Reverse execute is hard to balance and feels lame when it’s strong and weak.
Some ideas I can think of that I personally feel would be more interesting
-Red spells have a chance to ignite
-Reduce cast time & charge time of red spells
-Blue spells have a chance to proc eternity surge % increase (Changing the scintillation talent to be baseline since it’s mandatory anyway)
-Blue spells chance to stack a cold dot
The mastery is very lame in its design, even though Giantkiller makes you do more damage the higher the HP, from a gameplay perspective it just feels like you get weaker as the fight goes on, while I can understand the design niche of a “reverse execute” but I’m sure most Devokers would just prefer a regular execute most of the other classes have.
I’d like to see more interaction with Essence Burst and more ways to generate it.
Something like:
Your spells that consume Essence Burst deal X% more damage and healing.
Then rework talent trees to provide a way to generate EB on-demand.
I respect the desire to have a niche. But it’s like
PvP - You do an ABSURD amount of upfront damage & you either 1shot with combos + dragonrage or not
M+ - If another class bursts before you get your long fire breath cast off… then there goes a major portion of your damage and you’re feeling lame
Raid / Bosses - You get weaker as the fight goes on
This is Titanic Wrath.
This one is tricky because, while RNG is frustrating, the general outline created by the current design is pretty clear. EB from our fillers rewards uptime, and EB having the proc rate that it does means that Disintegrate can be powerful, which in turn means free Disintegrates are powerful, which further means that the guaranteed EB procs from Dragonrage are a big bonus. A lot of the weighting of our damage profile is dictated by how, how often, and when we generate EB.
Mimicking the current spread in a more deterministic way would probably require something like having it reduce the Essence cost of a spell by 1 per stack, and then have it stack up to 6 times with it being guaranteed to proc from Living Flame when cast on enemies, and with friendly Living Flame and Azure Strike having a 50% chance to proc it. Weak aura would have to be changed into a 3-part stacking icon on either side.
Yeah. I wouldn’t mind seeing that talent reworked and making the mastery more flexible though.
This is a good point. I do think we need some way to guarantee procs outside of DR though.
My thinking is like a 45s or 1m that instantly generates 2 stacks. That would go a long way towards improving talent synergy.
100% this
the more and more I play evoker the more I discover how badly it was designed.
it baffles me how someone who is in charge of WoW class design even came up with this rotten garbage and everybody on the team thought it was a good idea.
And more importantly, how come this passed beta testing.
They got feedback all the way back in alpha over devokers mastery and people not honestly liking it. It was asked to be changed over and over and over and over again. People gave a ton of feedback over it from alpha to beta, to release. And nothing was ever changed.
I hate the mastery. Yeah it feels nice on high hp targets and during dragon rage, but when bosses get lower and dragon rage is on cd, it just feels so awful.
This I entirely agree with. I pretty exclusively prefer non-RNG to RNG when it comes to rotations. To me variance should come from applying a deterministic rotation or a set of spells with deterministic effects to dynamic circumstances. Raids and dungeons and PvP in the modern era are well over the complexity threshold necessary to no longer need wacky RNG shenanigans in the actual rotations to keep players from being bored. An omniscient being should, hypothetically, be able to map out the entirety of a fight and know exactly what will happen at any moment, with the “fog of war” coming from the fact that there is simply too much information and too many possibilities for an actual human being to process that quickly.
An idea I’ve seen that could add more synergy is having Dragonrage have its CD reduced by consuming EB stacks. Further rewards uptime and obviously when DR is up we have total control over how things play out. But a super easy thing you could do otherwise or as well would be to turn Hoarded Power (pretty boring for a capstone!) into something like:
Hoarded Power
Passive
Upon consuming them, Hoarded Power stores Essence Burst, Burnout, Snapfire, and Iridescence stacks, up to their maximum charge count.1 min cooldown
Releases your Hoarded Power, granting all stored charges of Essence Burst, Burnout, Snapfire, and Iridescence.
Fits the name and would be fun for the whole family. Would also give Devastation its own cooldown version of Echo. Could need a longer cooldown but you get the idea.
My primary concern with any evoker change is that it’s very easy to have our mobility turn us into in-and-out assassins (if we have access to on-demand, insane burst with little set-up) instead of the high-risk, mid-range, sustained damage that we are now. The latter is much more unique and has a much higher skillcap. I never want to see the spec be like chilling in the backline waiting for the right moment to double Hover dash in and blow everything and then bonus dash out to wait for the next go.
after reading the PTR notes for 10.0.5, they clearly are capable of making big changes. Look at Druids. Half of their talent trees have been reworked.
it’s not too late to rework the Devoker talent and mechanics. I really don’t want to wait until 10.1 or 10.2 to really enjoy this class.
I hate it, and by extension dragonrage.
It sucks to feel like you’re getting worse as a fight goes on. I advocated hard for a mastery redesign in the beta. Either for it to work backwards or work at both ends of the healthbar, without ever actually bottoming out and becoming useless at any point in the fight.
If not just doing something else entirely, maybe something with essence burst, empowered abilities, or scintillation/volatility.