in development this is somewhat fine (making a forum post or putting in a bug report every time a new tier bonus isn’t being tracked properly or something breaks with a new patch and having to wait for a fix sounds terribly exhausting, but I digress), but you have to recognize that this is your new commitment for the foreseeable future. I really just don’t think that’s feasible unless you give us the ability to customize these things ourselves, which is essentially just addons with extra steps. If that’s the eventual plan, great, but I think everyone will suffer quite a bit for it until then. I personally would love a world where weakauras can’t interact with boss mechanics but we can still be free to customize our UIs.

This went a bit long so I’ll separate class feedback into its own post.

[Gilgvoker-tichondrius]

Feedback part 2

Class Stuff
Most of this will be dedicated to the round of changes made on Wednesday. I haven’t had the opportunity to test group or raid content yet, so most of my feedback is based off solo/world content, with speculation as to how they will impact raid, based on my own fairly extensive raiding experience.

Firstly, if Obsidian Scales is set to be our main defensive, please make it reset upon wiping to a boss encounter.

With that out of the way, I really want to talk about Renewing Blaze. This button is obviously very strong, especially with the extra benefits Flameshaper gets from it. However, a significant portion of its strength comes from it being on a separate button and the flexibility that comes with that. Baking it into Obsidian Scales leaves a lot to be desired, primarily:

1. We lose the flexibility of being able to use different defensives for different types of mechanics/damage profiles.
2. Renewing Blaze only healing the mitigated portion of the damage taken feels very weak, especially as Flameshaper.

My big issue with this is that when I press Obsidian Scales for a mechanic, I expect Scales alone to allow me to survive and let my healers heal me to full. In cases like this, the Renewing Blaze portion doesn’t benefit me in any way – I was going to be healed anyway.

If I am doing content where I don’t have a healer, e.g. Delves, the healing doesn’t feel sufficient to help me stay alive. I have already experienced this while questing: I can pull several mobs and press Obsidian Scales, but it just slows the rate that I’m dying a bit. My health doesn’t really go up, and when I leave combat I’m still low enough to need to recuperate or sit there and heal myself. With the previous version of Renewing Blaze, I could use it to mitigate all the damage I took and recover all of my health quite quickly.

I understand that most, if not all, classes had defensives pruned, and as such, this is my proposal. Either:

1. Keep Renewing Blaze as its own button, but either nerf it (less ideal) or leave it as a 90s cooldown (more ideal) since Fire Within has been removed.
2. Keep Renewing Blaze baked into Scales, but buff the healing that it does.

I personally believe that a 90s cd Renewing Blaze + Obsidian Scales is a satisfactory defensive core now that Twin Guardians has been removed.

I alluded to it before, but the big issue I have with Renewing Blaze’s essential removal is that we lack any real options for recovering from damage. Verdant Embrace and Emerald Blossom heal for very little, even with Panacea talented, and even now I find myself often having to hover away from mobs and Living Flame myself during times when I have no cooldowns up. In Midnight, I don’t have those cooldowns to begin with, so I expect to be hover living flaming quite a bit more, and have had to do so quite a bit while questing.

If you are set on removing Renewing Blaze as its own button, better options for recovery would be great. Devastation lacks the spec aura and talents that Preservation has to buff our healing abilities, so they have become quite weak. On alpha right now, in the raid at level 90, Panacea costs a talent point and heals me for a whole 1% of my health bar when I press my healing spells. Emerald Blossom and Verdant Embrace aren’t much better, coming in at ~3% and ~6% of my hp respectively. Considering their cooldown, this feels absurdly weak. It would go a long way if these were buffed, especially Panacea – that talent feels particularly weak even amongst the three.

Now I’d like to talk about Devastation’s newest defensive, Stretch Time. I don’t know how else to say it, so I’m just going to say it: this talent is ABSURDLY broken for any type of group content. When I was discussing our defensive options above, I failed to mention this talent simply because I believe there’s no way it goes live in its current state, and don’t want to plan on having it.

This talent will essentially make us immortal in most group content, particularly for Scalecommander with Strafing Run. We will essentially have our own personal, stronger Time Dilation for every boss mechanic, giving our healer 10 seconds to heal us through the damage instead of taking it all at once. It won’t be quite as strong for Flameshaper since their Deep Breath is a 2 minute cd instead of the ~40 second (or less on multi target) cd of Scalecommander’s, but between the possibility of taking Onyx Legacy or even Strafing Run themselves to reduce the cooldown, it certainly isn’t weak for them. I’ll certainly be happy if this talent goes live in its current state, but I absolutely don’t expect it. If it does, you can just ignore everything I’ve said: we won’t need anything else (except maybe better recovery options still).

I don’t have any commentary really on Strike from Above; it feels like it will be a nice talent to have if you have the points to spare. I eagerly await the new class tree layout.

[Dydymus-malganis]

Devastation Feedback for Alpha 1-2

Edit notes: Added more bugs and UI issues; trimmed parts and replaced headers for clarity; rewrote Flameshaper section to focus on the current gameplay feel and hopefully actionable feedback

List of known issues impacting testing of Devastation:

• the title of the Devastation section of the lead post for this thread is “Destruction”
• Azure Sweep does not grant Essence Burst
• Fire Breath’s cooldown is not reduced by Causality when dealing damage with Pyre
• Fire Breath’s cooldown is reduced by double the normal amount from Causality when dealing damage with Disintegrate
• Deep Breath’s cooldown is reduced by double the normal amount from Wingleader procs
• Twin Flame will hit mobs you are not in combat with
• missing apex talents (will impact hero talent interactions and spec talent affordability)

Notable UI issues for Devastation

• Fire Breath displays as a SharedCC on Nameplates, not a Personal Debuff
• Some debuffs don’t display on Nameplates: Bombardments, Permeating Chill, Deep Breath, Melt Armor, Landslide
• Some buffs cannot be tracked in the Cooldown Manager: Strafing Run, Dragonrage
• There is no way to track the number of Squadron Commando Pyres remaining in a Deep Breath cast (edit: there is a buff but it’s not in the cooldown manager)
• the new icon replacement for Mass Disintegrate does not reliably swap in, or swap back, on both Action Bars and Cooldown Bars
• the new icon for Mass Disintegrate looks like a dracthyr soaring; should look more like a multi-beam Disintegrate icon
• the default cast bar should show the ticks of channelled spells like Disintegrate to aid with chaining

I withheld my class feedback over the first week of alpha since it’s difficult to judge the feel of the spec without its apex talents and with significant bugs impacting hero talents. With those caveats, I will share my initial impressions; overall, the simplification represents a return to the straightforward fun of Dragonflight, with a focus on mobility and casting Empowers, Essence management, and more Deep Breaths. Reviewing the major changes so far:

Dense Energy

I did not expect this to be removed; Pyre now always costs 3 essence. Spamming Pyre while moving is what makes Dev aoe fun, so I’m suspicious of efforts to slow it down, but so far it feels fine.

Azure Sweep

A nice addition, play will depend on talent costing. I think this should hit everything around you, like a Holy Nova or Arcane Explosion; it looks weird to spin your tail but not hit mobs standing next to you when you target one farther away.

Shattering Star

Shattering Star had a confused identity as both a combo piece (press before a big hit for the damage amp) and generator (press on cooldown for essence burst). We rarely got to play around the damage amp, because the free essence burst was too valuable. I am happy to see it become a passive effect, which also makes Eternity Surge stronger, adding a reason to uprank in single target.

But I will miss Shattering Star’s damage amp; without this it only adds damage that could have been baked into Eternity Surge. I liked the way the Undermine tier set’s Jackpot effect generated high, random uptime of Shattering Star, and always wished it was tied to Eternity Surge as the trigger. Additionally, Eternity Surge already needs two talents (Eternity’s Span and Font of Magic) to go big in aoe; this makes it need two more to feel strong in single target.

I would rework the change like this:

• bake upranking into Eye of Infinity: Eternity Surge deals 15% increased damage to the primary target per empower level reached
• combine Shattering Star and Star Salvo into a single talent: Eternity Surge critical strikes launch a Shattering Star at their target, dealing Spellfrost damage
• bring back the damage amp as an upgrade node: Shattering Stars crack their target’s defenses, increasing your spell damage to them by 20% for 4 seconds

This would play into Blue spells’ themes of critical strike and focused damage, make the stars a bit random, and keep the identity of Star as an amplifier. I would compare this to Destruction Warlock’s Eradication talent; a small bonus rewarding staying on one target.

Firestorm

Firestorm becoming passive is good, but this concentrates too much power in one hard-to-reach talent. I also wish it counted Volatility bounces to increase the rate of procs.

Scalecommander

Scalecommander is in a great place. More Deep Breaths, bigger Mass Disintegrates; lots of relevant talents. The gameplay is there, but I have some lingering complaints:

• Mass Disintegrate should hit 5 targets; 4 is a weird number, why not 5? Most aoe is tuned for 5, and the visuals look better with 5
• Bombardments still have no aoe scaling and lose prio damage due to splitting, which feels wrong for a “hit this guy” marker
• Debuffs aren’t trackable on nameplates, and there is no way to track your Squadron Commando’s Pyre ammunition

Optimal play requires staying in flight until all Squadron Pyres are expended, delaying your second Deep Breath to not overlap Melt Armor, and juggling multiple Bombardments for Extended Battle and Wingleader. With no easy way to track Squadron Pyres you are flying blind and hoping they hit. Melt Armor aligns with Imminent Destruction, which is trackable in the cooldown manager, but the debuff itself should display on nameplates. Bombardments has a visual indicator that isn’t attached to nameplates and doesn’t show the duration.

These issues have UI fixes, but why not address the gameplay instead? Melt Armor and Imminent Destruction could extend, overlap, or pandemic; let me choose the right time to re-cast Deep Breath, instead of aiming for the 6-second window between the first debuffs and Strafing Run’s timeout. Squadron Commandos should continue flying in a straight line after you end your Deep Breath, until they have expended all their Pyres, so you don’t need to track their ammunition. Extended Battle should be a flat duration increase, a bombardment damage bonus, or extend only one active Bombardment per cast; buff Wingleader to compensate by increasing the scaling to 4 or 5 targets.

Extended Battle forces us to tab-target and apply Bombardments to two mobs, to abuse the double extension per cast for more Wingleader procs. This is annoying; tab-target doesn’t work well, and you don’t want to accidentally put your bombardment on a low-health mob that will die with it active. Bombardments should go on priority targets, and there shouldn’t be a penalty for spending two charges on the same target. It’s also over-valued; the original duration of Bombardments was 10 seconds, which easily allowed 100% uptime on a boss, but with the nerf to 6 seconds, Extended Battle became mandatory, and Diverted Power has never seen play. I would like Diverted Power to be a competitive talent; perhaps make Diverted Power’s proc chance increase with the number of targets hit, trading split bombardment damage for more Pyre casts, and make Extended Battle a single-target option.

Lastly, I will miss the Commandos sticking around to cast Disintegrate. Please add this to the hero talent; it has fantastic visual and thematic appeal, and adds much-needed prio damage to our aoe. The “reporting for duty” voice line falls flat if they fly away immediately. (If they won’t stick around, maybe change this to convey that they are only joining you for a bombing run. Give me a fighter pilot’s “On you, Blue Leader!”)

Flameshaper

This spec feels flat, and has lost the effects that made it fun and interesting for me (bursting with max-rank Fire Breath and Engulf). There’s little new gameplay involved in managing Consume Flame. Your essence abilities both reduce the cooldown of Fire Breath, and reduce its duration; there is no back-and-forth between building up your dot as a resource and spending it down with consume, like the new Unholy Death Knight design. Without a way to extend Fire Breath’s duration separate from consuming it, or guaranteed extra charges of Fire Breath, it amounts to a passive damage increase and duration decrease, like the first version of Fulminous Roar.

The only new tech is the second charge of Fire Breath, which hides the impact of consume if you start with 2 charges ready, and allows you to delay your Fire Breath without wasting part of the cooldown.

Because Causality and Consume are triggered by the same effects, the dot will always be consumed before Fire Breath comes off cooldown, and this is entirely up to tuning, not any gameplay choice or a result of doing your rotation optimally.

The current tuning (10 seconds consumed per Disintegrate, bugged cooldown reduced by 5 seconds per Disintegrate not 2.5) leaves a small gap between the dot expiring and cooldown recovering; it would be larger if the cooldown bug were fixed, but the same if consume was then reduced to 5 seconds per cast.

This means that if you start with 2 charges of Fire Breath, the dot expires before your first cooldown, but you can refresh it immediately with your second charge. Your first charge will regenerate while you consume the second debuff, and you can continue this way for a few cooldown cycles. But the cooldown ‘gap’ accumulates with each cast, and eventually you will have no charge available when your current debuff expires. After this you never recover; you never regenerate a second charge, and there is always a gap between your debuff expiring and first charge coming off cooldown.

The only agency you have to correct this is to skip a cast of Fire Breath, so you can get back to 2 charges. It feels like you will want to do this to have 2 charges ready for Dragonrage. You will never get a charge back naturally, unless you have downtime out of combat.

Meanwhile, Consume Flame discourages upranking Fire Breath because the shorter dot leaves less to consume. This makes Fire Breath feel like it’s no longer an empower spell. I am used to Devastation having a dot with a duration (24 seconds at rank 1) that is longer than its cooldown (~20 seconds due to Causality), and ‘managing’ the dot by upranking the empower to reduce its duration.

This has replaced our Empower-based dot-management with managing a 2-charge cooldown, by trying to spend our extra charge in a way that will let us consume it, filling the gaps in uptime created by consuming our first charge on cooldown. Once you run out of runway, it becomes cast-on-cooldown Devastation with a too-short Fire Breath. You can hold your one charge until you have essence to consume it with, but delaying a big spell isn’t fun, and this just moves the uptime around on the timeline, doesn’t increase it.

I can see this 2-charge gameplay working, but it will always feel bad when you don’t have 2 charges or don’t want to spend your 2nd charge. I personally dislike the implications of lower uptime and the disincentive to uprank, while for some the dot doing more damage makes up for it. I need to regen a 2nd charge to get back to the interesting bit and can only do that by skipping a cast.

The simplest thing that would fix this for me is some event that periodically (or randomly) refreshes a charge of Fire Breath. That way you are always juggling two charges, trying to consume both dots.

Conclusion

I have a lot more to say about the Devastation talent tree and changes I would like to see, but I’ll end this here to keep the focus on the changes Midnight is trying to make. I hope we get to see the apex talents soon, as that will warp perceptions of both hero trees and costing of spec talents. I am not excited about the new Flameshaper, but can see it working with some tweaks. But Scalecommander is fun and just needs continued iteration on the UI, or gameplay tweaks to minimize optimizations requiring buff tracking.

[Jereico-stonemaul]

Quick Augmentation Evoker Feedback

Overall quite excited for Midnight when it comes to Augmentation; just wanted to share some rapid-fire thoughts and feedback.

What looks good?

• Raid-wide Ebon Might
• Apex talent, Duplicate
• Scalecommander Hero Talents
• New class talent, Strike from Above

What’s on my mind?

Prescience and Shifting Sands

Prescience is relatively low-impact overall, but is now Augmentation’s only targeted damage buff. Shifting Sands now applies only by proximity, where it used to prefer Ebon Might targets.

Suggestions: Perhaps put a bit more power into Prescience, and/or have Shifting Sands prefer Prescience targets.

Chronowarden Hero Talents

Scalecommander has been the overwhelming favourite on Live for some time, and the new additions to Aug seem to continue to favour Scalecommander’s damage profile. New Hero talent, Chronoboom, is not useful as-implemented, as you’re better off holding Tip the Scales for Breath of Eons. New Hero talent, Energy Cycles, is difficult to manage without WeakAuras to help avoid wasting Essence Burst.

Suggestions: Change Chronoboom to 60 seconds to match the tier set version, or rework this talent. Energy Cycles could provide an extra stack of Essence Burst above the base cap of two, like other similar effects. Chronowarden probably needs an overall tuning pass.

Command Squadron Buff Tracking

New Scalecommander talent, Command Squadron, requires you to watch buff stacks while actively flying during Breath of Eons to make sure that all of the Pyres have been cast.

Suggestions: Add the Command Squadron buff to the Cooldown Manager, or otherwise add a visual/HUD element to indicate when your squad is done casting Pyres.

Miscellaneous Thoughts and Suggestions

• Please remove the ability to /cancelaura Ebon Might; this could otherwise lead to degenerate gameplay with the new design.
• Please ensure that the max range to extend Ebon Might is consistent with the max range to apply Ebon Might. On Live, it is possible to apply Ebon Might at 100 yards but fail to extend the buff past 45 yards.
• Stretch Time in the class tree is great, but probably too strong at 100% stagger; likely leads to unintended gameplay outcomes.
• Please ensure that Rescue does not interrupt any casted or channeled spells in Midnight, for the sake of redesigned Twin Guardian.
• Aug is still doubly punished when another DPS player dies in Mythic+, something that may have been reasonable on initial design, but makes less sense with the spec’s current output and tuning.
• There are still a number of spec tree talents that are too either too weak or lack any meaningful interactions to see play in PvE; something to think about going forward.

[Gilgvoker-tichondrius]

I was able to get some proper testing done with the new build so I’m back with spec feedback today, focusing on the new apex talent and tier set for now. Again, feedback is mostly focused on how it’ll play in mythic raid (with some mythic+ mentions).

I’ll put a quick tl;dr at the top of each section in case anybody wants to quickly skim through.

Apex Talent

Things I like:

• Ramping haste feels really good.
• Definitely makes a historically lackluster cooldown very powerful again.
• On a typical boss encounter (think Fractillus), this button will feel great.

Things I don’t like:

• It takes way too long to ramp to max Rising Fury stacks. Bloodlust is essentially over by the time you hit max stacks and get your damage buff.
• Promotes an ‘extend at all costs’ style of play for Dragonrage when combined with uncapped* Animosity that frankly feels really unhealthy. *A lot more on this later because it’s unclear which parts are intentional. Also, Power Infusion concerns lol.
• Really hard to utilize to its full potential on any fight with moving parts, and loses an insane amount of value in any content where you can’t utilize your full Dragonrage.
• Desyncs our damage profile from other 2 minute classes.
• Excessively high Dragonrage uptime with buffs like this create tuning concerns. The payoff needs to feel worth it, and make us feel powerful, not feel required to do a normal amount of damage.

We received our apex talent with this build, and bringing back a tweaked version of Emerald Trance was definitely a bold move. Luckily for us, having our apex talent be very similar to a past mechanic (Amirdrassil tier in this case) gives us good insight into how it will feel to play in raid and m+.

The biggest issues Emerald Trance had were that it:

1. Took too long to ramp for a lot of content
2. Was too hard to get maximum value out of because it severely punishes lost uptime and required planning in advance
3. Resulted in tuning that created a very flat profile and an underwhelming feel when not fully stacked on Emerald Trance

While Rising Fury being ramping haste instead of damage mitigates #3 a bit, it doubles down on the first 2 points. I feel that taking 30 seconds to hit the damage increase window is way too long. In raid encounters with important adds or a burst window you’ll have to constantly plan your Dragonrage uses so that you reach your peak damage at those periods. On a lot of encounters that won’t be feasible.

I personally would prefer a shorter ramp up time, either by:

• Increasing the speed that Rising Fury ramps, whether by reduced time per stack or more power but fewer stacks, resulting in reaching max value faster
• Attaching Rising Fury stacks to something like empower casts. This would result in reaching max value faster on aoe, which is something this apex talent will struggle with in non-high keys. However, this skews in favor of Flameshaper since it casts more empowers.

With all that said, neither of those changes are realistic right now because of the changes made to Animosity. In my opinion, uncapping* Animosity was a mistake. It wasn’t listed in patch notes so it isn’t entirely clear if it was intentional, but Animosity is partially uncapped. You’re allowed 4 extensions via Fire Breath before it stops extending Dragonrage, but Eternity Surge is entirely uncapped. If this is intentional, I assume it was to prevent Flameshaper from uniquely benefiting from having more Fire Breaths and thus more extensions.

The result of this is some absurdly long Dragonrages: I can, at level 88 with not very good gear, reach 73 second long Dragonrages (as either hero spec) on aoe, and 63 second long on single target with bloodlust (68s aoe/58 or 53s st without bloodlust). Including Risen Fury benefits after Dragonrage expires, you’re spending up to 75% of your gameplay in a Rising Fury window (it’ll be even more in optimized gear and an optimized environment with PI). This is insane, and I think very unhealthy for the spec. It promotes building your talents and adjusting your gameplay around doing whatever it takes to reach the next Eternity Surge cast as soon as possible, even at the cost of sacrificing value from your other abilities, just to extend your cooldown and thus your haste and damage amp as long as you can.

My impression from the changes being made is that you want to push us into an uptime-heavy, Dragonrage focused playstyle, which is something I disagree with for the reasons I stated above. The very long Dragonrages enabled by this and uncapped Animosity also pose a slew of balancing concerns. If we’re spending half of our gameplay with a 20% haste and 15% damage buff, are we going to be tuned around always being able to maximize our Dragonrage duration? Where exactly is our damage going to peak compared to other classes if the uptime on our cooldown is so high? Will the payoff be worth it? How severely will we be punished for letting Dragonrage fall early? These are all my concerns after testing these talents.

In short, I like the design, but the details seem likely to cause issues in actual play, especially when combined with uncapped Animosity. This apex talent is very gameplay warping, very challenging to use to its full potential, and very punishing. With some tweaks I think it can be quite good, but I don’t think it’s there yet. I think a dev note detailing what kind of cooldown you want Dragonrage to be (and thus what kind of profile you want Devastation to have) would go a long way and could help me and others give some more targeted feedback.

Tier Set

Things I like:

• Adds a bit of flexibility to our damage profile
• Being able to pool it for when you want to use it is nice

Honestly, not all that much beyond that unfortunately, but it might grow on me when I get to actually play with it and see how it feels in practice.

Things I don’t like:

• It never really feels good to press Azure Sweep. I did my testing taking note of times where I felt like I would want to press Azure Sweep with the new tier. Currently it very rarely feels good, although a big part of this is because Azure Sweep cannot generate Essence Burst like Azure Strike can (presumably a bug). In a world where it can generate Essence Burst, it will feel a bit better, but still not great. This issue is hugely exacerbated when inside Dragonrage.
• Makes an already busy rotation feel even busier, particularly inside Dragonrage as previously mentioned. Uncapped Animosity contributes a lot to this.
• Feels very shoehorned in. It doesn’t really have that much synergy with other abilities, so it feels a bit clunky to press. Put differently, it feels like I’m forced to stop what I’m doing to press it because you told me you want me to press it.
• Forcing us to talent into Azure Sweep to utilize our tier set creates awkwardness in an already pretty bloated spec tree and throws a wrench into some potential talent builds.

The tl;dr version above covers most things I want to talk about regarding our new tier bonus, but there are a few things I’ll expand on here. First, I do quite like having an essentially on demand, instant cast burst ability that I can pool. It will be good for filling in gaps in your rotation, providing quick damage when you need it, and having a strong button to press during movement or when low on essence.

With that said, with the current design state of Dragonrage + Animosity + Rising Fury, the rotation feels too busy for an extra button like this, especially with how frequently it’s available. In all of my testing, on both single target and aoe as either hero spec, I never feel like I’m glad that Azure Sweep exists. There’s almost always a higher priority button that I’d rather be pressing. It does feel okay outside of Dragonrage and Rising/Risen Fury windows, but that constitutes such a small amount of our gameplay right now that it doesn’t really feel impactful. I think if our cooldown uptime gets limited it will feel better, but it’s hard to speculate on that without being able to test it myself.

Regarding talent tree issues, Azure Sweep is in quite an awkward spot on the tree. It’s surrounded by very strong talents, and feels like no matter what we have to give up something important for it. If it was an impactful button this would be fine, but with it feeling more like we’re only pressing it because you told us to, this doesn’t feel very good. If you want Azure Sweep to be a staple button for us, I feel like you could easily rearrange a few talents for it to be easier to take. For example, combining Ruby Essence Burst and Azure Essence Burst into 1 talent and making that the initial Devastation talent, then having Pyre and Eternity Surge be the tier 2 talent nodes in their place with Azure Sweep taking the place of Eternity Surge. Eternity’s Span could take the current place of Azure Sweep if you want to keep the symmetry of the tree.

In short, the tier set feels like a miss with current design. Essence burst generation like Azure Strike will definitely positively affect the usefulness of Azure Sweep, but I don’t know yet if it will affect how it feels to use.

[Gilgvoker-tichondrius]

I wanted to give some more spec feedback today. Dragonrage and extend gameplay has kind of taken over both hero specs, so it’s pretty hard to get a feel for how things will be in the event that’s changed, but there are still some things I can share some thoughts on.

Scalecommander

Things I like:

• Solid gameplay loop
• Strong profile
• I personally find uptime gameplay very fun and this spec is a good example of it
• Strafing Run was a great addition to the spec
• The Imminent Destruction/Melt Armor/Maneuverability changes were very solid

Things that I think could use some work:

• Having to wait for Dracthyr Commandos to finish casting their Pyres before I can cancel my Deep Breath doesn’t feel good, especially with Strafing Run (it’s also annoying to track)
• Our snap aoe feels underwhelming with the Charged Blast + (very warranted) Commando nerfs.
• I know this is an unrealistic ask, but I really miss the ability to strafe during Deep Breath like we had early in Nerub’ar Palace. Having that much control over Deep Breath felt amazing.

This spec feels mostly complete, which makes sense given not much has changed. I know numbers tuning isn’t really something to worry about at this point, but with how integral Charged Blast was to our snap aoe (combining it with the Pyres launched by Dragonrage), I have concerns about our aoe burst with it – along with our Commandos’ Pyres, which served a similar purpose – being nerfed.

It remains to be seen how the essence economy will feel in a potential world where we don’t spend most of our gameplay in a Dragonrage/Rising Fury window, but with Shattering Star no longer being an active ability and losing access to Arcane Vigor as a result, this could be an issue.

Flameshaper

Things I like:

• Despite not having that many buttons, the rotation feels like it flows pretty well with the additional resource generation and shorter Fire Breath cooldown
• The aoe is really fun, especially in cds (I am a Pyre enjoyer)

Things that I think need work:

• Consume Flame consumes way too much flame currently
• The Consume Flame + Catalyze interaction is bugged. Catalyze should double Consume Flame’s damage while Disintegrating (because Consume is based on the damage of Fire Breath, which Catalyze doubles by making it tick twice as fast). It works for the first tick, but then doesn’t work for the remainder of that Fire Breath.
• There are quite a few talents that could use some work, some doing essentially (or literally) nothing and others being too strong. I’ll list them below.
• Talent pathing feels really rough. It feels hard to make a satisfactory hybrid st/aoe build (like you’d want in keys) without sacrificing a lot of single target or aoe.

I’m going to say something controversial and say I’m glad Engulf is gone.

With that said, the reworked Flameshaper has a fair few issues that need to be addressed still. Many of them involve talents, but a big one resides with the core of the hero spec in Consume Flame. The most recent change turbocharged the consumption of this to 10 seconds per disintegrate (with Azure Celerity) and 10 seconds per pyre. If your goal with this change was for Fire Breath to never be on the target, you succeeded quite nicely.

I logged some dummy tests for both single target and aoe, around 3:30 for each test, although unfortunately I can’t link them here. On single target, my Fire Breath uptime, using only rank 1 Fire Breaths, was 46%. On aoe, it drops to 39%.

This seems counter to your stated intent that we maintain Fire Breath on the target. Even perma r1ing (since there’s no reason to uprank anymore with the Scorching Embers revert) isn’t enough to keep it on the target for very long. On aoe most of my Fire Breaths manage to stay on the target for around 3 to 5 seconds.

I don’t necessarily have an issue with this, as all of this consumption gets converted into Consume Flame damage (or will once Catalyze’s interaction with it is fixed). However, it creates some strange anti-synergy with some talents such as Burnout and Unravel. I think Consume Flame went from too little consumption to too much, and the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle.

I mentioned that there were quite a few talents that could use some work. I’ll go through them one by one.

• Burning Adrenaline and Font of Magic (to a lesser extent because this isn’t Flameshaper exclusive) feel very underwhelming for a spec that doesn’t want to uprank Fire Breath anymore and for which Eternity Surge is a weak button.
• Separating the former choice node in Engulfing Blaze and Ruby Embers into two talents and forcing us to take them both to get to Feed the Flames is a brutal talent tax. Those 2 talents feel incredibly underwhelming – currently on live, Engulfing Blaze is the lowest priority talent for Scalecommander, only taken on pure single target, and Ruby Embers’ sole purpose is to buff Engulf for Flameshaper. They really need some love to feel useful, although I argue 1) their position on the tree as prerequisites for Feed the Flames is very strange, and 2) they have very strong competition from other talents, so I foresee them only being taken to access Feed the Flames.
• Lay Waste is essentially useless for Flameshaper, but is required to take to access its main aoe talents. Making Deep Breath stronger (i.e. more than just a filler button for when you have nothing else to press) for Flameshaper would probably help with this.
• It would be good if Twin Flame could be flagged as a Red spell so it benefits from Scorching Embers.
• The on-or-off nature of Conduit of Flame feels bad. It doesn’t feel good to lose a significant amount of damage the moment the target’s hp reaches 49.99%. Maybe allow us to benefit from it during Dragonrage?
• I don’t think Lifecinders actually does anything since the Renewing Blaze change.

I mentioned talent pathing issues, but it essentially boils down to Feed the Flames being extremely hard to talent into without creating a full-on aoe build. Azure Sweep being mandatory doesn’t help matters – as it stands, it feels really hard to make a build that doesn’t give up something big, with a lot of the traditional cleave talents being really hard to take. I mentioned some potential talent tree changes in my post above, and even if those aren’t the changes made, just having one additional talent point would go a long way.

All in all, I don’t dislike the rework, but it still needs some work.

[Dydymus-malganis]

Devastation Feedback - Alpha 3

Notable bugs and UI issues:

• abilities with charges don’t show charge counts on action bar icons (Hover, Fire Breath)
• still can’t track Melt Armor, Bombardments, or Landslide on nameplates
• still can’t track Squadron pyres in cooldown manager buffs; also can’t track Rising Fury
• Azure Sweep still doesn’t generate essence burst
• new Mass Disintegrate icon is better-ish but still doesn’t swap correctly
• Azure Sweep also needs a better icon, the current one is from a leatherworking reagent, maybe recolor the tail swipe icon?

Quick thoughts on this week’s talent changes:

• Inner Radiance feels out of place on the class tree; it’s a very weak self-heal buff pathing to strong damage nodes
• Imminent Destruction rework is great; it’s sometimes hard to spend all the stacks during Dragonrage or Risen Fury, but this is much more flexible and you don’t lose the stacks while charging empowers like you would waste buff uptime

Quick follow-ups to previous changes:

• Please try to address bombardment tab-targeting for Extended Battle, an optimization that requires UI support; any change that makes Diverted Power more viable would help Scalecommander catch up to Flameshaper’s essence burst generation
• Please take another look at Recall. This ability is most useful for boss fights where you need to stack, so you can breath through the boss and immediately return (removing the gcd penalty would improve this a lot). This utility is lost if you can’t Recall on your first Deep Breath with Strafing Run; you have to stay where you landed, hover back, or immediately breath again. It’s unlikely that you’ll want to return to your 2nd breath spot but not your 1st. Honestly it might be fine to make Recall automatically snap you back at the end of every breath; I only talent it when I want this behavior. (Ideally all breath abilities should use the Scalecommander cast style, with a shorter max flight time and ability to cancel early, and Recall would upgrade cancelling to return you to your starting point.)

Apex Talents

Let me get this out of the way first: This is a rework of the Amirdrassil tier set, which was EXTREMELY unpopular, as evidenced by public polling for the DF S4 tier set, and I am shocked to see it return. There were plenty of other ways to buff Dragonrage, but we’re getting an effect that less than 20% of Evokers wanted to ever see again.

In raids or boss fights lasting several minutes this Apex is ok; the downsides are weaker damage during Lust on pull, an overall flat damage profile, and awkward timing around add spawns, burst phases, or any forced downtime; but the overall effect feels powerful. Gilg’s feedback covers this, so I will focus on M+.

There are two main issues that make this feel terrible in dungeons:

• Time-based ramp-up plays poorly with coordinated cooldowns and sporadic downtime
• A special bonus that triggers after Dragonrage ends will often be wasted out of combat

In dungeons, the slow ramp-up feels much worse, because dungeon routes are often organized around large pulls with everyone’s cooldowns, and you rarely have the opportunity to pre-ramp. With too much delayed power, your allies kill everything while you ramp … and then you leave combat. You can’t maintain Dragonrage while you’re not casting, so you’ll trigger Risen Fury while running between packs.

These problems are already apparent even in Alpha dungeons. It will get better in harder content where fights last longer; but you’re at the mercy of dungeon design, healer mana, and tank behavior (“dude please chain pull”). A shorter ramp would help, but it needs to scale with external haste somehow to not feel left behind during Bloodlust.

For this Apex to feel fun and less frustrating to me, it needs to have a ramp driven by player action, not time waiting, and it should avoid time-based rewards that will land outside of combat.

The simplest way to do this is to grant stacks when you cast empowers; this gives more value right away if you started with empowers ready, reaches maximum sooner with high haste, and avoids incentives to delay empowers while you wait for the damage buff. Additionally, Risen Fury’s effects should be granted immediately, not after Dragonrage ends; this could guarantee a minimum 20s of its effect in case you fail to maintain Dragonrage, but we want to overlap buffs with our cooldown, not give resources after combat ends.

It’s also worth noting that Risen Fury’s free essence bursts are extremely easy to overcap, wasting their value even when you stay in combat long enough to use them. This was worse in Amirdrassil with Hoarded Power, but only 4s between essence bursts does not leave much time to cast Deep Breath, empowers, or utilities. This needs some tech like increasing your essence burst cap to make it less punishing. This is also why Dragonrage falling off after combat feels terrible; you are given a reward with only 4-8s to spend it, you can’t carry them with you over a long run.

Uncapped(?) Animosity and Rising Fury

I agree with Gilg that extreme Dragonrage duration is unhealthy; this echoes Fire Mage Combustion tuning problems. But I and many others felt that Devastation lost its core fantasy and fun when this effect was capped at 4 extensions. Our core gameplay loop was “cast empowers as fast as possible, especially during Dragonrage”; it was important to enter Dragonrage with both empowers ready, and cast your 2nd set asap to get a 3rd.

With the cap at 4 extensions and increased duration, Dragonrage uptime became almost free; you can cast your first empowers a few seconds late, and still get a second set before it expires; there’s no special benefit to getting them earlier, or getting a 3rd set in, as any ‘extra’ empowers during Dragonrage are just damage spells.

I do want Dragonrage to prioritize empowers more, but I don’t need infinite Dragonrage, and fully expect this to be tuned down. The unhealthy talent incentives and disparity between hero specs should be addressed (you could remove Event Horizon and Ashes in Motion, make Volatility not proc Causality, etc).

The relationship between Animosity and Rising Fury seems critical, and communicating the intent clearly would indeed help a lot. I want the gameplay of charging of your Dragonrage with empowers, but not the agony of a time-delayed ramp and burdensome maintenance. I do think the best way to make the ramp fun is to tie it to empower casts; other triggers could work, but leave the possibility of delaying empowers till after the buff activates. This overlaps with Animosity, so it might be a good time to re-evaluate Animosity’s purpose; instead of extreme duration, perhaps a more immediate payoff:

• Dragonrage reduced to 90s cooldown, 14s duration
• Remove Animosity from the spec tree; put Tyranny in its place, put Causality in Tyranny’s place, add a new capstone
• Apex 1: Dragonrage grants Rising Fury, increasing your Haste by 4% until Dragonrage ends. Casting an empower spell extends Dragonrage’s duration by 4s and grants an additional stack, up to 4 times.
• Apex 2/3: At maximum stacks of Rising Fury, you gain Risen Fury, increasing your spell damage by 8/15% for 20s
• Apex 4: A new spell that replaces Dragonrage, only castable once during Risen Fury

Flameshaper

Now that cooldown bugs appear to be fixed, I have tried playing Flameshaper more, and basically: it’s still boring. It doesn’t change anything about your rotation (except delaying a Fire Breath cast for unhealthy reasons) and has no visual appeal. It doesn’t feel like a “master of manipulating dragon flame” and you’re certainly not “maintaining” Fire Breath on a target by deleting it constantly. I don’t find it more fun in aoe because Volatility can instantly delete your dots.

The only somewhat interesting gameplay I have found is on exactly two-target fights; you’ll want to alternate Disintegrating both targets to consume both dots. This is a unique incentive that Flameshaper provides over base Devastation, ironically similar to spreading bombardments as Scalecommander. But it goes away at 3+ targets where you cast Pyre to consume all targets simultaneously.

It’s fine to have a passive spec that buffs dot damage, but seeing your dot fall off normally means you did something wrong. I don’t see the motivation here; why am I trying to consume flame, what special mastery or technique does it demonstrate, and why should I feel good that I have consumed all the available dot?

I still think this needs some kind of rotational impact; a way to extend or ‘manipulate’ fire breath, at least in aoe. The two-target effect has me wanting something like this:

• Pyre consumes 5s of dot from all targets hit, damaging them and adding 2s of dot to the primary target for each dot consumed
• Disintegrate consumes 10s of dot, damaging nearby enemies for 20% of damage dealt to the primary target, reduced beyond 5

This would create ‘funnel’ gameplay, where you Pyre off a priority target to collect your Fire Breath onto them, then Disintegrate them to burn it off quickly. Any effect that extends Fire Breath’s duration, forcing you to spend extra time consuming it, would make more sense out of the 2-charge ability to delay your next cast.

I don’t expect a major rework of the design but want to make this point clear: Consuming away a fixed-duration dot feels bad to me, not exciting like building up Wither stacks. Once it’s gone, additional spender casts do nothing new. Buffing the duration can only make this less painful, it needs a gameplay incentive to pay attention to your dots.

[Danktalon-proudmoore]

Augmentation Evoker – Midnight Beta Feedback

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The Good

• Ebon Might affecting everyone – Best change ever. This is exactly what Aug needed!

• Strike from Above (glide speed & height increased by 20%) – Great tweak. I love any update that further separates real Evoker Dracthyrs from “fake” non-Evoker ones (warrior, mage, etc.). Keep leaning into those unique Evoker-only traits.

• Improved Defy Fate (100% more healing, 1 min shorter CD) – Sick! Augmentation is the true master of time (Nozdormu POG!) and this talent fits that Bronze theme perfectly.

• Command Squadron + Duplicate – Such good concept. It really feels like you’re commanding a squad of elite Evokers, which fits the lore beautifully. Would love if they were your size so it doesn’t look like you’re leading whelps, but the overall idea is top tier.

• Regenerative Chitin (Blistering Scales deals more damage & doesn’t lose charges) – Great direction. Aug lost a lot of interaction with tanks and healers after Ebon Might stopped affecting them, so this helps bring that back even just a little. Lore-wise, Augs don’t discriminate by role! They empower all allies so more talents that benefit tanks/healers would be awesome!

• Motes of Possibility – Super fun addition! Glad they float to you instead of forcing movement. The talent granting Prescience is a neat touch, but Prescience itself feels weak. 3% crit just doesn’t feel exciting when it procs.

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Needs Improvement / Rethink

• Source of Magic (mana restore) – Scaling with Empower level doesn’t work well in raids. Fire Breath and Upheaval are usually cast at level 1 for uptime efficiency, which means minimal mana restoration. Could this be decoupled from Empower levels without nerfing the total benefit?

• Twin Guardians – The new “mini Spatial Paradox” effect is interesting, but 3 seconds is way too short. Also, the name doesn’t really fit now that it doesn’t provide a shield. Rescue alone is already a strong healer save from point A to B so not sure this talent is worth a point in its current form.

• Ricocheting Pyroclast – Feels wasted on single-target encounters and can’t be skipped efficiently. Upheaval is only accessible via this or Quell (kick time reduction), which isn’t needed in raids. Please consider reordering that part of the tree so we can opt out on ST fights.

• Perilous Fate – The slow and attack speed reduction don’t add much. Tanks die from mechanics, not autos, and mobs are usually stationary during DPS burst. A rework could help it compete better with Chrono Ward.

• Black Attunement – 2% HP buff is extremely low. Since Aug’s recent design leans toward DPS and mobility buffs, adding a bit more survivability balance here would help.

• Prescience & Shifting Sands – These feel like afterthoughts post–Ebon Might rework. If Ebon Might now affects the entire raid, Shifting Sands should too. Otherwise, we’re back to micro-managing buffs, which defeats the whole purpose of the change.

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Aug Scalecommander Feedback

As Scalecommander, we’re supposed to “spread” bombardments for maximum benefit, especially for Breath of Eons cooldown reduction.
The current rotation feels clunky:

Ebon Might → Fire Breath → Upheaval → cast Eruption on primary target (1st bombard) → tab to a second target → cast Eruption again (2nd bombard) → tab back to the main target and continue DPS.

This constant target swapping feels really awkward, especially when tab targets a low-HP add that’s about to die.

Chronowarden doesn’t have this issue. Its rotation is far smoother.
Would it be possible to make bombardment automatically spread to a nearby valid target instead of requiring manual target swaps?

That brings up a second issue:

In single-target raid fights, Scalecommander suffers heavily because there’s no second target to spread bombardment to. This means Breath of Eons’ cooldown reduction is effectively twice as effective in multi-target encounters compared to pure single-target.
Chronowarden, by contrast, is consistent across both.
A rework to make Scalecommander’s Breath of Eons CD reduction scale more evenly between ST and multi-target scenarios would go a long way toward balancing the choice between the two.

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Player’s notes

Overall, I love the new direction for Augmentation. The Ebon Might change is a home run.
I’d just like to see a more balanced buff distribution. Right now most of it focuses on DPS and mobility, which makes sense, but more interactions that benefit healers, tanks, and overall survivability would make the spec feel complete.

Also, huge props for diving deeper into Bronze Time magic. The theme and lore integration this expansion are absolutely sick.

[Frequentlee-illidan]

Augmentation Evoker Bug - Interwoven Threads

There is currently a big bug on beta where the talent Interwoven Threads will not reduce the cooldown of Deep Breath (Only Breath of Eons). I think its important this is fixed, especially in PvP where Eons is usually weak.

Similar to War Within Launch, the scalecommander maneuverability talent only worked for Breath of Eons for the first 1.5 seasons, not normal Deep Breath

[Terraion-wyrmrest-accord]

Please, I am BEGGING you to bring engulf back. To me it’s what made devoker so fun to play. Especially in single target. Lining it up felt so damn satisfying more so than almost anything else in this game. I don’t want 2 charges of flame breathe. I want engulf. Please return it to flameshapers.

I’ve mained evoker now for 2 expansions in a row. It’s my favorite class and aug has been through the ringer and no idea how or where it’s going to end up. But I really would prefer the gameplay loop involving engulf be returned in midnight.

but uh really like what you’ve done with scalecommander.

[Supersonic-scarlet-crusade]

What happened to Unravel?

Warriors still have wrecking throw to damage shields. Unravel is similar, why was it removed?

[Dydymus-malganis]

@Danktalon-proudmoore

This constant target swapping feels really awkward, especially when tab targets a low-HP add that’s about to die.

I’m glad to see some Aug players agree this is annoying …

@Danktalon-proudmoore

Would it be possible to make bombardment automatically spread to a nearby valid target

… but you don’t want this. Other classes have 2-target dot applicators, and they don’t work well. If you can’t choose the target, it will not always go on a good target, and you can’t disable this if you want to extend it on the primary target instead.

@Danktalon-proudmoore

This means Breath of Eons’ cooldown reduction is effectively twice as effective in multi-target encounters

It is intended that Breath cooldowns are shorter in AoE - because Wingleader’s cooldown refund per proc scales with target count, it will be shorter when your bombardments hit 3 targets than 1 or 2. More of your aoe spell in aoe feels good, and this affects Deep Breath as well as Breath of Eons.

Instead of encouraging spreading bombardments, they should remove the NEED to do so, for example by making the extension only apply to ONE active bombardment - either the shortest or longest duration, or most recently applied - just like Discipline’s Atonement extensions. Wingleader’s effect can easily be buffed to refund any lost cooldown from nerfs to Extended Battle, by increasing the base amount or maximum target count; and the scaling per extra target can be adjusted to tune single target vs aoe.

While the simpler gameplay would remove an element of ‘optimization’ it lets you focus on the target you actually want to hit. Devastation in Dragonflight was appealing to me partly because its entire design prioritized staying on the highest health target and made cleaving off of them simple. I want this back, and Aug has enough things to track without juggling two bombardments.

I should also note that, while Extended Battle might seem natural for Augmentation, which mainly plays around extending Ebon Might with Eruption, the effect is poorly designed for Devastation. It’s the same design as original Causality, counting each CAST instead of Disintegrate ticks or Pyre targets. This means it’s more efficient to proc with Pyre (one gcd) than Disintegrate (1.6 gcds). Although it’s not always optimal to do so (and this is reduced a lot by the removal of Dense Energy) you can get more bombardments by casting Pyre in scenarios where you otherwise wouldn’t, or by clipping Disintegrate casts. This should be removed, and I wouldn’t mind if Extended Battle didn’t exist or was a flat 2-4s base duration increase instead.

We already get more bombardment uptime per essence cast, from Causality reducing the cooldown of Empowers to apply another bombardment. Augmentation also gets this effect from Accretion. Technically Diverted Power (the choice node with Extended Battle) increases bombardment uptime by giving you more essence bursts, which feeds into these effects; but it’s much weaker than Extended Battle. Both talents need attention, and eliminating dot-spreading from a class that never wanted it would be a win for approachability and reduced UI burden.

@Terraion-wyrmrest-accord

Please, I am BEGGING you to bring engulf back.

He’s dead, Jim.

Engulf was fun but it was a problematic and unintuitive design. Shattering Star, Scorching Embers scaling with Empower level, and the scaling with number of active dots, made too many conditions to optimize around, and it took a lot of testing in sims for the community to determine the best way to use it.

I think with all of these effects gone, Engulf (triggering Consume Flame only) could simply be cast any time while Fire Breath is active; the only potential combo left is with Iridescence. That would have been ‘approachable’ enough but seems like an extra button merely for the sake of an extra button.

Flameshaper doesn’t need Engulf, it needs to build around Consume Flame the way Hellcaller builds around Blackened Soul. Ashes in Motion and Deep Exhalation increase Fire Breath uptime, but don’t feel like meaningful talents when you already have Causality and Consume away the duration. Expanded Lungs and Fulminour Roar are passive buffs to Consume’s damage with no proc or visual. Twin Flame has nothing to do with anything. Engulf was the heart of the spec in War Within, with 6 talents directly contributing to it (counting Enkindle for the dot scaling). Consume Flame doesn’t feel that way, and neither does having a 2nd Fire Breath charge.

@Supersonic-scarlet-crusade

Unravel is similar, why was it removed?

It wasn’t. It’s now a passive effect triggered by Fire Breath damage. It’s bugged right now and doesn’t apply on every tick or with Consume Flame. But when it works it does quite a lot of damage to shields.

The button was removed because it was an annoying button to press that wasn’t worth casting most of the time and needed huge buffs to be stronger than other buttons. This is a good change, for all Evoker specs.

[Kitsûnë-moon-guard]

If you are unhappy with the pruning done to Evoker, please contribute to the thread that I made here: Over pruning and the deafening silence from class developers

If we can provide overwhelming negative feedback in one central place that lights the forums up, then Blizzard cannot ignore us anymore, because obviously the class specific devs do not care.