Interesting! I feel way more squishy on my mage and druid in pvp than I do as evoker, especially in a 1v1. That said, I haven’t played mage in pvp since the option to swap out ice block so you can keep pressure up while being defensive.
I don’t want to rely on mercurial secondary stat balancing to serve as a temporary patch to our survivability gaps. We have no guarantee of being able to stack vers or that it will remain an effective DR in the future, I want my passive mitigation to come from the class, not stacking a secondary or feeling pressured to gob up phials of vers to compensate for an inferior kit to a ret pally or DK or rogue, hell we have less self healing than a shadow priest passively heals up or a DH. I can tell playing spriest and devoker which spec is more of a drain on the healer.
OS/RB are good for burst but you feel the gap for rot damage on bosses like HoI 3rd boss.
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Almost like, people need healing on the 3rd boss in HOI.
Besides, dev evoker has way more stuff to use than shadow priest.
Yes, and those without passive DR or high self healing need more than others. Spriest has a ridiculous amount of self healing, beating out even Havoc DH.
It still does, though.
And there’s some really strong DR coming in TWW.
The simple fact is that if you’re doing content that is trucking you, you want a good amount of vers no matter how good it is on its own.
The rest of the defensive kit is still pretty damn strong.
Renewing blaze is one of the strongest rot defensives in the game…
I’ll never say no to more survivability, but the days of evoker feeling like tissue paper are definitely long gone.
We’re not without passive DR… Huh?
No, defensives are also factored into this. Like obsidian scales.
That classes or specs with stronger defensive toolkits exist does not inherently make Evoker inadequate. Neither do classes with strong options in specific niches. That is a very unhealthy way to view class/spec design, and in this instance wholly unfair to Evoker. As it stands, each of its specs are plenty capable of surviving in tough content entirely on their own merits when their defensives are utilized efficiently. Evoker isn’t at all a vers class. It scales horribly for us. Having it helps, but it will almost never prevent you from dying in a situation where your defensives could not.
Also, uh… the third boss of halls is a heal check. Just about every class in the game needs a healer on that fight, even those you’ve listed.
…Evoker does have passive DR. We’ve got a talent node that quite literally gives us passive magic damage resistance.
There are pros and cons to the niche Evoker was built into/given. Having a shorter overall range is part of that niche, as is the utility and mobility Evoker enjoys. Changing that to bring Evokers up to the standard caster range bracket would necessitate overahuling that niche, which may not necessarily be an upgrade over what we’ve currently got. Can’t really have your cake and eat it too.
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Not really much utility as devastation tbh. A few tricks that are only helpful in certain circumstances is all. As for the pros of short range, it’s easy to assume they have them but much harder to name them. It’s not the mobility of the class. Other ranged classes have similar or better advantages and even max ranged classes still have to move around quite a bit in high end content and have the means to do so. Much better advantages in the case of hunters. It’s not like evoker damage is affected by distance from the target either, other than that there is no damage if you’re stuck too far away. Any pros that evoker has from having the shortest range of any ranged class are far from obvious.
There really can’t be any pros without pushing them into being OP.
If you have a short ranged spec that has the tools to maintain 100% uptime, but also gets a bonus for being short range, it’s just going to outperform everyone.
You could argue mobility is the pro for short ranged, but really it’s just a bandaid to keep them from falling behind due to their handicap. So idk how much of a “pro” that is.
Evokers are ranged with extra steps imo
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Rescue. Zephyr. Time Spiral. Source of Magic. Wing Buffet. Tail Sweep. Sleep Walk. Landslide. Cauterize. Expunge. Oppressive Roar and Overawe, which is the only AoE soothe currently available in the game. Come TWW, we’re getting access to Spatial Paradox, which is debatably one of the strongest raid utility spells in the game currently. Quite a few of those tricks are universally helpful in keys and in raid, with a few even being mandatory in certain raid encounters. That’s rather far from being niche and broadly meaningless, lol. Evoker utility has and continues to be a large part of why they’re taken in content to begin with.
Except that it is, though. It’s far, far easier to maintain uptime on a boss as an Evoker in almost all circumstances than most other ranged classes in the game. Sure, Hunter is able to do the same with a 40 yard bracket, but Hunter also has next to no group utility and far, far less survivability. We have been and still are one of the best-equipped classes to deal with high mobility encounters.
…Yes, just like all other DPS. Either you’re able to hit the target and do damage, or you’re not. The benefit to being ranged is that you remain effective across a much larger area than melee do.
I would argue it’s most definitely a pro. Something I’ve found a lot of people forget when fixating on the 25 yard range is that it’s only really a handicap when Blizzard pushes out encounters that do not account for it. Just about all of Vault and Aberrus were very Evoker friendly. Even Amirdrassil was fine if you exclude Council, Nym and (debatably) Larodar (and even then, the former two make it difficult for everyone to maintain uptime, not just Evoker). There are plenty of encounters where we’re able to use our mobility aggressively rather than reactively, which is absolutely an advantage.
You’re not looking at this from a healthy perspective. Yes, we’ve the shortest range bracket out of all ranged classes in the game – but we’re also very well-rounded, incredibly mobile, and boast a good offering of utility. Devastation has been one of the stronger ranged DPS specs in Dragonflight thus far. Aug is… Aug. Preservation is about the only case where I think additional range may be beneficial, but that’s simply because they lack consistent tools to deal with players spreading for mechanics/during an encounter.
In shorter words, Evoker works. Dev is fine. Aug has been a little too fine. Pres could do with a little bit of help, but even then, it’s still a pretty strong healer. There’s a difference between something being fundamentally broken and bias from failing to utilize a spec to its fullest.
If you legitimately feel that Evoker is that much weaker than all other ranged classes, then why not play one of them? Who knows, maybe putting time into another class will help give you a different perspective.
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First of all–all great points in general, but you’re arguing with brick wall echo-chamber-seekers on these forums for the most part, so prepare for people to bulldoze over valid arguments.
Also, while those encounters present more of a challenge to an evoker than a traditional caster might experience, you’re still able to maintain far more uptime than melee. Which is sort of the point of the mid-range classification and the extra mobility in our toolkit.
Additionally, even on those fights where situations can be far from ‘ideal’, we were (and are) performing very well on those encounters. I think dev was #2 on nymue for most of s3.
The fact of the matter is that calling our mobility a ‘band-aid’ is just erroneous. It’s not like they made the spec with no mobility, released it, and then had to add hover, VE, and rescue (as well as time spiral) into our kit to compensate for our struggles.
The class was very intentionally designed around a toolkit that allows for incredible uptime in almost all scenarios with clever use (or at times even basic use) of our mobility spells.
Long story short, no matter what you do you’re going to get nowhere arguing with almost anyone that would like us to get 40 yards, though your points are all valid.
This is the million dollar question.
If you liked playing rogue a ton but hated that they were melee, would you play a ranged class or would you go to the rogue forums and say that melee isn’t working for them simply because you didn’t like it?
Is it not used to cover the gaps in dps the spec would suffer due to its short range if it didn’t have those mobility tools?
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What I’m hearing is get rid of all mobility tools, clearly, it’s covering a shortfall of the spec. Goodbye blink, shimmer, warlock portals, gates.
Everything.
You should get your hearing checked.
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I’m just taking a very liberal interpretation.
Nobody said that.
Why does it have to be such black and white thinking?
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band-aid implies temporary, insufficient.
Evoker is insufficient without its mobility, much more so than any other ranged.
Almost like, that’s part of their identity?
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Taking extra steps to accomplish the same thing is an identity?