Been playing one recently for the first time. It feels like a slimmed down version mage with a lot of spells that have a CD. Just started it in remix so I’m not max level. Is it fun? Worthwhile?
I think for Dev it’s a pretty simple class/spec. Preservation and Augmentation have a higher skill cap but are also a lot of fun.
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The concept of each spec is pretty simple in my personal opinion. They feel a lot better to play as you level up more.
Devastation is really fun and pretty simple. It’s like the caster version of ret paladin. It’s easy to do pretty well with it.
Augmentation is also pretty fun and simple, as long as you don’t mind that your contributions won’t ever show up on a damage meter.
Preservation - dunno.
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Devastation feels pretty bad before you get some of the talent points near the end of the tree. At least it did for me. Otherwise, it’s pretty fun to play.
The rotation is pretty easy to understand and pull off.
The three evoker specs have very simple and intuitive gameplay.
Knowing what your priorities are you will be able to easily run the class.
The rotation is slow, so you have time to think about what to do.
The rotations and priority systems of evoker are relatively simple and have a low skill floor.
Like many simple rotations, though, there is some nuance to performing at a high level, but to get started they are relatively friendly to new players.
The vast majority of the difficulty of evoker comes from the fact that your performance is largely tied to your understanding of encounters.
Because ALL of your defensives are proactive, you will be very vulnerable if you don’t understand when damage is coming and react to it ahead of time. The spec is incredibly durable, however, if you have a strong understanding of when to push your buttons.
The same goes for the mid-range playstyle and your use of hover. You need to know before mechanics come out that require your use of hover to not lose uptime–if you wait and have to use hover reactively and cancel casts, you will see a decent dropoff in throughput.
But the overall TL;DR is that it’s a very easy spec to get into, and has plenty of nuance for players that enjoy min/maxing and micro.
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Dev’s damage rotation is pretty straightforward.
Their utility kit has a lot of fun tools in pvp, but is pretty basic in pve.
Aug isn’t really hard, but imo feels a tiny bit awkward to play. Lots of fun though.
Pres is probably one of the harder healers to play, but also the most fun 
at least in my experience and from what other healer players I’ve talked to have said, it was a lot harder to adjust to prevoker than any other healing spec.
Deceptively simple for devastation. You’re not just mashing the keyboard to get top damage and calling it a day.
Dev plays around making disintegrate do as much damage as possible (in ST/cleave). Which means stacking damage modifiers like iridescence, titanic wrath, and shattering star. It also means pooling resources to make sure you’re able to take advantage of those things.
There’s also knowing when to clip your disintegrates and with what. As well as knowing a given encounter’s movement requirements so you don’t have to stop casting as much as possible.
But it’s really not hard to get a hang of it if you’ve got the mind to. And once you do, in my opinion, devastation has one of the most comfortable rotations in the game. It’s got really good flow.
Augmentation, on the other hand, has a low skill floor and a really high skill ceiling (in raids, aug in dungeons is just easy). You can either focus on just doing your rotation and keeping EM up for as long as you possibly can, or you can watch other people’s cooldown windows and target prescience on people who are about to burst to maximise your own damage contriubtion (they call this spreadsheet playstyle, it only really works with folks you raid with regularly and not randos)
And then there’s preservation, which is all about spell combos and stacking modifiers. I found it pretty approachable IMO, but i understand that my experience is not universal.
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I am, and have been, a long time Priest main. Frankly, for most of Dragonflight it really felt like Devastation was just “short range Mage without the QoL spells”, and I rarely enjoyed my time playing.
But when I stopped playing it like a turret spec, and really started to take advantage of Hover and the plethora of instant cast spells that 1) don’t rely on unreliable random procs and 2) are actually worth using, the limited range didn’t really matter anymore. Nowadays it feels mobile and dynamic in a way that Mage or Priest never could, and it feels great. Aug is kinda fun, too.
I ended up enjoying it so much that I made my Evoker my S4 main, breaking a tradition that has been in place since late Wrath of the Lich King. So it took a while and I had to learn a different way of playing, but I have to say Evoker has reached the position of second favorite class. Nothing will ever unseat Priest for me, but at least now I have something I know I can stick with for a season.
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I just leveled and geared an Evoker for fun and tried all three specs:
Devastation is pretty simple, but I didn’t feel like I was cranking out good damage until I did some research. Someone else said it’s deceptively simple and id agree. One example is your main spender is a channel, and you often will chain that channel for 2-4x in a row, but in dungeons you need to keep moving – so the challenge is knowing when to use Hover so you can move and channel without wasting resources.
Preservation is actually what I leveled as and initially started doing mythics as. Id say across the three specs preservation is the hardest, it’s really neat and has a lot of cool mechanics that are unique. The challenge with preservation is your abilities are all on short CDs so it requires some management and forethought about when to use them to ensure you always have something available. Because of that it can also feel clunky to me.
Augmentation I’ve played the least amount of, I think Augmentations rotation is the most straight forward but there are more little things to think about to maximize your contribution. There’s broader utility you need to be on top of like interrupts and dispels, which devastation also has, but also timing of your damage boosts to align with boss fights and CDs of your party. My frustration with Augmentation is your damage boosting contribution is really limited to your groups capabilities. So if you have low a DPS team, your overall contribution will be limited to their DPS… if that makes sense.
I’ve had fun with all three, I’ve been running with devastation lately but want to spend more time with augmentation. The class isn’t complicated in terms of volume of buttons and abilities, it puts a lot more emphasis on small things like I mentioned. That said it does have moments it generally feels clunky but I’m attributing that to it being a relatively newer class.
Simple to play, yes. Simple to play well, not really. Though that can be said of most classes.
Except maybe beastmaster hunter.
Its a very enjoyable class. I’ve been maining it since the day it came out. Devastation is really simple, yea, but pres has a level of meat to it. Aug is very different. Aug is either super, super easy in dungeons, or has some decent level of thought to it in raids. The CDs on spells are super annoying until you get one of your main talents at the bottom, which provides cd reduction to your empower spells.
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Mmmm idk man I think rewind might be the strongest reactive heal in the game. Golden hour which is a large chunk of pres raid healing is also reactive.
I haven’t played Dev.
Aug is probably the easiest class to play at a reasonable level I have seen. The rotation is fixed. The only nuance is knowing when to use defensive and when to BoE and when to ebon might. At lower keys though you can pretty much press it whenever. Raiding is similar. You can easily do heroic raids just pressing cds on cd.
Pres is imo very fun and engaging in M+. It’s probably my favourite healer now. The skill cap if you will is managing situations where everyone needs to spread out (NO second boss…ho Boi).
When the group is stacked though it pumps like no one’s business. Raiding on pres is pretty much brain dead though… Get a bunch of echos, reversion, repeat.
I mean sure, but you could say this about literally any class if you just want to do below tank level DPS.
Nah you won’t actually. Also I wasn’t saying you should press cds on cd just saying you can and still perform quite well.
I stand by what I said. That’s not to say aug isn’t fun or good. I really enjoy playing it.
huh?
Like I understand the difference between can and should and everything, but why even say it like this if your aren’t suggesting it lol.
And yes, you actually will unless you get wildly lucky.
Overall yes they’re a bit simple compared to other casters (especially something like arcane mage)
But I think that’s a good thing. Not every spec needs to be a spreadsheet dps rotation and overly complex.
Melee have a couple simple specs, and I think having a simple caster is good for the game too.
Some people just want to zone out and play an easy spec to relax
Thank you for quoting me. SHOULD and CAN are different words.
And again no you won’t do less dps than a tank just pressing cds on cd. You are incorrect. Sorry.