I know this isn’t a popular sentiment, but I’ve ALWAYS played support classes in any game that had them available. I don’t like being a straight up healer, but I love buffing, debuffing, and support dps. Blizzard finally gave me that in this game, and I have some complaints about Aug for sure, like “Why the Dragon and not another class?” Theming is a bit weird, but whatever. I got my support. Only…
The community has been extremely mixed on Evoker as a whole but especially Aug. It seems like the majority of people practically want Blizzard to just turn it into a tank, that’d seriously break my heart. To the point that I may just stop playing the game for a while because it’d be such a blow to me emotionally. This isn’t me saying “I’m totally gonna leave guys!” Nobody even knows who I am. I’m just saying I’d take a break from how bummed I was.
I’d be okay with them nerfing aug into the ground to keep it a support spec if they really had to, and I’d still play it and do my best even not getting invites to things… I just don’t want to see it be a complete failure and removed from the game or reworked to a tank.
The worst part to me is just that if they see Aug as a failure, then we won’t get any other support specs or classes that would make a LOT more sense thematically, or be really interesting. Like a warrior war commander spec with buffing shouts, or something. The big one, of course, being…I’ve wanted bard all the way back since April 1st 2008, and it seems like this was my chance. If Aug succeeded maybe they’d think about it. Maybe that was the plan… but I doubt that could ever happen now.
Thanks for reading or not reading my rant. My formatting is crap, but I tried to make it readable.
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bro… relax, there’s no indication that Blizzard is even considering making aug a tank spec.
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I know. My only concern is they basically said themselves it was a test and they were going to be gauging community sentiment, and sentiment is…very mixed.
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This game was designed SO hard on the “holy trinity”…the moment I heard they were going for a “support spec” I was like “uh oh…”
I REALLY REALLY want it to work, because like you, I LOVE the idea of SUPPORT. I HATE HATE meters. I hate the metaphorical D measuring that comes with it. It has driven me away from DPS since the days of wotlk…I would much much rather heal or tank. At least then, people only get mad at a lower healer when everyone dies…as opposed to dps who get mocked in chat for being “low” (despite the overall success of the run) I wish blizz would BAN and destroy all abilities to measure DPS and heals on a graph…but i digress…
along with the “uh oh” feelings I had about aug, I also had hope…that I could play SOMETHING that isn’t “monkey noises BiG nUmBeRz Go BrrRRttTT” while still having fun, being useful to the group, and having a role to play. Alas…people get mad if it can do good damage on its own because “that isn’t fair to flat dps classes”, and when it doesn’t do good damage, despite their buffs and debuffs greatly helping the party, it gets mocked for “sucking”. It can’t win in this game. WoW is stuck as a product of it’s time, worshipping the “holy trinity” and “LeEt FaT nUMbErZ”. One can argue all they want about it, but much of wow is like that.
My best advice would be to find a good, friendly guild that simply appreciates you participating in their groups and enjoy the game for yourself =) I do hope I am wrong, but I think aug is largely being seen as a failure by the community =/
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We’re talking about blizzard. They don’t throw labor hours at fixing problems that they just spent labor hours creating.
If they determine this a failure, they’ll just drastically shift the power to personal damage. It’s the path of least resistance, and the playstyle wouldn’t really change.
I was personally hoping one of the hero specs would create the option for a more personal DPS build, tbh.
I like the spec either way, but I know it’ll be insanely easier to balance.
I wouldn’t worry about the spec going away, at any rate. Don’t let the tank trolls and doomers on the forums sway you.
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This…I don’t see it becoming a tank really, but…staying SUPPORT focused, idk =/ this class is fixing to be like shaman. 2 dps spec, 1 heal spec. Again, hope I am wrong.
I just want the spec to be fleshed out. The developer who created it, who has since left Blizzard, stated that the spec basically hasn’t changed at all since the very first iteration they implemented, and honestly it shows. Right now its gameplay is either extremely annoying (in raid) or extremely boring (in keys), and its talent tree is one of the most static, with almost none of the nodes even impacting your rotation whatsoever.
Being a support spec doesn’t mean you need to have your tree bloated with random utility nodes, because you aren’t a utility spec. You do some or most of your damage through buffing other people. Nor does it mean you need to have a rotation devoid of any interesting gameplay, just because it might result in giving the player power.
If improving the spec means it has to be turned into a more normal DPS spec that does maybe 20% of its damage as support, or it gets turned into a tank spec, then that’s what they should do. But it can’t stay as is.
I think they need to make it so support specs in the future aren’t rotational and have extended downtime periods in content. Having abilities scale based on how long they are left off cooldown for example.
Yeah it might be boring for some, but to others having to only press 20 keys a minute but spend time watching positioning and timers/kicks/interrupts more intensely could an adequate way for struggling raid groups to progress through mechanical hurdles their players can’t micromanage on their own. While also expanding on the concept of raid difficulty by requiring certain strategies like wyrmstones and demonic portals to be required… even if people hated kil’jaeden
Yeah no, this is a toxic idea for the game, besides sounding horrible to play. Why would you want to play something like this?
This would just result in having to be chain casting living flame, or at worst having to melee the boss to fill the downtime because at a min/max level not using gcds would feel terrible and result in something awful.
You’re literally already doing this as Aug if you’re playing it even remotely well.
These are already required depending on the fight.
If a spec is so strong that it carries a bad raid group, it would just be horribly abused at the top end of content.
It sounds like you’re just saying you want a spec that merely exists and barely requires playing while everyone else actually plays the game.
I probably just fed a troll, but that’s why we’re all here anyways.
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right now you just use cooldowns as they light up and there’s no ingenuity to how you play the rotation, the only thing that makes it support is how it enhances other people.
If there was a benefit to holding cooldowns or negligible punishment compared to other classes you could have an engaging skillset that enables you to play as a pseudo healer / mobility support while still having to skillshot your dps enhancements based on allied performance / variation in their own rotation. Right now the spec revolves around ebon might and prescience uptime, more uptime is better, the exact same as dps specs.
Incorrect if you want to be decent/ play the spec optimally.
There literally is–depends heavily on the specs you’re buffing when you use breath/empowers. There are many times I’m holding both to be giving breath and sands at the right times during CD’s.
Crazy that a buff DPS support would be based on buff uptime.
There are also still nanny times you sacrifice EM uptime for target selections and cd windows.
It sounds like you aren’t maximizing Aug in any way, shape, or form.
Any way you slice it, a spec that has a ton of downtime is never going to work in a game like this-- it’s too based on min/max and always doing something at the high end.
It also sounds horribly boring, and if it’s so powerful that it’s a crutch for bad players/raids as you’re suggesting, it will be insanely abused by top players.
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wow combat is incredibly slow to begin with, you can claim higher apm makes it more interactive but all it does is force you into making less important decisions on a frequent basis instead of more important ones less frequently. But even when you’re playing a high apm spec combat is still incredibly slow relative to what you’re actually doing. If you press 5 gcds and achieve the exact same thing as 1 gcd would have thats just the game design forcing the hamster wheel to keep turning. Probably why fights are designed as one dimensional as they are because there’s as you said absolutely no room for downtime.
The whole point of enabling lower apm specs is to enable faster combat and fight design. Its like if they give aug the ability for someone else to have their gcd reduced by .5 for the next 5 casts but the augs gcd is increased by .5 for 10 seconds, there’s hundreds of implications and variations for that to be utilized, instead the spec is stuck into optimizing buff uptime because like every other dps 9/10 you can’t numerically afford to lose uptime.
Hopefully support specs can make the macro strategy more complex because right now its just a micro spec like every other dps where every 30 seconds you ask? should I be dpsing that? who am I going to dps in 30 seconds? should I wait? and that’s as deep as macro goes (mind you with aug the macro is a bit more involved since you have to be aware of your allies, but that’s the point its macro involved because of everything it does that other dps do not, which is a very small portion of your apm).
I tried out/mained Aug this season to see what the hype was about. I’ve never played a spec that was both so loved and hated. The last month or so, I ran into a lot of outright hostility. After hundreds of keys with random pugs, I truly believe the standard for perfect gameplay is much higher towards Augment than any other dps class which is honestly not fair. As much as I enjoy the class, unless Blizz can figure out a way to fix this I don’t know if I will continue with Aug into next season, or ever again.
Perhaps a therapist would be more constructive than the forums. get help, worried about you.
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This would feel awful. I already know how I’d want something like, say, bard to play, and you can definitely have an active and enjoyable rotation without it being exclusively to do DPS.
I find it hard to believe it will become a tank. That being said, lore wise dragons are supposed to be tough. HOTS has a dragon knight in a wow themed map. Alot of people were hoping for a tank. Once upon a time feral was 1 spec for both kitty and bear. So who knows, maybe blizz will give it a 4th spec. I actually think that makes sense, hypothetically, maybe not logistically.
They’re probably not going to change aug and you’re freaking out about nothing. You need to stop reading player opinions online, especially on these forums. It’s only a handful of people here who are frothing at the mouth for aug to be a tank.
If they changed the spec at all, it would just be shifting the damage profile from other players back onto you, and be more or less unchanged.
At worst they would give it the survival treatment and make it melee, but that’s more wishful thinking on my part because i think the class as a whole would be fun with a melee dps spec.
They would never change the role of a spec though.
Personally, I wouldn’t say the experiment of aug failed at all. I think it’s a fine spec, they just need to do something about the raid spreadsheet playstyle. Not only because the playstyle causes a massive divide between the higher and lower end, but also because playing it at the highest level is causing player burnout because it requires unprecedented micromanagement that this game has never seen before.
(my solution is to have ebon might and prescience auto-prefer players in your party so that your raid leader can just put all of the preferred dps with you)
I actually somewhat prefer where it is right now with it bringing less overall dps than devastation in exchange for more survivability. Makes it a safe pick for progression when you don’t need kill speed.
And i like the idea of support specs. Hopefully it means we get a bard one day. Probably won’t, but that’s my white whale class.
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Fully agree. If Aug isn’t going to get power shifted to personal DPS, this dichotomy is really the only way to make it work.
When we need spatial or specific Aug windows/utility, I roll Aug.
Otherwise, I start blasting.
I play an Aug-Evoker atm and will in S4.
In my opinions supporters and a support-role would make the game esp. more complex and fun BUT we need then 6man m+ so no DPS needs to fight vs support @ spots.
Then they should bring more supporters/specs that plays differently so there are options for diff. playstyles.
I would love a bard, an illusion-caster e.g.
Lets hope and see what the future/Blizzard brings.
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My favorite idea I’ve seen someone come up with is “Commander warrior” Where, you literally would play this if you’re the raid leader, and you have buffing shouts with voice lines, where you yell commands. “Move!” or “Get in position!” giving everyone a burst of speed, and if a burst window is coming up “Hit it very hard!” and everyone gets 10 seconds of damage up if they hit the same target as you.
I’d really like a war spec like that.
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