Hi everyone! I just wanted to header this post to let people know I don’t hate evoker, I actually have a lot of hope that this is the class I can main for the whole expansion. But to me, they have some very glaring issues that may end up becoming sticking points. Instead of ratting them off one by one in a big list that people will only read half of, I thought I’d break it into different posts over a few days to allow time for proper discussion to form.
So here goes, my topic today will be movement! While Evoker in general is considered a very mobile class, I would consider their movement utility as quite weak. While hover is a core part of our toolkit, we are missing an additional form of movement most other classes possess. For example, while hover is great to use while casting it feels bad to use when you don’t need to cast, my solution would be to make the ‘cast while moving’ and dash components completely seperate, giving the player more agency over when they want to prepare for casting while moving without the want to actually move.
I personally think evokers movement needs to be compared more so to melee classes due to its reduced range, while Evoker has Hover for a Burst of movement you also have Zephyr for a 20% DR and movement, using probably the most mobile melee class as a comparison, Rogues have Sprint, Shadow Step, and if you are outlaw grappling hook too! Rogue has two or three answers to a question, all based around movement, meaning you don’t have to sacrifice a party damage reduction effect or a damage utility button like hover to get the desired movement effect. Evokers feel quite kiss curse in is regard, meaning while we do have an answers for problems, most of those answers are tied to one button, for an example off the top of my head, “need to get out of an AoE fast? Why not zip to an ally outside of the zone with Verdant Embrace?” having to choose to move but burn your instant heal doesn’t feel great, abilities like rescue also fit this niche, but that talent isn’t always taken and can annoy your teammates because it always requires you to move one, while I love having utility that assists my party I don’t know if that should come to the detriment of the player.
Finally while this does touch a little bit on evokers damage profile it is still related to their movement tech so bare with me, the main source of Devokers DPS comes from Disintegrate and your empowered abilities fire breath & Eternity Surge, and nothing feels worse than starting a channel and having to move right away, especially when you waste an essence burst proc or are trying to cast a rank 4 empower (those cast times are just too long!) I think the easiest solution to this is to allow hover to be cast while casting, like mages shimmer, it is too punishing in its current state and due to evokers reduced range you can sometimes be dealing with both melee and ranged mechanics at the same time. For an alternate solution I’d look at giving evoker some form of ‘Hyper armour’ while channeling disintegrate, for example the tooltip would read “while channeling disintegrate you gain 20% Damage reduction, and an additional 10% for each non periodic damaging effect that hits you” (so no dots). And for a final option, but my least favorite of the bunch would be to just make disintegrate castable while moving at all times. My only real solution for the empowered casts other than reducing the cast time is to add a ramping speed to them, so essentially a flavor of cast time reduction.
Hopefully you folks liked at least some of the changes I’d make, if not please tell me how you would change it! Or if you think evoker is perfect as is let me know that too!
