Midnight: Devastation's Darkest Hour?

Classes Evoker
1

This is a feedback thread for Devastation Evoker gameplay in Midnight. I am primarily M+ and raid focused with some small pvp experience; the spec is currently at its lowest performance and popularity in M+ falling far behind Augmentation. There has been no iteration on the spec since early Alpha - there were ZERO patch notes for Devastation in 12.0.5 - so I want to share what I think is working and what is broken; hopefully we can get some improvements in 12.1

Below are my top suggestions for the spec right now; I will discuss each point afterwards to explain the problems I want to see solved.

Dragonrage & Mastery & Apex:

  • Delete Rising Fury
  • Buff Giantkiller to 2% per point (10.1.5 value) and reduce floor to 20%
  • Delete Animosity, and baseline Tyranny into Dragonrage and Deep Breath; replace them with a new choice node:
    • A: Dragonrage’s duration is increased by 18 seconds and Giantkiller’s floor is increased to 35%
    • B: Dragonrage’s cooldown is reduced by 60 seconds and it gains a second charge
  • Mass Disintegrate, Eternity Surge, and Twin Flame should prioritize high-health secondary targets

Core Abilities & Talents:

  • Buff Fire Breath
  • Buff Eternity Surge +100% and reduce Scintillation’s damage ratio from 40% to 20%
  • Buff Pyre +100% and give it reduced damage beyond 8 targets
  • Buff Shattering Star and remove Star procs from Scintillation
  • Buff Charged Blast; increase the stack limit with a decaying bonus for stacks above 20
  • Make Fire Breath consume Charged Blast stacks, increasing its upfront damage only
  • Convert parts of the Season 1 tier set into talents in 12.1
  • Rework Iridescence

Scalecommander:

  • Reattribute Bombardment damage to the source Evoker on in-game damage meters
  • Rework Wingleader to proc its cooldown reduction from Mass Disintegrate damage instead of Bombardments
  • Change Onslaught to grant Azure Sweep instead of Burnout and also proc when you cast Dragonrage

Flameshaper:

  • Make Conduit of Flame scale with target health matching Giantkiller
  • Buff Twin Flame; move Enkindle out of its choice node
  • Rework Consume Flame to trigger an aoe from a single Pyre target
  • Delete Scorching Embers and revive Everburning Flame

Survival:

  • Buff passive defensives; massively buff Panacea and/or make Nourishing Sands a class talent
  • Give Evoker a new minor defensive; revive Renewing Blaze and/or make Molten Blood a class ability (self-cast only)

There’s a lot to explain here, I will try to keep this concise, but I want to be thorough about it; I may edit this later in response to discussion.

Dragonrage & Mastery & Apex:

Devastation’s Mastery was excessively nerfed in 10.2 reducing it from a healthy 2% to a pathetic 1.5% per point. I’ll spare you the maths, but this made Mastery a weak, ineffective stat that barely breaks even (compared to Haste or Versatility) when you maximize your Dragonrage uptime. As a result, we no longer build much Mastery or play around it all; our cooldown is tied to our Mastery, and it has felt weak ever since. Rising Fury fails to make Dragonrage feel strong, and makes it much harder to time properly, often providing seemingly no value.

The Mastery nerfs in 10.1.5 and 10.2.0 targeted a problem in Devastation’s raid performance: low damage during boss execute phases outside of Dragonrage. The nerfs did not fix this because they made Mastery even worse against low-health targets; the real fix was the 30% floor introduced in 10.2.0 which guarantees a minimum effectiveness outside of Dragonrage. Unfortunately this was paired with excessive % nerfs - driven by misinterpreting 10.1.5 data where Dragonrage’s value was inflated by the Blazing Shards effect - which caused us to mostly abandon Mastery.

Outside of raids, Devastation’s Mastery struggles to finish off targets in dungeons or pvp whenever Dragonrage is not available. Ideal play is to delay using Dragonrage until enemies are low health, taking advantage of Giantkiller’s passive value at the start of a pull, then activating Dragonrage once it decays too much, and finishing them off during Tyranny’s effect. A long duration makes this easier, because you can press Dragonrage early and it will last until enemies are dead; but the long cooldown of Dragonrage makes it often unavailable when you need it. The solution to Giantkiller’s problems is to let us play around it, with shorter, more frequent Dragonrages, choosing the right time to activate Tyranny based on enemy health; if you always have Dragonrage when targets are under 30% then you don’t need the floor on Giantkiller at all. In contexts where this isn’t possible, like raid bosses, you instead need a higher floor for effectiveness.

This can be implemented easily, using simple tech inspired by other classes’ flexible cooldowns:

  • Buff Giantkiller to 2% per point (10.1.5 value) and reduce floor to 20%
  • Delete Animosity, and baseline Tyranny into Dragonrage and Deep Breath; replace them with a new choice node:
    • A: Dragonrage’s duration is increased by 18 seconds and Giantkiller’s floor is increased to 35%
    • B: Dragonrage’s cooldown is reduced by 60 seconds and it gains a second charge

These changes are meant to be taken together, and require the removal of Rising Fury (because its ramp is too slow for a shorter Dragonrage and its after-bonus prevents delaying Dragonrage). Increasing Mastery to 2% makes it an effective stat again and makes playing around it rewarding. Choice A offers the familiar Dragonrage with a long duration on a fixed cooldown, and a high floor to guarantee effectiveness outside of cooldowns. Choice B offers more flexibility so you can align Dragonrage’s effect to enemy health without losing uptime, saving it to execute packs in dungeons or vulnerable targets in pvp; good timing offers a high reward, but the risk is higher as you will lose more from the lower floor when doing this wrong. Class reworks for Midnight promised a focus on smart use of cooldowns as a driver of performance; picking good targets and using Dragonrage to counteract Giantkiller’s falloff should be Devastation’s skill test.

Rising Fury should be replaced with a proper Apex that works regardless of when you press Dragonrage (and actually does something when you don’t have Dragonrage). Its current design is frequently useless in dungeons where many important targets die in less than 30 seconds; it’s hard to use on bosses where you may need to cast Dragonrage far in advance of an add spawn or damage amp phase; and it clashes horribly with Tyranny. If Dragonrage comes off cooldown partway through a pull - perfectly timed to execute packs with Tyranny - it feels terrible to press because this will guaranteed waste Risen Fury after the pull. But activating Dragonrage at the beginning of a pull means you are getting the worst possible value out of Tyranny, by wasting it on full-health targets; if anything even survives into your Risen Fury window, you will be hitting mobs at low health without Tyranny. Because Risen Fury activates when Dragonrage ends, you always gain its effects just as you lose the effectiveness of your Mastery. The Alpha change that reduced Animosity’s effectiveness made Dragonrage worse, because its shorter duration is now less likely to last until the end of a pull; it would have been better to delete Risen Fury and keep Animosity uncapped (or a higher cap), so we can make more use of Rising Fury with Tyranny.

Risen Fury is simply a bad design that replaces 20 seconds of Dragonrage with 20 seconds of a worse effect; it turns Rising Fury into a ramp to nowhere that runs straight off the cliff of Tyranny. The ramp itself is not fun to play around, mostly useless outside of boss fights, and does nothing to help our damage on the many pulls where Dragonrage is not available or comes up late. It should be good to activate Dragonrage late in a pull when enemies are low health, not punishing because you have less time to ramp. It’s time to fix Giantkiller and give us proper tools to play around its falloff instead.

  • Mass Disintegrate, Eternity Surge, and Twin Flame should prioritize high-health secondary targets

This might seem like a big ask, but it ties back into our Mastery. Devastation in Dragonflight played around its Mastery, which rewards focusing the highest-health target (instead of sniping low health targets with an execute button), and quickly swapping to new targets entering combat (which can be difficult for other specs). I no longer think about my Mastery at all; War Within shifted the focus to rotational effects in hero talents. The pruning effected a return to Dragonflight pacing, but it lacks the motivational aspect of a strong Giantkiller. Focusing big targets should be a defining goal for Devastation and our spells should aid in doing this effectively. Many classes with target-capped abilities would love this effect too, but only Devastation pays a special penalty for hitting lower-health targets because of Giantkiller; Mass Disintegrate cleaving onto low-health minor units can significantly degrade Giantkiller’s value. Our cleaving effects should be targeted to synergize with Mastery and make it more effective. (Note that Preservation’s healing Twin Flames should prioritize low-health targets instead.)

This does not need to be extremely smart and always target the highest-health enemies; it should be the player’s job to pick the healthiest primary target. But cleave should generally prefer healthier targets, perhaps with a random weight based on health; the goal is to frequently pick secondary targets that give positive Mastery value (>1% effectiveness) before targets that give negative value (<1% effectiveness). Larger enemies will tend to stay above this threshold longer, and should be magnets for Eternity Surge missiles while smaller enemies soak up Pyre damage.

Core Abilities & Talents:

  • Buff Fire Breath
  • Buff Eternity Surge +100% and reduce Scintillation’s damage ratio from 40% to 20%

Both empower spells are extremely weak right now, which makes upranking empowers rarely worth doing. The rotation outside cooldowns now leaves plenty of room to uprank empowers while waiting for essence, so these buttons need to be satisfying to use when you have the opportunity. Eternity Surge in particular has never been strong; its value is driven by Scintillation procs, and upranking in aoe deals less damage than a Mass Disintegrate. It needs a very large buff, with a compensating nerf to Scintillation so that only the on-cast damage increases. There are also too many talents buffing Eternity Surge, which are difficult to afford; I have more suggestions to make here but a direct buff is the first step. Fire Breath is also weak and feels almost useless for Scalecommander, except as a way to generate Mass Disintegrate. The buff to Consume Flame’s ratio for Disintegrate saved Flameshaper’s single-target, but hid the relative weakness of Fire Breath.

  • Buff Pyre +100% and give it reduced damage beyond 8 targets

Pyre keeps falling behind and needing buffs; it gets overlooked due to raid-focused tuning and Mass Disintegrate holding up Scalecommander’s damage at low target counts. Flameshaper, which relies entirely on Pyre in dungeons, performs poorly at low target counts and needs very large pulls to catch up. A weak Pyre is also bad for Scalecommander because it leaves all our damage up to Mass Disintegrate, which doesn’t scale to larger pulls, and devalues Charged Blast.

Both specs would benefit from retuning Pyre to deal more damage at low target counts, balanced by the usual falloff curve. This would even out Flameshaper’s performance across pull sizes and make Pyre and Charged Blast more relevant for Scalecommander at low target counts. The current tuning of Pyre overtakes Disintegrate at four targets (before considering effects like Volatility); it should be roughly doubled so that Pyre and Disintegrate are about equal at two targets, and a Mass Disintegrate roughly equals Pyre on eight targets.

Pyre’s linear scaling is exciting for very large pulls, but it’s not ideal for dungeons with varied target counts or for killing small numbers of stragglers at the end of a pull. Having a spender tuned for very large aoe only is hurting both specs and leaves us waiting for buffs every tier. Both specs have access to other tools for scaling into large aoe (Deep Breath, Firestorm) and would do better with a stronger button for small aoe.

  • Buff Shattering Star and remove Star procs from Scintillation

Shattering Star deals very little damage (it’s hard to see how little because the built-in meters merge it into Eternity Surge). Allowing Scintillation procs to trigger Shattering Star was a strange choice; this ties its value to another talent, already geared towards sustained single-target fights. Star Salvo doubles down by requiring an expensive talent to combo this effect with Eternity’s Span, and adds to the bloat of Eternity Surge talents. Remove Star procs from Scintillation, and buff the base Star and its empower rank scaling significantly; let it reward spending extra time to hit more targets by also doing more damage to your primary target. (I would even consider removing Star Salvo if this allows for more direct buffs to the base Star and Eternity Surge.)

  • Buff Charged Blast; increase the stack limit with a decaying bonus for stacks above 20
  • Make Fire Breath consume Charged Blast stacks, increasing its upfront damage only

The nerfs to Charged Blast made it too difficult and unrewarding to prioritize clearing stacks with Pyre and ruined one of Scalecommander’s signature effects; we no longer track Charged Blast and waste many stacks casting Blue spells back-to-back, which is easier to play but feels like you are doing something wrong. This can partly be improved by buffing Pyre, but it won’t feel good to have a strong Pyre and waste Charged Blast stacks because we can’t cast enough Pyres to spend them. Please increase the stack limit; this could have a reduced effect when consuming more than 20 stacks at once to add flexibility without concentrating too much damage.

I also wish Charged Blast was more generally useful now that its main function of buffing Pyre is so reduced. Why not let Fire Breath consume Charged Blast stacks (in addition to Pyre), increasing its upfront damage but not the damage-over-time? This would give Scalecommander a chance to clear some stacks with another Red spell - one usually followed by a Mass Disintegrate overcapping stacks - and rewards upranking Fire Breath. The effect would trade off with Catalyze, which buffs Fire Breath’s damage-over-time and requires lower rank casts; you might choose between Catalyze and Charged Blast based on your preference for upranking, hero talent, and how much you expect to cast Pyre.

  • Convert parts of the Season 1 tier set into talents in 12.1
  • Rework Iridescence

Azure Sweep is fantastic but may become a dead talent after unequipping our current tier set. It needs these effects added to the talent tree in 12.1; at least baseline the damage bonuses and second charge, leaving out the Eternity Surge cooldown reduction.

Iridescence is a minor effect but deserves attention because its gameplay is broken by Azure Sweep. We used to optimize for Iridescence by avoiding casting Azure Strike when we want to consume Blue Iridescence with Disintegrate (or Mass Disintegrate). Azure Sweep makes this difficult, but applying Iridescence to Azure Sweep gives much lower benefit. Overall we ignore Iridescence and try to get what value we can from it passively, which is “approachable” but unsatisfying, just like overcapping Charged Blast stacks. There’s also a weird interaction for Flameshaper where casting Fire Breath can apply Iridescence to a second Fire Breath. Iridescence should be reworked to only apply to essence abilities, or else replaced entirely with a new talent; it has never felt truly satisfactory as a capstone with inconsistent value compared to other talents that directly buff the same spells.

Scalecommander:

  • Reattribute Bombardment damage to the source Evoker on in-game damage meters

Bombardments are attributed to the triggering player, and not the source Evoker. This is deceptive; an Evoker would likely deal the same total Bombardment damage without allies helping, and players don’t think of Devastation as a ‘support’ spec that deals damage indirectly. It is impossible to judge your own contribution from the in-game meters, since you cannot compare your damage to other players in your party. It is equally impossible for other players to judge your contribution, but they don’t know that and will do so (incorrectly) anyways. Developers took responsibility for providing feedback to players by implementing built-in meters, so it is imperative that they provide accurate feedback. This issue is significantly undermining the spec’s perception in the community, including the satisfaction players get from playing it themselves, and for no apparent benefit. Bombardments might as well just be an “aoe dot” that doesn’t require any damage from you or your allies to trigger its effect; no one could tell the difference.

  • Rework Wingleader to proc its cooldown reduction from Mass Disintegrate damage instead of Bombardments

I complain often about forced target-swapping to spread Bombardments and maximize Extended Battle procs. I now have a second complaint: Wingleader’s cooldown reduction scaling with Bombardment aoe makes your rotation dependent on other players’ gameplay, with no obvious feedback. This became apparent on Mythic Vaelgor and Ezzorak; many Evokers struggled with unreliable Deep Breath timings, because tanks positioning the bosses slightly too far apart (in a fight where putting them too close Enrages them!) would cost you 50% of your effective cooldown reduction. This may be a “skill issue” but it is not your skill and the game gives no feedback to your tanks when they are doing it wrong. I wish Wingleader proc’d its cooldown reduction from Mass Disintegrate, and Bombardments were just damage. If you play correctly, hitting as many targets as possible with your Mass Disintegrates (something actually under your control) then you should get the maximum cooldown reduction. This would also reduce the feeling of “anti-funnel” on Mass Disintegrate (it loses primary-target damage for each secondary target added) by making this a tradeoff for increased Deep Breath cooldown reduction. This would require some tuning, especially for Augmentation, and might increase Deep Breath’s cooldown in single-target, but honestly some would appreciate not needing to Deep Breath as often during hectic boss fights.

The simpler fix is to buff the splash radius on bombardments, but it’s already disappointing to have an effect on a priority target that splits damage so I really don’t want it splitting even wider in dungeons. Moving the cooldown reduction off bombardments instead would also remove the need to spread Bombardments for Extended Battle (now just a minor damage optimization). There’s another reason besides target-swapping that I dislike gaming Extended Battle: It highly prioritizes casting Mass Disintegrate immediately, so that all your Pyres trigger extensions. It should be okay to cast a few Pyres first, to wait for spawns/movement/Iridescence or kill off minor units so your beams will hit bigger targets, but Extended Battle attaches a penalty to pressing Pyre whenever you have a Mass Disintegrate charge.

  • Change Onslaught to grant an Azure Sweep charge instead of Burnout and also proc when you cast Dragonrage

One simple, fun suggestion for Scalecommander. Onslaught was always laughable as a hero talent, and is worse now that we often ignore the Burnout charge because Azure Sweep (and even base Azure Strike) are stronger. It should give an Azure Sweep charge instead, and proc when you cast Dragonrage, letting you start every Dragonrage with a strong generator; this would feel great with a 60s cooldown Dragonrage. I would happily share this with Augmentation; they already borrow Devastation tech with Squadron Pyres, but Burnout is weak and Chronowarden is the Living Flame spec, not Scalecommander; Azure Sweep is cooler and would have strong synergy with Echoing Strike.

Flameshaper:

  • Make Conduit of Flame scale with target health matching Giantkiller

Conduit of Flame reinforces Devastation’s Mastery by increasing your damage (and essence burst chance, with Titanic Precision) against high-health targets. This currently has a hard cutoff at 50% health, which is weird, frustrating, and harmful to Flameshaper’s execute damage. It should be updated to fall off gradually just like Giantkiller, with the same minimum floor and maximum effectivness during Dragonrage. (For Preservation it should maybe do the opposite, increasing critical strike against low-health targets to reinforce their healing Mastery.)

  • Buff Twin Flame; move Enkindle out of its choice node

Simply put, Twin Flame does low damage and isn’t noticeable. It needs to contribute more of Flameshaper’s 2-to-3-target damage, at least if we don’t get a Pyre scaling rework. Enkindle should also be separated from Expanded Lungs; without Enkindle, Flameshaper no longer has any direct spender buff, it needs a tuning knob to balance its damage between spenders and Fire Breath / Consume Flame, and get more benefit from our many spender-focused class talents. It was a mistake to buff Consume Flame’s ratio on Disintegrate; this ties Fire Breath’s tuning (very important for aoe) to Flameshaper’s single-target raid performance; it will be very awkward to constantly adjust these ratios and does not scale with other Disintegrate bonuses. A better approach is to move Enkindle so it does not compete with any bonuses to Consume, and buff its effect for Disintegrate - directly targeting the weakness in Flameshaper’s design, which is the fact that its effects don’t scale with external Disintegrate bonuses even though Disintegrate is most of our boss damage. A similar approach was used for Hellcaller Destruction Warlock with the addition of “Through the Felvine”; Flameshaper would love to have Enkindle’s effect doubled during Dragonrage, like Malevolence does for Felvine; this would compete better with Scalecommander’s Melt Armor.

  • Rework Consume Flame to trigger an aoe from a single Pyre target
  • Delete Scorching Embers and revive Everburning Flame

Flameshaper is fun in a simplistic way - it plays like base Devastation with a lot of haste, spamming Pyres - but breaks down outside of resource-generating cooldown windows. It suffers the most from a weak Eternity Surge discouraging upranking, and especially from not wanting to uprank Fire Breath due to losing dot duration that could potentially be Consumed. The Fire Breath talents that form the core of the spec don’t read like hero talents, split into so many small pieces: one for cooldown reduction, one for dot duration, one for dot damage, one for dot speed … Deep Exhalation is even an exact copy of the class talent Blast Furnace. Each of these amounts to a ~15% bonus to Fire Breath, multiplying together into a larger bonus, all of which are then subsumed into Consume Flame. This warps the entire gameplay around casting rank 1 Fire Breaths and consuming the full duration on all targets. Any time Fire Breath is applied to more than two targets, you must Pyre to consume it all, or you wasted your entire hero package. If you choose to Disintegrate a priority target, you will quickly consume its Fire Breath, and leave unconsumed duration on others, but need to reapply it anyways. It’s difficult to deal damage to isolated targets or swap to new targets that don’t have Fire Breath. The imperative to not waste Fire Breath dot in aoe flattens the spec and takes away gameplay instead of adding to it.

There’s a simple change that would make Consume Flame work for me: Each Pyre should consume duration only from its primary target, triggering an explosion that damages all nearby enemies (reduced beyond 5) without consuming duration from them; exactly the way it worked for Engulf. This would mean that a few Pyres will quickly consume all Fire Breath from one target, but leave it active on other targets. When there are multiple targets, you can swap between them as each runs out of Fire Breath, just like you do with Disintegrate on 2 targets. New targets that enter combat or any targets missed by Fire Breath will still take effective damage if your primary target has Fire Breath. And it’s okay to uprank Fire Breath; a rank 4 cast applies 10 seconds of dot to each target, enough for about two Pyres per target. This would play like Engulf did except the damage is split between Pyre casts instead of concentrated into one insane burst; and you need to pay more attention to the target of your Pyre casts. It would also have healthier scaling, doing more significant damage in small aoe. The current implementation amounts to a 15% bonus over Fire Breath’s normal damage at all target counts; this mostly relabels damage bars from “Fire Breath” to “Consume Flame” without adding as much as it seems. By taking a small amount of Fire Breath from one target and adding it (with a large multiplier) to each nearby target, Engulf’s version of Consume Flame had a much higher effective bonus; something like 75% with each Engulf adding the equivalent of 18 seconds of Fire Breath damage to all targets, without removing their existing Fire Breath. It feels wrong that Consume Flame’s contribution is basically capped at some fraction of the original damage of your Fire Breath cast, regardless of how many Pyres you get. This change would make it so you can never consume the entire duration of Fire Breath from all targets in a large aoe scenario, at least before the cooldown of your Fire Breath, so every Pyre adds Consume damage, unlike the current design where you run out of Fire Breath before the cooldown. It leaves a lot more room to tune the amount of Fire Breath consumed by each cast and is less dependent on very short Fire Breath cooldowns.

(Aside: I think Preservation would also benefit from this design for Emerald Blossom. Consume Flame currently contributes very little healing, because it only procs from targets directly healed by the blossom, wasting a small extra heal on the same targets, if they even happened to have Dream Breath on them. It would be more useful if the primary target of each blossom - including blossoms spawned by tier set procs and seedlings - was consumed, triggering an aoe heal around them just like Engulf did only much less concentrated. This would make blossom itself much more effective as a group healing tool, although you would have to aim your blossom at targets with Dream Breath.)

Scorching Embers additionally punishes upranking Fire Breath by demanding high dot uptime to buff as many Pyres as possible. If this problem can’t be solved - it has been reworked twice - then it should be removed just like Augmentation’s Molten Embers. There may be better alternatives, but I keep thinking back to its predecessor: Everburning Flame (“Red spells extend the duration of Fire Breath on the target by 1 second”). This was originally a choice node with an early version of Causality, making you pick between shorter cooldowns or longer durations, both of which increased Fire Breath uptime. It worked in aoe thanks to Pyre and Firestorm, but did not generate enough extension in single-target from only Living Flame, and was less effective than the cooldown reduction option which fed into extending Dragonrage. Its value was reduced when the choice node was separated, since shorter cooldowns require fewer extensions to fill, and it was removed and replaced with Scorching Embers.

Flameshaper can now solve a lot of Everburning’s problems: Twin Flame would add extensions from casting Disintegrate, and if buffed sufficiently would reward prioritizing Burnouts during Dragonrage to get more essence bursts and extensions simultaneously. Titanic Precision also favors Critical Strike, so you could give Everburning an extra .5s extension on crits just like Ebon Might. The cooldown-limit on extensions is solved by the extra charge of Fire Breath allowing you to delay your next cast. I find the extra charge often useless because it’s gone once spent and never recovers until you stop casting. Extending Fire Breath could reverse this; you gain a charge whenever you succeed in extending enough to not need to re-apply it for Consume. In single-target this would add a small amount of Fire Breath duration to help balance a higher Consume amount; in aoe each Pyre would add one second on multiple targets while consuming four seconds from one target, making it possible to juggle a short remaining duration for quite a while or even net positive duration with enough targets. Scorching Embers seems at odds with Consume Flame - when you consume you lose the damage bonus - but an extension mechanic could complement a more limited Consume and give some meaning to Twin Flame.

I have been deeply critical of Consume Flame in the past, and I still don’t think consuming dot durations is a really healthy mechanic. But it manages to work in single-target without much disruption; it just needs to work in aoe without such a punishing disincentive to uprank Fire Breath. The goal should not be to consume the full dot from every target, but just to make sure every Pyre hits a target with Fire Breath to consume. Flameshaper for Devastation should support doing this in a way that allows and encourages upranking Fire Breath, for more exciting and powerful casts of its signature spell. Right now it just relies on tuning (primarily the shortened cooldown and extended duration of Fire Breath) to not run out of dot too fast, which is targeted for rank 1 casts.

Survival:

  • Buff passive defensives; massively buff Panacea and/or make Nourishing Sands a class talent
  • Give Evoker a new minor defensive; revive Renewing Blaze or make Molten Blood a class ability (self-cast only)

Evoker’s powerful proactive defenses and self-healing were almost all pruned away, leaving us with only Obsidian Scales (admittedly an incredibly strong button); we lack a short-cooldown minor defensive or a strong self-heal to use after a mistake or when healers are struggling. When Obsidian Scales is on cooldown or must be saved for a major event, my only real tool is Verdant Embrace, which only heals ~10% of my hp. It feels like my survival depends on rolling a critical strike with VE. Renewing Blaze should have just been nerfed, with reduced effectiveness or a cap on its total healing, instead of bolting it to Obsidian Scales. We need another buff to passive defense; and either improved self-healing (buffing Panacea does this without improving off-healing) or a second defensive button or both. I have a simple suggestion for some new class talents, repurposing an effect from Augmentation that was over-nerfed and left to rot:

  • Molten Blood: Gain a shield for up to 30% of your maximum health, increasing based on missing health; 60s cooldown.
  • Renewing Blaze: Molten Blood’s shield now decays over its duration, healing you for its unused amount.

This would work like a hybrid between the small shield and self-heal buttons that are common minor defensives for many classes, while keeping the flavor of Molten Blood’s missing-health scaling; draconic blood from your wounds forms a volcanic shield that burns away as healing fire. It functions as a shield to block incoming damage, but returns the health to you slowly over a few seconds even if no additional damage hits, so it can also be used to recover after damage.

Thanks for reading; I’m going to end with a few more talent suggestions; these are lower priority for me than dealing with the major problems (Mastery, Apex, and Empowers), but would solve some pain points:

  • remove Essence Attunement; Devastation should get this effect for free since we pay two points for Ruby + Azure Essence Burst
  • move Eternity’s Span or Font of Magic to Essence Attunement’s location; add connections from Volatility to Engulfing Blaze and from Arcane Intensity to Eye of Infinity / Event Horizon (allow skipping one node when pathing to Feed the Flames or Shattering Star through the 2-point nodes on row 4)
  • swap Heat Wave and Lay Waste; remove the ‘Lay Waste tax’ for Flameshaper pathing to Volatility, make Heat Wave and Catalyze more affordable for Scalecommander, and encourage Flameshaper pathing through Living Flame nodes and Honed Aggression
  • remove Eye of Infinity / Event Horizon and move Shattering Star up one row; or combine Shattering Star into Star Salvo; there are too many nodes on the blue side, the extra points are needed to path through red talents
  • remove Eternity’s Span; this talent is needed to unlock 2-target cleave from Scintillation, which should be baseline; skipping it in dungeons without many 2-target fights massively undercuts the value of Eternity Surge upranking; Eternity Surge should hit 1/2/4/8 targets based on empower rank, putting more value at the end of the channel and gaining more benefit from Font of Magic
  • consider retuning all Empowers on exponential curves like this, and make Font of Magic a talent that buffs each spec’s unique empower only; Fire Breath should get this effect from Flameshaper’s Burning Adrenaline
  • baseline Onyx Legacy or swap its position along with Burnout and the other Deep Breath nodes; Scalecommander shouldn’t need to talent Burnout or Feed the Flames to get to Strafing Run and loses a capstone (Iridescence or Star Salvo) to Onyx Legacy
  • baseline Causality and Power Swell or move them up a row or three, these are both critical effects now
  • baseline Power Nexus or give it an additional effect, like doubling your max essence during Dragonrage; this talent’s actual value is too low to justify taking in most builds, but the 5-essence cap feels awkward now that Pyre costs 3 essence
  • make Catalyze double all Red damage-over-time effects (Ruby Embers, Enkindle)
  • make Enkindle a choice node with Essence Well or Legacy of the Lifebinder instead of Expanded Lungs
  • extend or remove the timeout on Imminent Destruction stacks

EDIT: In the interest of discussion I’m attaching a reply to a thread by @Baumritter of the Wyrmrest Temple discord on the EU forums. I’m going to quote some parts and give my thoughts about the underlying problems with the spec.

I do think that Pyre should scale less towards high target counts. I’m not sure what ‘setup’ means but I don’t want it; let me cast Pyre, Disintegrate, and Empowers as I choose based on the health bars in front of me, don’t make me ramp or generate or pre-apply debuffs or something just so I can’t do damage before other classes. Part of our mastery is that our upfront damage against new targets like add spawns or exploding totems is strong; requiring some ‘setup’ on new targets would indeed defeat this. (I don’t think Baum is asking for this, but I want to be clear that it’s not a problem to be ‘solved’ - it’s part of the design, and other specs have plenty of strengths we lack instead.)

Doing more damage to high-health targets isn’t necessarily “padding” - it’s supposed to be balanced by the lower damage at low health. It does encourage a playstyle of greedily swapping to new add spawns, then abandoning them for other players to finish once they get low, which can be seen as padding your damage on adds when you should be focusing boss or as going back to boss too early when you should be finishing off adds. This would be helped a lot by a shorter cooldown Dragonrage, letting you finish off adds with Tyranny instead of being tempted to go back and hit the healthier boss target; you would also be able to stay on the boss and passively cleave adds instead of swapping immediately, since you know you’ll have Tyranny to finish them and don’t need a head start on add damage. It does get frustrating for other players when Devastation’s burst is too high, allowing us to virtually one-shot targets and ignore its falloff; this happens mostly with very small adds like Void Orbs on Mythic Dragons, and was a good reason to remove Engulf and redistribute Flameshaper’s damage more evenly.

For me, Giantkiller is supposed to be a big part of Devastation’s identity, and it should guide your gameplay through targeting and timing your Dragonrages. The empower loop is core to the rotation, but I would like empowers to feel stronger themselves instead of just being generators for spender-boosting effects. The empower loop started as a way to drive Animosity extensions for Dragonrage, but this basically died when extensions were capped. Hero talents now provide this value instead; it’s important to get short cooldowns for more Mass Disintegrates or Consume Flame value. I think the empower-loop part of Dev’s identity is fine right now and can live alongside our Mastery, even without Animosity.

But our Mastery is completely broken. The current 1.5%-per-point maximum yields an average effectiveness of only .75% whenever you kill a mob without pressing Dragonrage; the floor at 30% only increases this to .8175%; a Dragonrage uptime of ~25% brings this up to ~.99% which is what makes Mastery “about equal” to Haste or Versatility in sims and longer fights like raid bosses that average over multiple Dragonrage cooldowns. Giantkiller was fine at 2% where it gave an average effectiveness of 1% without Dragonrage and allowed you to achieve higher effectiveness with good use. While trying to fix the problem of too-much-damage-during-Dragonrage-and-not-enough-outside for raids, the overnerf to 1.5% actually created this problem for dungeons. If you equip too much Mastery you will do decent damage during Dragonrage pulls and crap damage on other pulls; you need groups coordinating big pulls on 2min cooldowns for this to work, and it ends up feeling bad because your allies also press their cooldowns at the same time, stealing your chance to win damage, and you suffer more than them on no-cooldown pulls.

I too would prefer to keep Giantkiller intact, and in fact I want it to have a bigger role in driving Devastation’s gameplay. For Mastery to be meaningful, it needs to have a guaranteed effectiveness higher than Haste or Versatility, so that you actually want to equip lots of it. There are ways to do this without increasing its maximum value; for example, you could change its falloff curve so that it starts at 1.5% but falls gradually to 1% at zero health, never dropping below the point where it gives “negative” damage compared to equipping the same amount of Haste or Versatility. Personally I prefer the version with a high maximum and a steep falloff because it creates a stronger incentive and reward for using Dragonrage at the right time, as well as simply making Dragonrage stronger; this needs a short Dragonrage cooldown so you can react when mobs drop below the transition point between >1% and <1% effectiveness (which for a 2% maximum would nicely occur at 50% health). If you flatten Giantkiller, reducing its falloff and raising its floor, you reduce the reward for making good use of Tyranny, and leave Dragonrage with a mediocre damage bonus. I don’t like this as much but it would leave more room for a design like Rising Fury, since it cares less about when you Dragonrage and honestly needs an additional damage bonus to make up for the weak mastery.

I have outlined the problems with Risen Fury and Tyranny; it’s less noticeable in raids because bosses have tons of health so their % doesn’t drop as quickly, but it does impact your Dragonrages during execute phases, defeating the feeling of a ramp. A cheap hack to add Tyranny to Risen Fury could fix this but the whole effect just feels like a knock-off Dragonrage to me and not a real addition. I find the timed Essence Bursts more annoying than fun, they aren’t better than guaranteed bursts on your fillers since you are going to press Azure Sweep anyways, and they can overcap during hectic moments. Pausing this effect out of combat isn’t a real solution to me, it will just add pressure to the start of a pull when you already have all your resources, or waste itself while you’re waiting for a tank to gather and had to enter combat to kick a cast.

I also think there’s a problem with the ramp making it hard to time Dragonrage for maximum value. A top evoker player even pressed Dragonrage 14 seconds before the pull on Mythic Belo’ren as an intentional strategy to line up with the egg phase. Fortunately this doesn’t seem to be necessary but it’s a crazy thing to see. The ramp is just too slow and you have no agency to make it faster; the shorter duration of combat in non-raid settings is also a real problem for this design.

I do think Rising Fury can be saved but it needs four crucial elements:

  • Buff Mastery to eliminate the damage loss when you don’t have Dragonrage
  • Make the ramp faster and react to haste; I would make it gain a stack when you cast an empower instead of on a timer
  • Remove Risen Fury and buff Animosity so we get more time with 5 stacks during Dragonrage and Dragonrage doesn’t end too early
  • Replace Risen Fury with a new effect that gives you part of Rising Fury’s effects when you don’t have Dragonrage; for example casting an empower could give you 5 seconds of its damage bonus, and maybe also Tyranny’s effect

This would work around a weaker mastery by caring less about it but giving you a more powerful cooldown window. Investing so much into ramping Dragonrage as the focus of our Apex basically requires that it be a long cooldown and that we be able to ignore our Mastery while it’s on cooldown. I would prefer a playstyle with a stronger Mastery and more reactive use of Dragonrage, and would delete Rising Fury to allow for a shorter cooldown. There were many better options for our Apex, starting from proven designs like Obsidian Shards or even the Jackpot tier set from Undermine.

I won’t quote the entire remainder of the post but encourage everyone to read it. I generally agree with criticisms of bad talents and the underwhelming state of Flameshaper, and we align on some points like replacing Scorching Embers. I have tried to present minimal solutions to what I think are the biggest problems, but I would welcome a full Flameshaper rework and some new talents.

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Flameshaper rework
12.1 Devastation Evoker Feedback
2

This is the longest post I’ve ever seen for evoker.

Here’s hoping for some positive changes.

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3

I shared the same frustrations in my post made about a month ago. Should be titled “Devastation needs help in M+”.

While it doesn’t have nowhere near as much information provided here, we still share that Devastation needs to be changed and buffed in many aspects. It is currently at its weakest point it has ever been.

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My god dude. I think they could just bump up the damage some. Look at Arms Warrior. Everyone thought they were busted and needed a rework then Blizz gave them a massive flat damage boost now they are like 3-4 place dps. No one is complaining about them now.

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But the overall damage is … fine? ish? Middling-low in raid, far from the worst in M+ despite what silly “tier lists” say, just way below the top performers (Unholy, Devourer, Demo) like most other specs right now.

You can aura-buff any class to make it good but that won’t make it fun and people won’t enjoy playing it and only do it because it’s “meta” and they want invites. I have been playing Dev up to at least 3400 every tier, even when it’s “bad”, and right now I’m getting the least satisfaction out of it.

My problem with the spec right now isn’t just that my damage is low, but that it feels like there’s no way to improve my performance through better play, because some critical flaws in the design lock you into bad patterns.

Take the Apex for example: Pressing Dragonrage early causes you to waste Tyranny; but pressing it late causes you to waste Risen Fury. It makes you want to save Dragonrage for the next pack instead of pressing it when it comes off cooldown, but then you’re wasting uses and Tyranny value. There’s no good answer, it feels like a crap shoot whether you will get anything out of it, and the faster your team kills packs, the worse it performs.

Or Flameshaper: It does piss damage on small pulls. You do a big pull with Lust and blast aoe for 30 seconds. Then you’re left staring at the big prio mob who still has 50% hp with nothing left to aoe; you have Risen Fury but your Tyranny is gone, and so is Conduit of Flame. You run out of essence bursts and your damage evaporates; all the work you did in the first 30 seconds is completely wiped out.

Or Scalecommander: Your tank skull-marks the first big Lasher in Algeth’ar. You hit a Mass Disintegrate on it, then you swap to a different one for your second Mass - because you have to do this or you will lose a lot of Deep Breath cooldown - and the second Mass completely misses the first Lasher, it hits all the tiny ones instead. Don’t bother upranking Eternity Surge, it will never hit them anyways.

All I want is a version of Devastation that actually works and makes it feel like when I choose to press Dragonrage and what I’m targeting for Giantkiller actually matters. I believe that’s exactly what the developers said they wanted to accomplish with class reworks in the alpha notes for e.g. Fire Mage (however you may feel about the result of that effort, it doesn’t seem to have turned out well for mages either).

If I just want to play a good-numbers spec that makes no decisions, I’ll play Aug. Blizzard seems to be saying “we’d prefer that you don’t play Devastation” with the way that they put zero effort into this spec after everyone completely abandoned it. Aura buffs that make our overall competitive with Aug won’t bring players back or solve my frustrations. You play Dev for the fantasy of an angry lizard wizard who melts big monsters, and that’s been totally broken since the Mastery nerfs.

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Dude almost all specs are like that now. It isn’t an evoker issue. It was post TWW when the great dumbing down of classes happened. Blizzard’s ulterior motive for neutering classes has yet to be revealed.

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I think their motive was clearly communicated in the alpha notes.

  • They wanted to reduce proc- / buff-based gameplay where damage optimization was mostly driven by reacting to conflicting prompts instead of player choice
  • They wanted to move power back into major cooldowns and how you chose to use them, instead of overall being determined by how often you failed the proc-minigame

For Fire Mage this took the form of removing Sun King’s Blessing and concentrating power into Combustion. For Frost it was similarly concentrating power into Ray of Frost and giving it two charges for more flexible use. (You can think what you want about how this worked out, I don’t play those specs and have no opinion. Dev is certainly not the only spec they messed up.)

For Devastation it was removing Engulf with its heavy focus on stacking multiple damage amps at the right moment, along with Snapfire procs and Shattering Star. I applauded these changes in alpha, and they have been good for the spec. But they completely missed the mark with Rising Fury. They wanted our defining gameplay to be “land your ramp at the right time and maintain it for as long as possible” but that doesn’t work at all in dungeons. And they built it around a cooldown that is fundamentally broken, because its value is based on a Mastery that doesn’t work so we don’t build any.

I don’t need my buttons to just do more damage, and I don’t need more or more complicated buttons. I want a gameplay hook to drive decision-making, especially when to press Dragonrage; that’s supposed to be my Mastery and its focus on hitting big targets:

  • I want Mastery to be strong, so that I build a lot of it, prioritize healthy targets, and need to press Dragonrage when all targets drop below 50%
  • I want Dragonrage to have a short, flexible cooldown so I can choose when to press it, responding to how fast enemies are dying
  • I want Eternity Surge to be stronger and focus healthier targets, so that I choose to uprank it equal to the number of high-health targets in range but ignore low-health units
  • I want Pyre to be stronger at lower target counts, so it’s useful to crush small health bars before sending Disintegrate or Eternity Surge at the big health bars

The spec actually worked a lot like this in Dragonflight before the Mastery nerfs, it just didn’t have the flexibility to use Dragonrage correctly. War Within was a different kind of gameplay, the bloat of effects from hero talents interacting with spec talents and tier sets made you ignore the mobs in front of you and focus on your class WeakAuras. Maybe you preferred that gameplay - that’s fine - but the developers changed direction. If you think they failed to deliver for other specs too, please keep telling them that! But aura buffs won’t fix Dev’s problems, even if they would help me time more keys; for example, the stronger my base damage, the more totally useless my Apex becomes as my group tends to kill packs even earlier before its ramp.

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I’d bet you 100 million gold that what they said to the players and the real reason they did this are WILDLY different.

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A very well-done post that addresses several current problems with the spec. I hope that in patch 12.1 they will rework it and correct the problematic points we currently have.

Personally, I’m a hater of mastery, so for me the best option would be a complete replacement.

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10

The apex talents need a complete rework. One of the most boring sets to begin with. Worst case scenario is that you occasionally get no use out of them.

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OP has a lot of good points. Wanted to chime in with my $0.02:

Flameshaper

Current version seems like it’s missing a button. I personally preferred the Engulf version from S2 & S3 in WWI. Who doesn’t like big, flashy numbers? The damage it dealt & procs it had gave some variation and punch to the spec that it doesnt really have currently.

Why was Engulf even removed? All of the tracking for the DOTs to optimize its damage can be done in-game with CDM.

Consume Flame in ST feels unintuitive & counterproductive to the stated design goal of “managing your (fire breath) dots”. Even with 2x Fire Breath charges, you still run out of FB dot that you can’t consume without a FB to replace it.

On my wishlist, give me Engulf back. If that isnt the option, I think there needs to be better hooks from consuming your dots. Thematically, we’re not shaping flame so much as we’re just….breathing it or eating it.

Scalecommander

My major qualm with how the spec plays is that Deep Breath is one of the hero spec’s cornerstones, and there are always situations in Raid or M+ that breathing puts you in danger (or death). Would be nice if there was an option to have a “casted” version where your character stays still and you select the area like original flavor Deep Breath (w/o maneuverability).

As mentioned in OP, the fact that Bombardments don’t report properly on in-game meters is baffling. I shouldn’t have to rely on an external tool (e.g. - WCL) to see what’s actually my damage.

Apex/Rising Fury

I don’t generally mind the Apex suite of talents, but the ramp on it makes it take long to even feel the effects of them on the rotation. It would be a nice QOL to build in a pause on the Risen Fury portion of the buff to pause while out of combat at a minimum.

Tuning

A bit bummed that we got hit so early in the season with nerfs to Disintegrate that also nerfed FS (which didn’t need the nerf), especially while OTHER specs weren’t hit anywhere near as hard in comparison. Dev damage is middle of the pack at best, and it would have been nice for the nerfs to be reverted, even partially, to help keep it competitive.

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I tried to explain in Alpha that having a single button - Disintegrate - both consume your dot and reduce the cooldown of applying the dot was a dead end. They settled for tuning the consume-to-cooldown ratio until it passively feels okay; Fire Breath uptime on logs is around 75%-80% so consume is basically a non-mechanic. And the “second charge” of Fire Breath virtually doesn’t exist; they could delete the talent, forcing you to cast on cooldown, and your uptime and consume damage would be mostly the same.

I have no hope for Engulf returning but I would at least like an extension mechanic to balance the consume, or maybe something that gives me an extra Fire Breath charge whenever I press Dragonrage. There’s no gameplay here; I’m looking for some high point in the rotation where you apply a mega-Firebreath with an extra-long duration to consume, or something beyond the apply-consume-reapply doom loop.

Honestly, I don’t think there’s any danger with Stretch Time, although sometimes you do need to wait. Slipstream makes it easy to do a quick breath and immediately hover dash back out, and you can just send both breaths back-to-back if you know you won’t have a safe opportunity to recast later.

I don’t hate the idea of a non-moving Breath but it’s not a priority for me, and it would need to have some damage penalty, otherwise it’s just always better and why would you breath normally? The most likely answer is that if this is actually important for people, we would end up losing Strafing Run, in exchange for a choice node exactly like the one Pres has for Verdant Embrace. A safe cast that must be used on cooldown but involves no risk, or the normal cast with a second charge so you can choose when to breath safely.

I am honestly not opposed. I think Giantkiller is interesting and would be fun if we were allowed to ‘game’ its effectiveness by choosing when to Dragonrage with a 2-charge cooldown. Without this ability a strong Giantkiller is part fun, part punishment, as you are forced to suffer weak moments against low health mobs.

There’s a part of the community that believes Giantkiller cannot to be tuned healthily or that allowing us to ‘game’ it in this way would be game-breaking, resulting in our base damages being nerfed to compensate, so the penalty for doing this wrong would be very high. I don’t agree but would settle for a version with a lower maximum if needed.

If it’s really impossible for us to have a fun and effective Giantkiller, then it should be removed. Give us a new mastery and the problems are mostly solved; Dragonrage can stay a 2-min cooldown, its duration is irrelevant, and I don’t care when I press it. Rising Fury is still too long and too slow to be useful in a lot of contexts, but it can be improved.

A simple option that is not perfect but would likely be popular:

Mastery: Obsidian Shards: Empower spells and Deep Breath deal X% increased damage; essence abilities deal Y% additional damage as Volcanic damage over 8 seconds.

The ‘Blazing Shards’ effect could be baseline, a talent, or even rebuilt as our new Apex.

If the ‘flavor’ of Giantkiller is important for Devastation, but the scaling with Mastery is too big a nightmare, they could always just … make it a talent instead! Give us a new mastery, then give us a talent like:

Talent: Giantkiller: You deal up to 25% more damage to enemies based on their current health; higher health enemies take more damage. During Dragonrage, you gain the maximum benefit against all targets.

Or even build this out into a new Apex, keeping it a major part of the spec. The point is simply that if tuning difficulty (driven by gear scaling and high-mastery trinkets) is the sole reason we have not had a strong cooldown for years, they can sidestep the issue by putting a hard cap on the effect.

There are plenty of plausible solutions, even a boring mastery would be better than a broken one with a conflicting apex.

EDIT: Coming back to this:

Okay, actually, here’s the big, dumb, perfect fix for Flameshaper: add this to the Devastation talent tree:

Everburning Flame: Fire Breath is now permanent and deals 15% increased damage.

This is the post-pruning version of Everburning. No fancy tech, just infinite dot. I would move Font of Magic and/or Burnout to make room, move Scorching Embers up to row 9, and add this as a capstone below Scorching Embers.

This completely solves the problems without requiring any special play or tuning around extension procs. It turns Fire Breath into a nuke that you always want to uprank when you can do so without wasting essence. It lets you actually use the 2nd charge as Flameshaper to delay your Fire Breath cast until a break in your essence flow, or if you need to save a charge for an upcoming add spawn, without running out of dot on your current target. You can keep Scorching Embers and Pyre-consuming-from-all-targets unchanged; you can do whatever you want with the tuning of Consume and Fire Breath; the only additional change needed is to remove Deep Exhalation (or make it a choice node with something else - hint hint, Enkindle) because it now does nothing. Well and you also should remove the Iridescence gimmick.

This statement should have included Disintegrate. It feels so dumb to run out of Fire Breath on the boss a few seconds before an add spawns. If I hold my Fire Breath I stop doing damage to the boss. If I don’t, I will have no damage for the add.

Consume exists to add damage from Fire Breath to my spender casts; it should always do that successfully, as long as I pass the test of hit every target with a Fire Breath. It doesn’t need to actually reduce duration to achieve that, and no gameplay is added by having it reduce duration and force me to re-apply Fire Breath. I already want to cast Fire Breath on cooldown, because of Devastation’s many interactions with casting Empower spells. I need permission to not re-cast Fire Breath on targets I have already successfully hit, so that I can save one for new targets, since opening with Fire Breath is now critical to my damage.

Let me opt out of silly trade-offs between upranking and dot duration, between holding or sending Fire Breath, with this one simple talent. Then go tune Consume Flame based on how many Disintegrates or Pyres I cast (and how much weaker they are than Scalecommander’s) instead of how much Fire Breath I have to consume.

This might seem mildly crazy, but it feels a lot less stupid to me than the dog-chasing-its-own-tail that is the current Consume loop.

It’s been said before but Catalyze is a better talent than Consume Flame. This turns Consume into another Catalyze, while also fixing Catalyze’s problem (they both prevent you from upranking Fire Breath).

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13

I made several long posts regarding Pyre in the past and also how to improve Flameshapper. Just a few of the changes I suggested were:

  • Allow Volatility to trigger on single target also (THIS IS A BIG ONE, it would boost Pyre’s single target dmg by 42% without affecting it’s aoe at all) *keep in mind that Volatility procs off of other Volatility procs aswell*
  • Make Power Nexus baseline and replace it with a Charged Blast
  • Increase the single target damage of Pyre straight up without increasing it’s aoe dmg (maybe like 15-30% more dmg to your main target)
  • Slightly reduce the dmg of Firestorm and reduce it’s duration back to 6 seconds (maybe reduce the amount of Pyres required to trigger it by 1)
  • Maybe change Causality to allow Pyre a basline empower cooldown reduction regardless of the amount of targets hit (approximately 1.2 to 1.4 seconds)
  • Reduce Dragonrage’s cooldown to 60 seconds and balance the Apex talents accordingly

These are just a few of the changes they could make that would immediately solve the balance issues with pyre.

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I don’t think Pyre needs special support for single target, because honestly Pyre should never be pressed in pure single target - that’s why we have Disintegrate. I am mostly interested in its damage on 2-8 targets, where Flameshaper feels weaker than Scalecommander, and Scalecommander leans too heavily on Mass Disintegrate. Tuning Pyre for higher base damage with target falloff would fix this and support better overall performance in dungeons without needing so many late season Pyre buffs.

That said, it would be nice if Pyre did more damage to the primary target in aoe; prio damage is more commonly a Blue-spell mechanic for us, but Flameshaper doesn’t benefit well from Blue talents, and spends its cooldown windows mostly casting Pyre. It needs a bonus to Consume Flame or Pyre damage to the primary target of each Pyre to fill the hollow left by Engulf’s removal.

Pyre damage felt better to me back when Giantkiller was strong, because smaller mobs dying faster meant your damage against them quickly decayed, but the healthiest mobs continued taking heavy damage. It wasn’t “prio damage” or “funnel” exactly, but it distributed damage in an interesting way. It took more Pyres to kill small mobs without Dragonrage, but those Pyres dealt more total damage to the large mob in a pack, leaving less health to Disintegrate afterwards. Without a strong Giantkiller or Engulf, Flameshaper deals basically flat damage across all targets, which leaves the biggest mobs very healthy when you come out of cooldowns with no gas left.

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We’ve had Pyre builds where it’s the main spender in single target in the past. Think of early Snapfire builds or season 3 war within twin flame build. They were viable single target builds with Pyre as the main spender and they worked.

Now, Snapefire’s been removed, Firestorm is only in the passive talent and twin flame has been severely nerfed. These changes make those builds no longer viable in single target rotation.

Now, if we make a few of the changes I mentioned, it would allow for the return of Pyre focused builds, which they’ve only had a few. Just make it worth the cost of investing Pyre (fire) builds.

The most common complaint for Flameshapper is that we lack the visual thematic of ACTUAL FIRE spells. Flameshapper has all the visual flare it needs with it’s existing spells. Back in the Snapfire days of Dragonflight, you would often have up to 3 active Firestorms at a time. NOW THAT’S A FIRE!

Bring back Pyre centric builds. Blue lazer isn’t the only evoker spell and it shouldn’t be treated as though it is.

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I agree entirely, Consume Flame needs a bit of buff.

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There was never a point where casting Pyre instead of Disintegrate in pure-single target did more damage; the Disintegrate builds were always much stronger. But it may have been ‘viable’ depending on your definition; I remember doing a +10 this way once for fun.

It is true that Engulf made up a sufficiently large part of TWW Flameshaper’s single-target damage that it devalued Disintegrate, in a good way that freed up more interesting talent builds.

It’s also true that Snapfire added so much AoE that it made exclusively spamming Pyre on as few as 2 targets actually very competitive, despite how little damage Pyre itself does on 2 targets (much less than one Disintegrate).

I really want a Pyre rework to allow this playstyle to feel strong again; right now, you should never press Pyre on fewer than 3 targets, and honestly, it’s debatable at 3 even for Flameshaper. Pyre doesn’t feel strong until much higher target counts; it should feel strong at 2+ regardless of Disintegrate’s role in single-target.

I understand there are players who don’t like Disintegrate and would like a Pyre-only build or some alternative, but it’s not the goal of my suggestions. (It clearly is for yours, and they are not bad either; retuning Causality in particular is a must-have for any single-target Pyre build to work.) I won’t debate this too much, I welcome alternate perspectives, but I like Disintegrate, and historically classes with only one spender for both single-target and aoe have suffered horrible tuning nightmares. It might be interesting if they did make a Pyre-only build work for Flameshaper, maybe by making Pyre proc a stronger Consume Flame on the primary target (along with some of your changes). I enjoy the Diabolist Destruction Warlock build that only casts Chaos Bolt and not Rain of Fire; this might be like that in reverse.

But I don’t think “pressing Pyre in single-target” is what will save Flameshaper. First it needs to actually cast Fire Breath at more than rank 1; it needs that exciting peak moment. And yes, more Firestorms and Fire Torrents; replacing the bad Living Flame talents that tax you for pathing to Feed the Flames would help. Fun-wise, the spec feels dead to me because it only casts rank 1 Fire Breaths and Pyre, and all the damage is passive. Performance-wise, it’s viable if you’re looking at overall damage after the dungeon, but it feels weak on small pulls and big prio mobs, which is a huge reversal from War Within.

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Nobody’s claming they did “more” damage then Disintegrate builds in ST. The Snapefire and season 3 WW twin flame builds were both comprobable (as in equal or in likeness) with disintegrate in single target DPS at the time when they existed.

The advantage of the fire builds was clear, massive cartoonish AOE damage and cool visuals. The huge disadvantage was they were much more reliant on positioning, procs and timing, making in a hit or miss build.

Snapfire in particular was heavily reliant on mob positioning and fast reaction time, which is why is wasn’t seen alot. Season 3 WW Twin Flame lasted only a season, requiring the set bonus, so it was short lived.

Disintegrate is such the standard, that most players never attempted Pyre, even when it was viable. Why? Because they didn’t know it was possible, because they hadn’t considered it.

Disintegrate builds are no secret to anyone. They are and have been (with few ephemeral exceptions) the only viable builds in single target. Monkey see monkey do and most people copie their builds from websites (which is weird btw) Calculating and optimizing new builds is half the point of an RPG. Much like that newish 1 botton rotation, it’s doing your thinking for you and it’s boring…

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One of the suggestions I made regarding Flameshapper was moding the consume flame effect. I also have been enjoying the Rain Of Fire build for Hellcaller Desto Lock. They’ve finally perfected it and I love how people can choose between Chaos Bolt and RoF.

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I wanted to avoid arguing and keep this constructive, so I tried to avoid simply saying: You’re wrong, there was never a ‘viable’ Pyre-only build. Your statement is false:

During War Within Seasons 2 and 3, virtually any possible combination of Devastation spec tree talents for Flameshaper was a ‘viable’ build for M+ in terms of overall damage; your choices merely shaped the damage distribution between large and small aoe, single-target, and some 2-target specific effects. Part of Flameshaper’s magic was that, because Disintegrate was a smaller part of its single-target profile, you could afford to drop talents like Arcane Intensity for more AoE-focused talents, without completely torpedoing your boss damage.

But no matter what talents you ran, at no point was it ever correct to cast Pyre instead of Disintegrate in pure single-target; this was always a large damage loss. Even an AoE-focused build with Snapfire + Feed the Flames and no Arcane Intensity / Azure Celerity / Scintillation still did more damage by pressing Disintegrate. That did not make those builds bad or non-viable; they were just aoe-heavy.

For single-target damage specifically (not overall), you need to define ‘viable’ here. If “doing ~50% of the damage you could do with the same build by pressing your other button” is ‘viable’ to you then sure: a Pyre-only playstyle was ‘viable’ in content that didn’t have very difficult enrage timers, including keys up to some level. You were basically sandbagging by doing this, but you weren’t doing no damage, just less damage; and the amount ‘less’ was indeed reduced by Engulf and Snapfire (whereas the current Flameshaper penalizes you more for not pressing Disintegrate, thanks to its higher Consume modifier).

You can also probably clear heroic raids and +10 keys as a geared Destruction Warlock casting only Rain of Fire, or as Retribution Paladin only casting Divine Storm, never using your single target spenders, because the content doesn’t require your class’s best damage to beat. That may have been true for Flameshaper at some point, but it was never “competitive” with Disintegrate.

I assure you, smart players test everything in this game. That’s how the Feed-the-Flames Flameshaper build became popular; because a top M+ player decided to pilot it in high keys and proved to everyone that it was viable. It’s not like those builds were underplayed either; lots of people played them successfully, despite some voices arguing the single-target tradeoffs were not worth it.

You’re also not the only person to play that build and think: “What if I press Pyre in single-target?” You’re just wrong if you think that actually did equivalent damage to Disintegrate.

As I said earlier, I even tried it myself in some +10 or +12 vault farm keys; it did tank damage to bosses, but my friends didn’t notice, because I kept up on overall with aoe damage to trash.

Again, Pyre was never equal-or-better than Disintegrate in pure single-target, for any build, ever. If you want to continue arguing that it was, you’ll need to provide some real data to prove it.

But I won’t argue it anymore; whether you’re right or wrong about the history, you’re entitled to want a Pyre-only build in the future; I don’t think it’s a great goal or likely to happen, but we both need Pyre to not suck at 2 or 3 targets first anyways.

Believe me, I played every possible build for Flameshaper in keys in War Within, including off-meta builds with talents like Focusing Iris, and argued with people about non-recommended playstyles, like max-ranking both empowers. What I loved about Flameshaper was that everything was ‘viable’ if you played appropriately, but the talents still felt impactful. I played every single talent on the Dev spec tree as either Flameshaper or Scalecommander at some point in War Within (except the 2nd point of Honed Aggression, which funny enough is viable now that it gives crit).

The new Flameshaper has virtually no talent support, which I think is a huge loss:

  • There are too many Deep Breath talents, which are worthless for Flameshaper
  • There are too many Eternity Surge talents, which are mostly worthless; even Azure Sweep will likely be discarded once the tier set goes away
  • Font of Magic, required to reach Scorching Embers, is worthless since you never uprank
  • Talents like Ruby Embers and Iridescence used to be HUGE for Engulf damage but are now mediocre or irrelevant
  • Only talents that directly buff Fire Breath, like Heat Wave and Catalyze, really matter; buffs to other spells or damage add-ons like Scintillation and Shattering Star are tradeoffs that have no interaction with any hero effect
  • Volatility, Azure Celerity, and Causality remain hugely important for the simple reason of getting more Fire Breaths

The talents themselves are too bland, but there’s also a lack of meaningful interactions to drive playstyle choices, because Flameshaper’s only goal is to consume rank-1 Fire Breaths with spenders. Firestorm doesn’t even tie back into or benefit from Flameshaper in the way that, for example, Charged Blast is empowered by Scalecommander having Mass Disintegrate. The Red side needs better options than Ruby Embers and Engulfing Blaze; maybe Living Flame should contribute stacks towards Feed the Flames? Or even all Red spells, so Twin Flames count?

Flameshaper has plenty of room to grow, but a minimum first step is to fix Fire Breath upranking somehow, and buff the weak points of Fire Breath, Pyre, and Twin Flame damage.