Need some insight

Hello Evokers!

I’ve always played Melee classes/jobs in my MMO “career” if you want to call it that. 8 years in FFXIV and 3 in WoW now.

Thought that the Dracthyr were pretty cool so I made an Evoker to try out. She’s level 67 now and I’m having a rough time.

I’m totally willing to accept the blame for my own struggles here, because this has been my attempt to try and make myself learn and enjoy a Caster which I have avoided for a decade now lol.

Anyway, more to the point.

I’m leveling by questing and I find myself seriously struggling to stay alive in the overworld. God help me if I accidentally aggro an extra mob or two. Is this normal? Does it get better at 70? Because so far it has been ROUGH. Are they only good in group content?

If anyone has any good guides they could recommend for beginners/intermediates like me I would love to check them out. A lot of stuff I’m finding seems to be outdated.

Honestly any tips/insight/advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks for reading my post!

The Rotation is super simple. Knowing what the abilities do will push you towards a priority. Ill explain priority after the spells are explained.

So Evoker technically has 4 abilities, and a couple CD abilities not including Dragon rage and Deep Breath.

First we need to explain Fire Breath and Eternity Surge. With out taking talents into account this is how it works for them.

Fire Breath has 4 ranks, each rank does the exact same damage except rank 1 does a longer damage over time with a little damage up front while Rank 4 does more damage up front with a shorter damage over time.

Eternity Surge will always hit 1 target with rank 1 and will do the exact same damage spread across 4 targets at rank 4.

With that understood Talents within the talent tree offer you the ability to do more damage based on your fire breath duration. Such as the talent Catalyze which increases Fire Breath damage by 100% tick rate while channeling Disintegrate on a target with fire breath on them.

For this reason Rank 1 is the most important thing to put out. It will hit the same number of targets for fire breath but have a 25ish second duration letting you pummel Disintegrates into it.

Talents like Shattering star increases damage by 30% on a 15second cooldown.

Living flame should only be used as a filler OR during Dragonrage. (will explain a little more in Dragonrage section.

Squall is fantastic and turns you into a fire mage basically. Squall cast timer is the only issue with the spell but there are procs within the tree that allow you to have instant cast and CD resets on Squall.

Dragonrage is your only major CD. Understanding it is where all of your damage will come from. Dragon rage makes your essence burst talent activate 100% of the time on your next living flame or azure strike for 14seconds. it also fires off up to 3 pyres at a target when activated. Essence burst makes your next Essence spending ability free completely. Pyre and disintegrate are your only spenders for this so they are priority during the 14seconds it is active. The problem is Essence burst can only be activated 1 of 2 ways, With Ruby or Azure Essence burst (top talents) and Ruby gives you a 1.4second cast time (if no instant casts are active via fire breath talents).

Azure Strike is instant cast and will 100% grant you Disintegrate stacks in this window. BUT it does minimal damage, so when Living flame has a proc active for instant cast is it the better choice.

AoE situations replace Disintegrate with Pyre and watch the numbers fly.

Deep breath is when all the mobs are grouped in dungeons, not really important but is also a HUGE damage.

Now that the core is explained lets talk Priority.

Shattering star as much as possible before the hard hitting abilities like Eternity surge, a rank 4 Fire breath or Disintegrate.
Maintain Fire Breath damage as much as possible. Rank 1 beats out rank 4 every day of the week unless rank 4 will kill the target.
Keep Eternity Surge on Cooldown, 1 charge for 1 target, 4 charges for 4 targets (talents double this number).
Essence burst Pyre 3targets or Disintegrate 1 target.
Living Flame Instant procs only during Dragonrage otherwise Azurestrike.
Non Essence burst Disintegrates and Pyres
Living Flame hard casting during Dragonrage

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What’s your ilvl? I’ve seen a bunch of people recently who are trying to push into Dragonflight with gear that is worse than the level 60 boosted set

Evoker can be slightly squishy vs casters and stuff but not really any worse than other ranged classes, and you should be pretty much one shotting mobs with a charged fire breath.

Thank you so much for taking the time to type this out and explain it to me, this is super helpful and I really appreciate it. Will definitely be studying up and moving some things around with this in mind.

Seriously, thank you!

The bulk of this advice is spot on, but Fire Breath is definitely not this simple, especially with leaping flames. You’ll get the sweet spot on it eventually just by doing dungeons, but only rank 4 if the mobs will die within 6 seconds and only rank 1 if you’re going to have everything living for its duration and theres no reason to empower further.

Additionally, save shattering star within reason so that you can fit 3 chained disintegrates or 2 disint and 1 ES into the window.

Other than that, leveling with the crap gear just feels awful. Once you’ve gotten to 70 and have some loot you’ll basically one shot the packs you’re pulling. In the meantime, following up your first cast with a landslide and continuing your rotation and then deep breathing back the other way will help keep mobs off you.

Casual player perspective, but I did struggle a bit early on leveling my evoker, but partly that was a years long break from the game. You kind of have to realize that in many ways, we are just a mage with scales. You have to kite. Use your knockbacks, use hover. Once I had that hang of that, I didn’t have too many problems, unless you couldn’t slow the mob, of course.

And, yes, managing dragon rage is key to your damage. Just a matter of practice. Devastation doesn’t have so many buttons to press, so you just focus on pressing them at the right time. lol

I know you asked for a more starter guide but if you ever wanted to try pvp on impossible mode ive made an entire youtube channel for devoker in arenas

Link here
Devastation Evoker Guides