I have been back for a couple of months now, I usually play healers, I have one of everything resto/holy but a holy paladin, and my main is a holy priest. I was curious to try a preservation evoker.
And I have to say that after a couple of months, Blizzard made a good job at creating the preservation evoker. You can criticize Blizzard for a lot of things but I do enjoy the novelty provided by the preservation evoker. It’s fun because it’s…. different than other healers’ principles. Sure, there are common parts like the flash heal flame, but for the rest you need to plan your strat fine. The mass shielding is genius and massive fun (old school disc priest talking here). It’s all about planning the CDs and the proper position for using the CDs, sometimes, it feels a bit unfair when healing against a preservation evoker because the shielding begins even before the pull and the preservation evokers take a good head start, and if they maintain the pace though the boss fight, they’re hard to catch up.
But overall, yeah Blizzard did a very good job at offering something different!
Granted I have done only LFR on it, but I am having a lot of fun with my preservation evoker!
Its an interesting healer, the problem with evokers in general are the aiming skills.
How is this a problem? None of them are difficult to use.
Two of our strongest heals are a line skillshot and a cone skillshot. it’s pretty hard to miss everyone with them, but it’s still possible to miss a few depending on where people are standing.
So it’s not so much that they’re difficult to use, but moreso that it’s also fairly easy to ‘miss’ a player or two if the fight requires strict positioning, or ranged players aren’t willing to work with you.
…I do think that Pres is a lot of fun, though.
Your party in the <1 second cast time of rank 1 dream breath
While Preservation can be fun it can also be annoying when running keys. Most of the time you hope the key holder takes somewhat pity on you and gets a group with more melee than ranged otherwise you may have a difficult time.
Quite often I get groups where they are scattered all over the place and I just hope they line up for a dream breath.
Also if you have someone targeted and you cast Spiritbloom and they die while charging it up it’ll cancel the cast out. All of those aside the class can be fun but I often find telling myself I probably should have switched to something else.
OK SO HERE IS THE WAY IT IS…
PRES LOTTA FUN IF YOU KEY IS 3 MELEE DPS
pres suddenly becomes unfun when you have hunters that like to always run to egypt.
It is different for sure, but that’s a subjective level of fun, different for all, i like it.
It’s raising the question of the playstyle following the gear level. Maybe the spec is played very differently at gear level 480 on mythic, and I don’t see at 450 in LFR! I always wondered if the spells power scale much with the gear level….
Yeah, its the same with shaman and paladin.
Pres is 100% the most fun healer in the game and infinitely better than everyone pretends they are.
“Aiming skills” is a weird thing to say considering dream breath is the only ability you aim and it essentially hits every single thing in front of you.
Fire breath is a non issue
The major issue is that you don’t know how to echo people you want to heal and embrace yourself, so you can heal them without flying across the map and getting yourself killed. Pres is semi annoying in some situations when 3 ranges are standing on opposite sides of the room for no reason, but generally it never happens.
Most of the complaints about pres are 10000% a git gud issue. The spec is incredibly fun and has god tier throughput, and does a ton of damage.
The prevalence of the Echo build this season makes playing with ranged classes much easier than before though. It is quite annoying when they scatter out of range but if they stay within 30yds of you, their placement doesn’t matter as much as before.
We don’t use Emerald Blossom in m+ and we give out Echo like free candies with the tier set… So it’s been generally a good time.
I was surprised when people chose season 1 tier set over season 3 for next season.
I feel like the people who voted have a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes pres good. Reversion healing increased off empowers is more of less useless. The instant living flames are great but they’ll 99% of the time be sent offensively as you really never need to living flame defensively.
This seasons tier has been great because the globals where I pre blanket with echos to prepare for damage in 4-10 seconds is instead replaced with offensive living flames because of the frequency with which they also apply echos.
The Leaping flames’d living flame off fire breaths always throws out a bunch of echos too which is really nice and i’m going to miss.
The living flames off of empowers add a ton of needed healing and conviently echo people off those empowers. This seasons tier is really REALLY good and i’m actually shocked people didn’t choose it again.