Intro - Hello, I wanted to take sometime to give my thoughts on Augmentation Evoker in Rated Arena PvP, and wanted to emphasize some minor quality of life changes that could dramatically improve our rotation in PvP without outright “Buffing” the specs. We know that Augmentation Evoker participation is at all time lows, with a steep drop off this season. I think these quality of life changes will help everyone enjoy playing this specialization more. My Credentials, I have been playing Augmentation since it was first introduced to PTR. I have 4 max level Evokers, 2 of which I got 2640 rating in 3v3 arena on. I was also the #1 Highest Rated Solo Shuffler in NA on my Augmentation Evoker I’m posting on.
– Recommended Quality of Life Changes: –
- Extend the duration of the new Tier 4 Set Trembling Earth Buff from 15 seconds to 30 seconds in PvP. The major problem here is that Prescience has an 11-12 second cooldown, and the Fissures from the 4 set only last for 15 seconds. This creates a 3-4 second gap where refreshing prescience becomes #1 most important, or you lose all your damage from your previous prescience stacks. With the amount of crowd control (And Micro Crowd Control) in the game, this is very easy to CC off the Fissures buff (Whether intentional or not by the enemy player). Extending the duration of the Fissures 4 set buff to 25-30 seconds would help remedy this (Our rotation/setup would feel dramatically less button bloated), and would still encourage us to refresh Prescience for the crit buff.
- Shifting some personal damage out of Ebon Might and back into our baseline damage. Right now, Ebon Might gives Augs 33% increased personal damage. This is a HUGE disparity, and makes our damage globals and essence expenditures outside of Ebon Might pretty worthless. I think shifting 18% of this damage into our baseline damage, and nerfing Ebon Might to a 15% damage increase from 33%, would help bolster up our “Lows / Valleys in damage” in a non-game breaking fashion, because Augmentation has little to no pressure outside of Ebon Might. I think a disparity this large can cause problems in the present and especially future, and would be a great think to look over. To reiterate, this would could keep our damage with Ebon Might up exactly the same as now, it would not increase our burst.
- Increasing all Evoker’s range of spells to 30 Yards. Hear me out here, this is strictly to keep consistency across the 3 Evoker specs. I must say, it feels quite awkward that Preservation has a 30 yard range, but Augmentation and Devastation have a 25 yard range. This makes spec swapping a little strange to adapt to, and it feels weird to see Preservation using Disintegrate and living flame at a further range than the DPS specs. Preservation is relatively weak compared to other healers at the moment, because they have no damage mitigation / reduction CDs, and have to be on top of their teammates vulnerable to crowd control to output healing. I believe this 5 yard boost to 30 yard range would add consistency across the specs, and be a very positive change especially in the future like The War Within Xpac.
TL;DR – We spend way too much time refreshing Prescience strictly for the Fissure stacks from the Amirdrassil 4 set bonus which expire quickly and easily (because of prescience has a 11-12 second CD, and the fissures only last 15 seconds, on top of disruptions like CC, interrupts, and magic immunities like grounding totem), then you are likely to run out of Ebon Might damage for 10-15 seconds which feels incredibly punishing, because we then lose 33% personal damage which is greater than the damage of the previously expired Fissures.
Extending the duration of the Trembling Earth Fissures buff to 25-30 seconds I believe is a beautiful remedy for this, that will not modify the value of Augmentation’s burst output.