Title. After spamming arenas/m+ for about 2 months with beta and now pre-patch, I can’t help but get the feeling that the spec is missing a level of depth that makes it feel rewarding or allows players to differentiate themselves.
What amazes me (and please correct me if im wrong) is there is no real indication in any of the tooltips as to how to build essence at a baseline. Of course you start with 5 and there are talents and cds that can generate or amp it but at the foundation I found no single ability that specifically labels “this is how you build essence.” (Outside of cds and essence burst)
Additionally, I feel devastation is incredibly reliant on cooldowns, more-so than other dps specs which brings me to the conclusion that if everyone pressed the correct sequences with the same stats and gear there would be absolutely no difference. With only scintillation to decide who got lucky with more procs.
Am i trippin, have i had too much turkey? Or does anyone feel the same way
6 Likes
Well, it’s pretty obvious from the get-go that essence builds up over time like runes. I think its 1 per 4 seconds? Maybe reduced by haste.
And yeah, devastation is very basic, not much nuance. And because of the mastery, dragonrage is very important, which is kind of annoying.
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God no! I find the simplicity of it refreshing. In contrast to the jumbled messes so many other specs have become playing Devastation is downright delightful. The other side to this is that it’s a new spec which just has fewer abilities but that’s to be expected.
Well that’s because you don’t build essence. It’s a resource that passively regenerates on its own. Any abilities or talents that modify it, with the exception of Arcane Vigor, don’t generate essence but rather either increase how quickly it regenerates on its own or make it so you don’t spend it.
That’s just not true. If anything Devastation it’s just the oposite.
That’s not a cooldown, that’s a proc. All specs have to deal with the RNG of procs.
9 Likes
Essences are basically just worse DK runes.
You spend them and they come back over time.
I kinda wish they’d all com back at the same time for more fluid gameplay but whatever.
1 Like
Not at all.
The range, long channels of disintegrate, usage of hover and so on are going to create a huge chasm between the bad DEvokers and the good DEvokers.
Its depth comes more so from the fact thats its very punishing, more so than being super complex.
5 Likes
I feel like it’s missing core spec features that have analogous abilities in in other specs’ trees.
- No rune-tap ability to get an emergency Essence.
- No ‘pull’ ability….at all. Every melee can pull at a greater range than we can.
- No talents that allow you to “build” a different play style. Living Flame and Disintegrate have no tie-in to make it feel good to lean into single-target play.
- The mechanic that uses blue spells to boost Pyre is massively lackluster, particularly in ST fights, but you end up taking and using it anyway because there aren’t other choices.
There’s very little synergy or ramp available, meaning there’s two builds that are almost identical.
All of these could be solved with spells that fix another problem: Dragonflight representation. Namely, there are no Bronze combat abilities. Some possible fixes:
- Time-manipulation bronze ability that instantly gives you essence or allows multiple Essence to recharge at once for a short term.
- foresight/seer ability allows you to pull in a line in the direction you’re moving
- alternatively, Black earth spike jabs adds at a distance with a few seconds cooldown and little damage.
- Black or Bronze spell with a tactician/time-management theme, decreases channel time of Disintegrate when you cast Living Flame, or gives a chance to proc instant-cast LF when Disintegrate ticks. Even if this meant single-target spells were tuned to do less damage, this would mechanically be a more rewarding gameplay loop.
I hope some reworking happens at a .0.5 or .1 patch, because this is already stale. I expect to only heal in all content due to the lack of satisfying play available at launch.
7 Likes
I mean, DH got put into the blender a couple times in legion before they smoothed it out. There’s precedent for then doing larger changes to a new class like that mid-expansion.
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Its just disappointing that theres a million ways they could have made this an incredibly cool class and it feels lazy. This is the best a studio with this kind of budget could do? All sorts of cool draconic inspired spells could’ve been introduced and they just…didnt.
The biggest joke is not having a dragon’s breath conal cc like fire mage. They are dragons. They literally should be able to do it. There are currently no options to peel anyone off you. Its pretty stupid tbh.
2 Likes
Dragon’s breath would be ideal but this is false. We have two peels and can be talented into a slow.l and one a lower CD, Wing buffet and tail swipe.
Also doing the push back into a Hover and having rogues shadow step or warrior leap while casting sleep walk works wonders. Rescue is a good peel too. Lots of options.
The DPS spec is lack luster and I have my complaints but both specs have out play utility available.
Range is the biggest issue.
Thumbs down for mid range unless they make all abilities except empowered abilities run casting. Pvp and pve side.
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I think devastation id lacking a bit of depth compared to 90% of other classes in wow, but while many of those classes have had several years to mature overtime this is evokers first step into the spotlight and I’m fairly certain making evokers rotationally simplistic was a conscious design choice by Blizzard.
Honestly Evoker reminds me of Demon hunter when it first launched, visually flashy but lacking actual depth and choice, evoker I think is in a better spot primarily because of the new talent trees, you do have some build diversity but not a whole lot of rotational diversity, no matter what you pick in your tree the impact on the buttons you push mostly stay the same.
My hopes for this expansion is that Blizzard take a much more active roll in class tuning and we could potentially see talent changes to evoker and tier sets can add some nice flavour through out the expansion, but if the rotation at its core isn’t for you I wouldn’t expect that to change majorly until 11.0
Yeah I’m going to have to hard disagree. That spec and rotation is brain dead and absurdly boring to play.
Agree to disagree. It’s a little too simplified, I grant you that, but it flows together nicely and more importantly looks visually appealing. Not having to worry about cooldown stacking shenanigans or having to endure a lengthy and boring ramp up process is incredibly refreshing.
Maybe Evokers aren’t ideal for a main but they certainly check all my boxes for when I just want to relax and do some button mashing on an alt.
3 Likes
They don’t need CD shenanigans or ramps, they need some dynamic feedback and synergy between abilities so you have to actually think once and a while.
Having essence burst as your only dynamic rotation changing ability is beans.
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Well there is some of that. There are various interactions with Living Flame that you can talent into. But I agree that we could use some more, especially on the Blue side of the tree where the only interactive talent is Charged Blast.
Not every specc needs to appeal to you. As blizzard has continued to mechanic creep all the speccs i’ve stopped enjoying the speccs i used to play. I find the refreshing not to have the ability bloat of other speccs, and not have 5 diffrent plates i need to spin while playing.
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I sort of like it but it definitely feels like it’s missing something. I assume later on once we get Burnout it will feel a little bit better because of extra proc but yeah.
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Your argument is grossly hypocritical.
No it isnt. All speccs have had mechanical creep over the years, you only need to go back to WoD to see how much more complicated class design has become. I loved survival, MM, disc and combat. However these simpel design are gone and you cant find them anymore in the old classes. So its not hypocritical to be happy when we get a specc that has that kind of simpel design again since it did not exist in the specc pool we had. In the meanwhile if you want a more complicated specc you have 36 other speccs to choose from.
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absolutely, 100% feels like gutted pres but with some damage
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Nothing you said in any way contradicts the fact your position is grossly hypocritical.
Maybe you just don’t understand the point I was making. You are essentially making the argument that it should stay that way because you like it, while simultaneously arguing that other people not liking it isn’t a good reason that it should change.
Furthermore there are a number of relatively simple specs you could play; BM, Arcane, Fury, Havoc, Destruction, etc all come to mind. So this argument is also grossly hypocritical.
Bottom line, you’re a hypocrite. Make better arguments.
1 Like