Our current mastery has some issues, including:
- It is not interactive, meaning it simply increases our damage under certain circumstances.
- As the fight progresses, we end up becoming weaker, and in many encounters where the end of the fight is the most important part, we end up with much lower DPS than our initial DPS.
- We do not feel stronger when we should.
I would like to propose a complete rework of our mastery, replacing its current effect with something new that interacts with our empowered spells and maintains a strength effect during Dragonrage. To achieve this, there’s nothing better than a slightly modified version of our current tier set (season 2/4).
Mastery: Draconic Legacy
Your essence spells pierce enemies with Spellweaver’s Shards, dealing 10% of the damage done as arcane damage over 6 seconds.
Empowered spells deal X% increased damage and cause your Spellweaver Shards to blaze with power, dealing X% more damage for 6 seconds. During Dragonrage, shards always blaze with power.
This new mastery would add a new layer to the gameplay of Devastation, giving players something new to control during fights (Empowered Shards), and it would address some of the current problems we have with our damage profile in battles. It could also add more value to our mastery.
Flameshaper has a talent (Enkindle) that makes our essence abilities deal damage over time. This talent could be reworked into something that adds value to our mastery, such as:
- X% of our mastery damage is dealt in an area around the target;
- Increases the effect of our mastery by X%;
- Your empowered spells also trigger Mastery: Draconic Legacy;
- Increases the duration of Empowered Shards by 1 second.
There are many options.
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Personally im fine with mastery as it stands right now, except for the insane amount of up-front threat it causes. I would, however, like if the damage dropoff stops at like 50% of the enemies life or something like that.
The current tier bonus (also your proposed mastery) is fine at best, but not really engaging to play with. Its pretty boring if I was being honest, but thats just my two cents.
If we’re looking for a rework, I’d prefer something that would cause your abilities to hit with destructive force throughout the entirety of a fight.
3 Likes
couldnt we just get a sliding scale start at 100% drop down to 50 and then work back up with 10% being 100 again with a threat reduction based on the %
One of the new hero talent trees gives this passively. Essence abilities deal 20% damage as fire I think, over 8 seconds. No 4 pc but free damage is free.
Yeah I don’t think obsidian shards is the move for mastery with how flameshaper is going to work.
I personally think that, while they probably would have done this if they wanted to, reversing the damage profile of the mastery would feel best.
To me, a mastery called Giantkiller makes more sense as an execute. It also would feel fine for the majority of early fights since we’re generally leading with d-rage and will have the full bonus for lust whether it happens at the beginning or towards the end.
It also gives devastation more value in a raid, as execute damage tends to be more valuable for progression encounters.
4 Likes
We have best mastery in the game. Like, what?
Maybe they’re still in S1/S2 mindset?
“Better” is a very relative term if that’s the case. It was stronger, but that made it worse, lol.
Playing the remix (we really shouldn’t use this as a basis for many things, but it’s interesting to see how our mastery behaves here), with high mastery values, it becomes even more evident how flawed our current mastery is. Outside of the dragonrage windows, I lose so much damage that it becomes depressing. We need a mastery that doesn’t depend on % health to function. Just increase our damage, or something like that, something needs to be done.
Just make our current tier set our mastery.
Call it spellfrost shards to accommodate our blue dragon line and maybe give the shards a visual.
It’s already part of the flameshaper kit.
They can find an enhancement for it in that hero tree as replacement. Flameshaper still suffers from this current mastery.
We’re not really “suffering” from mastery at this point.
It’s not the most well-designed mastery, but it definitely doesn’t hinder us at its current strength.
I’d much rather see the values flipped so we have execute damage than to see a tier bonus replace it that is already accessible elsewhere.
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Well, yes, that’s what I mean. I mean it’s more like the DH mastery, it’s not particularly great (and they have to pay a capstone for it to not suck booty), but it could be significantly improved,
And the improvements should come to the core spec, it should never be tied to as specific hero tree.
This would probably create problems like: you never want to burst a group of adds, as you would want to wait for them to lose HP to do more damage.
The tier set is my personal taste, but the way mastery works, linked to the enemy’s hp, is terrible.
It feels a lot better in raid because the granularity of the damage works on a longer fight duration.
But in M+ when mobs are being gathered by the tank, you lose a lot of mastery value because a lot of your aoe damage comes from chaining your empowers into pyres, and since you want mobs clustered together to hit all of your empower targets as well as for Pyre to not miss mobs, by the time they are clustered the mongo melee have already been vomiting their aoe cleave/burst, mages rolled their face on the keyboard with ignite, and the mobs are likely at 80-70% HP at the highest.
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You’d still lose overall damage doing this in almost any scenario.
Additionally, you’d have dragonrage on big pulls/packs like this, so you’d likely get full mastery value in most scenarios.
At any rate, it would be loads better than current mastery.
Hopefully we see something on alpha here soon to at least test.
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They could simply implement a damage increase, where you deal X% more damage, nothing else. Perhaps during our Dragonrage, this bonus could be doubled? This would maintain the special flavor of Dragonrage.
In particular, some classes in the game have conditional masteries, but none like Devastation. For example, Destruction Warlock increases your damage by a certain percentage, but the increase is random. Shadow Priest needs to manage their DoTs to gain value from their mastery. I think that’s a good mastery, as your success is tied to how well you manage your DoTs.
Devastation Evoker has many paths. We have five dragonflights at our disposal, and we have chromatic magic. Creating an interesting mastery that isn’t punitive in some scenarios isn’t such a difficult task.
Its our least desired stat due to all the nerfs it got in Season 2.
Current priority is as follows (as per wowhead):
- Item Level
- Crit
- Haste
- Versatility
- Mastery