Feedback: Scalecommander in The War Within

Classes Evoker
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TL;DR: The idea and fantasy for Scalecommander are great! Deep Breath/Eons is stressful to use and needs improvements. Mass Disintegrate is awesome and has many possible interactions. Bombardments seems cool but needs explanations. Might of the Black Dragonflight is bad for Deva. Onslaught is a dead talent for raid.

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The fantasy/idea around Scalecommander seems really really nice and is very well represented on the tree! The idea of Mass Disintegrate is awesome and Deep Breath becoming an important ability is quite nice (but brings quite a few problems, which I will talk about below). Also, we really need some clarifications and improvements. I’ll talk about each talent below.

Maneuverability: Deep Breath/Eons often puts us in dangerous situations because it locks us in animation while still allowing us to take damage. Improving Deep Breath/Eons to prevent us from taking damage from puddles, fiery ground and AoE damage from moving skills (e.g. berserkers from everbloom / juggernauts from atal’dazar) would be ideal to make them more reliable, fun and less stressful to use. Also, the ability to control the character while flying will be an important aspect of the tree because if it’s badly designed (e.g. hard to control, turns too slow, hard/slow to stop the cast), the tree may be doomed.

Mass disintegrate: this talent is really cool, both from fantasy and gameplay aspects, it may interact with a lot of talents we have, for example to reduce cooldown of our empowers, to buff our pyre damage, etc. It is super important to know if these interactions we are assuming are correct because it may make or kill this tree as well. Please, do make these interactions happen, it would be awesome. Also, we need to know if the buff/proc for mass disintegrate is stackable (so we know if we can cast both empowers, one after the other).

Bombardments: Speaking of fantasy, it seems to be a fun talent that represents well the idea of the scalecommander. In-game it may be a bit boring if we don’t see the procs, since this is a passive skill. Gameplay-wise, we need to understand how it works to judge if it’s good or bad. What is the proc rate? Is it stackable on the same target? Can two or more evokers mark the same target? How many players in the raid may proc it? What are the damage numbers?

Might of the Black Dragonflight: 10% increased damage to black spells is really bad for Deva because it only buffs 1 skill (Deep Breath).

Onslaught: only 1 instant cast for living flame at start of combat is really bad for raid, since it will be used only once during an entire encounter, so it’s a dead talent - but seems decent for dungeons. We could use a new talent here or maybe adjustments considering the lenght of the fight for raids.

The other talents seem to be ok in my opinion.

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I really like this idea. It could work similar to recall where recast places you at the NPCs end position if you want.

I would lose my mind if they made this change. Bombardment triggering the use of pyre and making firestorm a viable ability to path for in the talent tree sounds like a fantastic bit of synergy.

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It doesn’t really matter how much base damage Mass Disintegrate does compared to using Pyre. Mass Disintegrate marks the target for Bombardments, that does AoE damage and interacts with multiple hero talents. If you’re not casting Mass Disintegrate then not only are all the Bombardments hero talents doing nothing, but you’re casting fewer Deep Breaths cause of no CDR from Wingleader, which renders the rest of the Deep Breath hero talents mostly pointless. The overall damage benefits from casting Mass Disintegrate should always be tuned to make casting it worth it in every situation, or the entire hero tree is dead.

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85

Hadn’t though about this, but that would decimate our uncapped AOE damage to have to spend our first 6 essence every fight on disintegrate to apply bombardment. Then the bombardment duration being 12 seconds means that with power swell wed barely Regen the 6 essence by the time it needed to be reapplied. This effectively kills pyre use.

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If we have no Essence Bursts ever, then yeah potentially it might see a decrease in Pyre usage, but I’d assume a Charged Blast Pyre will always be used regardless in AoE (which will stake very quickly from Mass Disintegrate on 3 targets). If we do have Essence Burst, particularly for Mass Disintegrate, then we can still slip in some Pyres, like during Dragonrage.

Given Ruby Adept hasn’t been released yet, I’m fully expecting that to focus more on Red spells so would anticipate a Pyre focus in that hero tree.

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pres doesn’t have pyre though

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Could work with blossom/convert it to a red spell.

It’s going to need something like that to make sense, given how little of the healing kit is red-based.

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So? All of the released hero trees so far where there’s no overlap in toolkit between the two specs are in the same situation. For each tree Blizz has just split the hero talents to do similar effects to different spells based on the specialisation.

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The only red spells that preservation has overlap with dev. It wouldn’t really make sense to be have living flame for pres and then pyre for dev instead of just living flame/fire breath for both.

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I really don’t like using Deep Breath due to the long animation lock that comes with it.

I don’t want that skill to be a focus at all.

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Hello, I’ve been playing Evoker Devastation since the expansion started and then also Augmentation when it came out. From Devastation’s perspective the tree looks good but I wouldn’t like to have to use Disintegrate in AOE pulls to be able to set the Bombardment procs so I think Deep Breath should be able to apply the Bombardment effect on packs and using Deep Breath on Single Target could be awkward. Getting into a AOE pull in an M+ and you need to cast Disintegrate first for 3 adds and then casting pyres for the true aoe dps doesn’t fell right . I also don’t like the idea of ​​having to use Blue Side of Dragons in AOE when they could find a way to make Firestorm work and from the point of view as spec support augvoker; is cool but this only gives damage to your character so you wouldn’t be providing much help to the party , at the end of the day that’s why people like augvoker , for been a support . Thank you for the efforts .

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I think the only issue with having Bombardments have full pandemic like Hover means… It will have 100% uptime on ST because causality pushes our empowereds down. Which, I suppose will be a good thing to have permanent bombardment uptime on a primary target but maybe trickier for them to balance other things around.

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My biggest problem with this tree is that it feels SO disconnected compared to other trees. Looking at other trees such a Templar or Harold for Paly, they have the main ability and the rest of the tree augments and buffs that 1st one with the capstone adding to the main ability.
This tree is all over the place, the 1st ability (Mass Disintegrate / Mass Eruption sounds amazing and bombardment sounds okayish, we need to see Alpha to see how it is implemented, the proc of it, and damage) but the tree descends into this whole “Deep Breath” use that not many people use as it is in the 1st place and even less in single target settings. And it is randomly Split between required use of deep breath / breath of eons even in single target and a random right side that does whatever with living flame… It doesn’t build on itself like other hero trees.

Also, Mass Eruption causes “Eruption to hit up to 3 targets” But eruption already causes damage split between nearby enemies… Is eruption being changed to a single target (Which means non scalecommander Aug Evokers lose that damage) or will Mass Eruption do something like “Hits up to 3 targets and causes additional spash damage split between all enemies?”

Personally, my feedback is, move “Maneuverability” and put it where “Might of the Black Dragonflight” is. Make it a choice node with Tailwind (Be able to steer your breath OR Immediately have a hover when you land.)
And PLEASE just make Might of the Black Dragonflight buff Black / Blue and Red spells damage by %10. (this seems redundant as it focuses on Aug Evoker as Dev has 1 Black spell that does damage.
Move (Changed) "Might of the Dragonflight and nimble flyer a talent on the Evoker tree (They need the Defence there.)

Get rid of Hardened Scales and Menesing presence and make it a choice node that augments the breath abilities. More DPS or More Defence
“Deep breath / Breath of eons causes the targets hit to take volcanic damage over X seconds”
OR
“Deep Breath / Breath of eons causes foes hit to deal %10 less damage for X seconds”

Make the right side of the tree augment living flame like the 2 right powers do. The 3rd being a choice of something like.
“Living flame / Azure Strike extends the duration of your active hover by 0.5 seconds”
or
“Living Flame / Azure strike reduce the cooldown of hover by 0.5 seconds.”

Make the capstone work and buff the Main Ability or buff Bombardment…

-"Mass Disintegrate has X% chance to cast a lvl 1 eternity surge per target it (Stacks with scandalization) and Mass eruption extendss active Ebon Might(s) by 0.5 seconds per target hit (Stacks with the current 1 sec eruption already does)

Or like Paly Hero Talent tree tie it into the other abilities that the tree uses.
-“Empower spells have a %100 chance to trigger a bombarment when used on targets marked for destruction”

Scalecommander / Evoker is the top of the top leaders of the Dracthyr soldiers, as such limiting them to “Hit more targets and do the breath attacks because black dragonflight yada yada” makes no sense.

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95

Not sure how many people participate in Epic Battleground PvP, but this spec feels specifically designed for that area of the game. The capstone talent allowing for changing the direction of deep breath will fix the most annoying aspect of that ability; people slowly walking out of the way of danger while you approach.

Being able to call targets by putting the bombardment debuff on them, specifically being able to focus call out healers will be a decent change and one that will really make evokers feel like the talent tree is grasping that class fantasy of Scalecommander.

Most people say Deep Breath isn’t a very useful talent, but in PvP, the healers always hang out at the back of a pack of players. An evoker can fly through the pack, damaging and stunning everyone, target the healers for bombardment and then teleport back to the safety of their own pack. Since we can’t target three people specifically I assume the talent will just pick two people near your primary target to hit with disintegrate, which is unfortunate, but it will still be enough to disrupt back lines.

The dot from deep breath will ensure that bombardment procs, and at that point its all gravy. The spec doesn’t address general lack of survivability outside of strictly running away from combat and I wish that would be acknowledged.

As a spec we are expected to fight near the front lines, with limited tools to mitigate damage, literally becoming a huge target for enemies because they know they can hit us before we even get in range to do any damage, and are squishy as all heck. If we are expected to “command” in battle, throughput in PvP needs to be increased a lot. Having big burst when targets are at full health to then go into panic mode if our 1 ability that undoes our bad mastery is on cooldown feels downright horrible.

That is a general gripe with the spec overall, but one I thought would be addressed with the new talents. These talents do little to change my overall gameplay, but they do modify my PvP burst rotation slightly, now being forced to use disintegrate instead another empower ability, and being forced to clip it for the bombardment buff alone, otherwise I will not be able to recall.

Maybe extend the duration of the recall window if you plan on adding things to the burst rotation?

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Scalecommander as a theme sounds amazing. Scalecommanders are like the captain or commander of the team in my opinion and class fantasy delivers with bombardments.

One thing that is both good and bad is Deep Breath / Breath of Eons. It is so polarizing. I love the fantasy of being able to fly over my enemies and unleash a devastating attack. However, in practice it doesn’t always land well… often leading to deaths because of where I land.

I would like to see maneuverability change breath of eons and deep breath and have a scalecommander theme… instead of flying over your targets, what if breath is changed to an ability that launches you a little bit into the air (think Rain from Above for Demon Hunters in PVP). The purpose is to bypass ground mechanics. It could launch the evoker into the air (almost like hover and we can move around) and it does the same thing as breath of eons or deep breath does to enemies + bonus damage on our regular abilities we cast while in the air… something like this OR maybe it casts a more powerful mass disintegrate + bombardments (which then connects the rest of the tree). This to me feels like a commander ability. One importnat reason for this is because, to play breath optimally, you want to cast it as a short distance as possible so you can get back to your regular sequence of casting - this new ability would change that so now I do not have to worry about that.

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This is what I had hoped Deep Breath and Breath of Eons would’ve became. Safi’jiiva Sapphire ultimate attack in MHW is even blue and red combined. Could change gold for Aug but you get the idea. A Dragon doing a Dragon blast attack in the air.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QeZOFJm-ID4

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Scale Commander has potential.
Instead of giving additional cleave. How about having it boost the damage of key abilities more while updating the visuals to match the increased power.
Say Disintegrate would get stronger as you channel it, but would pulse with a massive pulse at the end doing either aoe or increased single target damage.

Just a thought.

You could also rework the tree to be more of an actual commander. Say your abilities build up charges, once you’ve maxed out those charges you can call in an air strike from your fellow dracthyr.

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Mass Disintegrate innately boosts the power of Disintigrate after empowers (ST or AoE) and considering how our primary means of using it is to chain cast them to maximize uptime, having a pulse at the ‘end’ will end up lackluster given each cast of Disintegrate will usually be 2~5 disintegrates cast without stopping.

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The thing is, you’re not considering how mass disintegrate will interact with our kit.

With causality, each time disintegrate does damage it reduces the CD of our empower spells. This could be adjusted to compensate, but either way it’s likely that this will be a really powerful interaction. That doesn’t even start to consider how good mass disint could be with scintillation if all of the beams can generate the ES.

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Summing up most of these posts:

What people LOVE: Mass disintegrate, the possible interaction with causality, Scintillation, possibly charged blast, imminent destruction, etc.

What people LIKE: Bombardment seems fine for the tree, Unrelenting Siege could add some interesting rotation choices for longer boss fights, diverted power as an interaction with bombardments for essence burst procs could lead to very long disintegrate chains.

What people DISLIKE: Deep breath seems like an odd choice to incorporate into your main rotation - currently it isn’t used in really any capacity beyond repositioning and during mechanically inactive portions of the fight to avoid death by swirly

What people HATE: Onslaught feels WEAK compared to other T2 talents, might of the black dragonflight is much more synergistic for augmentation (Devastation only has 1 Black dragonflight ability with Deep Breath) and the capstone Maneuverability is uninspired and disappointing - maneuverability of deep breath and breath of eons should be innate to the evoker ability without having to spend a talent point for it

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