After spending a few hours in battlegrounds and skirmishes; here are my thoughts.
Flameshaper Preservation Evoker feels amazing. Your throughput is absolutely insane, but if the spec is going to be HoT dependent like resto druid, it’s going to need dispel protection.
Emerald Communion being a pvp talent feels awful because Preservation now only has two slots since it will always be taken. Feels bad on a spec that has quite a few good pvp talents that you routinely swap around.
Chronowarden feels dead on arrival without spirit bloom. You can’t have a hero spec that is based around empowers and then remove the only healing empower they have; verdant embrace cannot fill that role like they tried to make it and you don’t fully empower dream breath.
Both specs run out of steam pretty quick when dealing with heavy, sustained burst damage on multiple people. Spiritbloom was the button for this, but now you’re sitting there hoping echo + reversion / golden hour spam will be enough if your verdant embrace is on CD.
Not being able to spread Lifebind anymore feels redundant as well. Either I’m taking damage or my dps is taking damage, so it just leads to alot of overhealing since I’m probably already at full hp. They probably just need to scrap lifebind altogether since spirit bloom is what made it great in the first place.
The only way that I’ve found to play Chronowarden is to play Temporal Anomoly and Nozdorumu’s teaching in order to reduce the CD of Fire Breath and Dream Breath to get more empowerment’s. This playstyle actually feels pretty good but is very mana intensive.
Problem is I need the spec Timeless Magic and probably Tempo Charged or else I go oom super fast from Temporal Anomoly. And I also need the capstones in both the center and left side other side of the tree for proper throughput. If I go this route, I won’t have the talents to spec into the Merithr’s blessing talents when they drop which I guess is fine if the throughput is there.
Emerald Communion does feel horrible now that it can’t be used in half the CC that it was able to be used in before(doesn’t work in fear or poly anymore since they took away the talents that let’s you case while moving). I find myself using more for the mana than anything else now.
EDIT: It only works in those CC’s when you have hover up because hover allows casting while moving for some spells. How janky is that? LOL
And ain’t no way I’m ever using blossom in PVP. Trash spell that should’ve been scrapped.
I tried Chronowarden again this morning and it felt better and I was making some things shake, but it just feels so off without Spirit bloom. I may have to try your suggestion, but it seems like it would oom you insanely fast. If Chronoboon reduced the CD of Tip the Scales by 1 minute, instead of 30 sec; the specs shortcomings would have been much easier to deal with.
Did several arenas and BGs last night with both Flameshaper and Chronowarden. Flameshaper felt better for being able to contribute more with double breaths, but it seems like dream breath is healing for very little. There’s no way to recover from burst damage; our HOTs are pretty weak. I found myself relying on rewind during burst windows, but then not being able to keep up with the healing needed afterwards. Spirit bloom was our only bursty heal – we need something like that back.
Also quite sad that Emerald Communion is a pvp talent; there are so many fun and interesting pvp talents for this spec and we can really only pick one.
Yea, Nully and EC are basically required PVP talents now in all situations. “Mandatory” PVP talents have always been regarded in the past as bad design. Hopefully their solution isn’t to just nerf them since they are perfect and necessary as they are.
Yeah, I’m not sure what they were thinking making Emerald Communion a mandatory pvp talent. Isn’t that the whole reason they changed Master Summoner pvp talent for Demo Locks and just made it a spec talent….then did a complete 180 and did the same thing to Pres Evoker haha absolutely bonkers.
All the design decisions they have made for Pres have made it lame in PvP and PvE. The raid builds are fine but at the cost of doing literally anything else. It’s terrible.
Dream Breath is WOEFULLY UNDERTUNED right now. The spell should be useable without modifiers and (apex) talents should only moderately improve the spell.
You bumped almost every thread to caps lock about this?
It’s pre patch, numbers are all over the place because it’s…pre patch.
It doesn’t matter that you feel like they should tune specifically for a month long period of the game where power is irrelevant; it would make no sense to do that (and they’re not going to).
We don’t have our full builds yet, they’re not bugging anything by 400% until full builds are working at ilvls they can actually judge balance.
The Alpha talent literally procs bounces off dream breath too.
Again, this is the intent and function of pre patches…everyone here screaming about the sky falling needs to take 5-6 weeks off.
rofl you think they care about beta feedback ? think again
this is live environment, not a beta or PTR environment, so yes, balance matters even during pre-patch, you seem like the type to enjoy being served and asking for more
To be fair, dream breath on beta is also extremely weak and heals for about 6% of our total HP. People have been constantly talking about it and pres has only seen nerfs to its healing because of raid performance.
They need to figure something to make it more viable in other content.
Transferred all Spiritbloom talents to Dream Breath.
Tuned Dream Breath to do nothing.
Attached an Apex talent to Dream Breath that also does nothing.
Pres in prepatch and beta is built around Temporal Anomaly, Dream Breath, Reversion, Verdent Embrace and Living Flame and frankly, those buttons aren’t good enough or interesting enough or flexible enough to make Pres numerically good or fun to play.
Echo, Essence and range limitations feel like remnants of old ideas that longer work but remain anyway. If Pres gets enough of a nerf in raid to make it comparable to other healers, it’s going to become apparent very quickly that it’s an F tier, complete dumpster tier spec overall.
Pray that nothing happens to Rewind or Merithra’s in the next few months or Pres is going to be in trouble.
and asking for more