We’ve gotten a much better idea of the impact these changes have made on gameplay over the past few weeks, and after actually getting to play the new Flameshaper in raid I feel that I’m comfortable enough to give proper feedback. Note that this feedback is purely from a raid perspective, and I also won’t discuss bugs unless they directly impact gameplay. If it matters, I have extensive high end experience and have spent a pretty good chunk of time learning how to play optimally (people that frequent the evoker discord might recognize me).
There’s a fair amount of missing (or incorrect) information in here, and while I give feedback I’ll try to correct the issues that I see. I apologize for the length of this post (take a lunch break in the middle), but there’s a lot I want to say. Note: I apologize for the ugly links, but I don’t have the required trust level on the forums to make them look pretty. 
General Evoker Things:
The changes that affect the base class are pretty limited, being only the replacement of Hoarded Power (RIP my beloved) with Azure Celerity, the change to the targeting of Eternity Surge, the Rescue change, and most importantly the change to the functionality of Scorching Embers to match the Augmentation version of the talent. Although the number of changes is small, the gameplay impact they have – especially in the Scorching Embers change – is massive.
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Azure Celerity: Replacing Hoarded Power meant that Azure Celerity had big shoes to fill. Multiple procs of Hoarded Power in a row was peak dopamine and made for fun gameplay moments ever since the beginning of Dragonflight, and my initial reactions to its removal were purely negative. With that said, I understand the logic behind its removal, and I feel that Azure Celerity is a worthy successor. The extra ticks of Disintegrate providing more cdr through Causality and more Scintillation procs (especially for Scalecommander, which I’ll mention later) make this a fairly powerful and well-designed talent that really takes off once Scalecommander mechanics get added to the mix.
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Eternity Surge: I have mixed feelings about the change to Eternity Surge. There are clear benefits to its new functionality in being able to hit spread mobs (including ones behind you, which might have some undesired consequences considering how hit-or-miss spell targeting on CC’d mobs has been this expansion); however, I feel that losing its effect of targeting enemies around your target has some drawbacks. The biggest issue is that to hit every mob in a pack now, we have to make sure we’re within 25 yards of ALL the targets in the pack, rather than being able to be in range of one target and knowing that it will hit everything around it (with some exceptions involving big mobs, e.g. Silken Court). On packs of mobs that are a bit spread out, this pulls us even closer to melee range in order to hit all the mobs, which in many cases is an undesirable outcome. I think it’d be nice if the new functionality was combined with the old to make it more flexible in different situations where one implementation or the other might struggle.
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Rescue: Cool change, probably a bit overpowered, funny that the impact it would’ve had on Mythic Queen pushed it back a patch.
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Scorching Embers: This is a BIG change, and it has a massive impact on Flameshaper specifically. I’d first like to clarify that it is not quite implemented in the way it is worded. The wording suggests that the damage amp scales with empower level, with each rank giving a 10% damage amp up to 40% at rank 4. However, it is actually implemented in such a way that the damage amp increases as the initial dot duration of Fire Breath on application decreases. In other words, the damage amp is equal to 240 / Initial FB Dot Duration. This results in some weirdness where a rank 3 Fire Breath (with Blast Furnace) only provides a 20% damage amp (240/12), or a rank 2 FB provides a 13% amp (240/18). Here’s a table of Scorching Embers amp values based on empower rank (https://i.imgur.com/bQjubCI.png). Note that this issue has been present in Augmentation’s version of the talent for the majority of this patch. However, with this implementation comes an unintuitive side-effect that you might’ve noticed in the table: by talenting Font of Magic and untalenting Blast Furnace in the class talent tree, we can reduce the initial dot duration of FB down to a mere 2 seconds with a R4 FB. The duration is extremely short, but for those 2 seconds Scorching Embers is providing you a massive 120% damage amp (240/2). Can you think of any hard hitting ability that might appreciate a 120% damage amp?
Flameshaper Things:
If your answer to my previous question was Engulf, you were correct. The Scorching Embers change has had stupid consequences for Flameshaper, allowing us to stack damage amps in Shattering Star (20%) and Scorching Embers (120%) to result in some truly stupid Engulf numbers. Here’s a couple examples to give you an idea of the kind of numbers I’m talking about.
Exhibit 1: https://i.imgur.com/vsrQqri.png
Exhibit 2: https://i.imgur.com/fCoat60.png Note that this fight has a 100% damage amp. Without it, it would’ve only been a measly 21 million.
Note that these screenshots were taken from heroic raid testing on Wednesday, when we were scaled to 631 ilvl, up to 8 ilvl below where most bis evokers are right now. Logs can be found here (https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/vf2At7FNgyDz6jYZ?fight=17&type=damage-done) for those interested.
The impact this has had on gameplay is that the optimal way to play Flameshaper is to stack all the damage amps you can in order to buff an Engulf every 20 seconds, e.g. SS > R4 FB > Engulf. You have a simple goal of applying a max rank Fire Breath and instantly removing it with Engulf within a Shattering Star window, with no regard for talents such as Burnout or Catalyze (you don’t even take it). It creates a gameplay loop where you have a huge spike in damage every 20 seconds, making it feel like the time in between doesn’t really matter that much (in reality a slight exaggeration: Engulf windows were ~43% of my damage on a heroic Crucible kill on Wednesday). While a slight exaggeration, the impression is still important for how it feels to play the spec.
While such gameplay isn’t necessarily bad in and of itself, I have three main concerns:
- The gameplay does not lend itself to being learned intuitively, and runs counter to how evoker has played for the entirety of its lifespan; not only is the wording on Scorching Embers incorrect, but untalenting Blast Furnace and using max rank Fire Breaths is not something that you would expect to be optimal for a boss encounter. Not maintaining Fire Breath on a single target for as much time as possible feels wrong.
- The gameplay punishes high ping. The timing for casting SS > R4 FB > Engulf before SS expires is extremely tight without a certain amount of haste, and players that play with high ping are unfairly punished. As a reference, on live servers I play with 35 ping and am able to do the combo easily with only 11% haste. On the PTR, where I have 80 ping, I wasn’t able to consistently achieve it until I reached around 16% haste.
- The gameplay punishes you harshly for missing an Engulf window, and has incredibly high variance. When 1 button is ~30% of your damage, whether or not that ability crits or having mechanics that prevent you from standing still for ~2 seconds to cast a R4 FB in a 4 second SS window result in huge damage swings.
As such, I highly recommend you take a look at how the spec plays now and reevaluate if this is how you wish for it to be played.
Gameplay aside, I believe that Engulf is a fairly weak button both visually and mechanically. In combat you barely notice the animation for Engulf, and for an ability that is meant to be the hallmark of Flameshaper, I believe it should be significantly more flashy. You’re telling me an ability that looks like this (https://i.imgur.com/y7tdSot.png) hits for 20 million? I also believe that casting Engulf should impact your gameplay more. Scalecommander’s Deep Breath and Mass Disintegrate are strong mechanically because they interact with each other and other parts of the kit through Bombardments and Melt Armor, and Flameshaper’s implementation being Consume Magic (something you’ll barely even notice on single target without looking at a log afterwards), a faster next cast, and time off your Fire Breath cooldown when you Engulf is comparatively very weak. A couple quick ideas I had were:
- Instead of reducing your next spell’s cast time, Engulf could give you a certain amount of haste for a period of time. Evoker gameplay struggles with consistently being at a constant cadence outside of bloodlust, and this could help solve two problems at once;
- Make your next X Disintegrate casts considered red spells. With the current Scorching Embers implementation this won’t get any real value considering Fire Breath is instantly removed by Engulf, but if it is changed this could be a way to make Engulf give a real payoff by making your next spells much more powerful. It’s also a good opportunity for your FX artists to make a cool red beam animation.
As it stands, Engulf warps the spec around itself because the ability itself is so powerful but feels like it gives very little payoff besides just hitting hard, making it feel very underwhelming especially when compared to Scalecommander.
Scalecommander Things:
I am one of the people that highly enjoys current Scalecommander gameplay, and I feel like its 11.1 iteration is a big step down. I believe that the loss of both Hoarded Power and our 11.0 tier set results in too big of a decrease in the amount of Essence Burst we’re generating.
This decrease in Essence Bursts affects how the spec flows; currently, our gameplay flows in a nice loop where we generate Essence Burst with our empowers/SS which gives us more Disintegrates to reduce our empower CDs to generate more Essence Bursts and give more Bombardments uptime to reduce our Deep Breath CD. When you remove a large chunk of the essence burst generation, the whole loop slows down, and 11.1 didn’t bring anything new to fill the void left behind, and you end up just casting Living Flame significantly more often. From a design standpoint, pressing your filler spell more isn’t really a bad thing, but Living Flame just doesn’t feel good to press. Maybe make Living Flame a bit more exciting to press? Let Leaping Flames hit the same target multiple times instead of healing allies? (this would also fix not getting a 2nd essence burst in dragonrage because your raid is at full hp, which would be nice)
When you play Scalecommander on the PTR, you can feel that you’re doing the same thing as in the current patch, except worse. The new tier set being incredibly bland does not help matters, as it minimally impacts your actual gameplay. The end result is gameplay that is simply unsatisfying when compared to the previous iteration. I understand that you don’t want gameplay to be the same from patch-to-patch, but I also feel like having the spec feel like a shadow of its former self isn’t the best alternative.
The saving grace for how Scalecommander feels to play comes with Azure Celerity. With the increase in Disintegrate ticks, the blue lightshow of Eternity Surge procs when chaining Mass Disintegrates is very satisfying, particularly on more than 1 target. These changes also result in Eternity Surge being a pretty significant portion of our damage on cleave/aoe, which is nice to see. Empowers should feel powerful, and they definitely haven’t (https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/NFA2KRcqw7CvLhaf?fight=81&type=damage-done&source=305) this patch, so this is a welcome change.
My tentative suggestion would be to give us an additional source of Essence Bursts back, either through ES like our previous tier gave us, or perhaps allowing the Shattering Stars casted by Jackpot! to benefit from Arcane Vigor and provide Essence Burst if you want to bake the power into the tier set rather than make it baseline. Another option would be to create ways for us to generate essence faster, rather than relying on Essence Burst as an end-all be-all solution for resource generation. This could be paired with a Dragonrage/mastery rework if you’re feeling generous, as essence burst as a mechanic is probably too powerful, but that is probably a discussion for another time. If I were to give specific criticism to guide development, I would say that casting both empowers and not always being able to immediately follow them with Mass Disintegrates in periods of low essence feels bad. If the intent is to have us consider our essence usage more carefully, I don’t think the payoff for doing so is rewarding enough.
I apologize again for the length of this post, but you’ve reached the end! Thanks for any consideration you give a lone guy trying to make his favorite spec better. Feedback & criticism welcome.
EDIT: Scorching Embers has been hard capped at 40% with the most recent build, which kills the big engulf playstyle. This brings Flameshaper back to a more normal rotation (where we basically play base evoker and press engulf when it makes sense).