Hey all,
I’m back and this time with some feedback on the state of Augmentation, Devastation, and Preservation. I don’t personally play Preservation very much, but I do have some feedback that I’ll relay on behalf of others.
Augmentation
The community has done a pretty good job outlining the issues with Aug. I’ll attempt to reiterate some of those points and propose solutions for Blizzard to consider.
Measuring performance
The fact that you cannot effectively measure Aug’s performance inside the game is a non-starter and should have never happened. While it’s good for WarcraftLogs’ business… mandating a 3rd party tool to evaluate yourself violates so many fundamental tenets of the game in my opinion. Not to mention it’s completely unrealistic to expect of players. If the game can’t show me how I’m doing with the combat log… it’s simply not well designed and it’s certainly not intuitive.
Additionally it was stated at the onset of Aug that accurate combat hooks would be made a priority for us to effectively evaluate ourselves. This stopped being the case in 10.2 and I believe is likely to be an on-going burden for Blizzard to keep up with. This is the strongest argument for a rework.
Possible solution: Make Ebon Might function like Blessing of Summer and proc an extra damage (or healing, or mitigation) event. This would restore our ability to measure contributions in game and reduce the burden on Blizzard for combat hooks.
The mini game
One of the most polarizing aspects of Aug is the Ebon Might (or Prescience) mini-game. You’ll hear from people who play M+ that it’s not really a problem, but then hear from people who Raid who can’t stand it after multiple weeks of progression. This has to do with how much effort it takes to manage Ebon Might targets (with Prescience, which would be far more annoying without the current 2pc bonus).
It’s a lot of work to plan your Prescience targets well and to work ~30 seconds ahead for an entire boss fight. Combat log tools are used to determine the best targets and generate an ERT note. That ERT note is then read by a WA to apply frame highlighting to your second set of raid frames (which have cooldown tracking) in an attempt to achieve the most effective use of Ebon Might? It’s just too much. You can play without the highlight WA, but you’re going to take an efficiency hit for the sake of sanity (worth it to some). This all gets much worse when you are in farm with constantly changing raid composition and fight timings.
Possible solution: Make Ebon Might apply to twice as many targets in raid, and be half as effective. This would mean 8 targets in Raid, which would lessen the pressure to pick the most optimal targets. Prescience can still allow us to pick a specific two. Also: please fix the behavior where if we recast EM while it is still on players that it ignores Prescience targets (we are currently forced to wait for EM to fall off). Also consider making Prescience a permanent buff that we can move around freely.
The niche
Aug being the only support specialization in the game is not ideal. This makes it uniquely difficult to balance. It’s been stated that Aug will either be mandatory or very mediocre. This is likely accurate if the expectation is that Aug is primarily a damage dealer in terms of how it is measured (with an abundance of utility).
Possible solution: Lean less on damage contribution (lowering overall damage) and more into healing/mitigation. This would create a clear trade-off with respect to damage and utility. This would mean some general talent tree rework.
Sibling spec alienation
Many have raised concern that some of the utilities that Aug brings (namely Spatial Paradox) are so powerful that it alienates the other specs. If changes are made to the spec as suggested in “the niche” section above… I believe the alienation of dev/pres would be lessened, because clearer trade-offs are being made in playing aug. However, currently you play Aug for similar damage with more utility over Dev, and you play Aug for more utility with a healer that has the same throughput and no range limitations over Pres.
I do believe that Spatial Paradox as designed should be re-considered, or placed in the class tree (which may put all Evokers over the top in terms of baseline utility). The cast while moving reminds me of Aspect of the Fox (which was sadly just deleted from the game for being too powerful). We’ve got a similar situation once again (albeit for healers only). This spell really stands out from all the rest in the spec tree. I will say that the extra range is really nice to get as an Evoker (especially a Preservation Evoker who really struggles with the limited range). Bug: when receiving Spatial Paradox empower spell graphics are not properly adjusted for range.
Devastation
Overall Devastation has been a success this expansion, but it is really hampered by the spec tree. It’s a fun and rather simple ranged DPS spec that has a ton of potential.
The limited spec tree
The tree for Devastation is simply devoid of variety. It has extremely limited pathing and is very bottom-heavy.
Ruby / Azure Essence Burst: Why does Devastation need two different talents for Essence Burst when the other specs just get it from one? We should merge them. They are always taken.
Dragonrage: Why is this a talent? Please consider making it baseline for devastation and adding a choice node instead that adjusts the play style of Dragonrage (perhaps inverting your mastery health damage scaling while removing the guaranteed max benefit of the mastery).
Animosity: Make it a choice node. The alternate talent could be: the effectiveness of your mastery is doubled in Dragonrage, but you can no longer extend it.
Lay Waste: This talent is in an odd location (right side, which is supposedly blue side)
Honed Aggression: +10% to AS & LF for 2pts (compare to Engulfing Blaze which is +25% to LF for 1pt). Always skipped.
Heat Wave: Let’s be honest. Who wouldn’t take this talent 100% of the time? Ridiculous 2 pt talent.
Charged Blast: Consider re-tuning to 10 max stacks (for same damage boost) and adjusting location.
The middle of the tree currently has a 2-3 pt variety between Volatility and other talents. That’s it.
The bottom of the tree currently has no variety. I actually think there are too many talents here and not enough in the top or middle of the tree.
Let’s talk about Firestorm. It does not fit the fantasy of the class. It is a fiery wild spirits that doesn’t empower, synergize with anything, or have essence interaction. Suggestion: please remove it. The community has pretty much avoided using it the entire expansion.
The left side of the tree needs some adjustment. The right isn’t even really that blue-focused and the left bottom has less compelling choices compared to the right bottom. In general the tree feels all over the place.
Consider rebalancing the top / middle / bottom of the tree. Give us more path choices and adjust the focus of either side of the tree especially as we get to the bottom.
Awkward AOE
Devastation continues to feel a bit odd in the AOE department. The notable culprits are of course Pyre and Deep Breath.
Pyre: this spell has way too slow of an animation speed and projectile travel time. This makes Devs overall burst really slow compared to other classes. It also makes talents like Causality feel weird cause there is a very noticeable lag time on CDR when using Pyre spam.
Deep Breath: this spell is still waiting to be more of a focal point for the spec. We can buff it by 20% with Lay Waste. We can make it a 1 min cd with Onyx Legacy. We can reduce essence costs by 1 with Imminent Destruction (which we never take). That’s it. Evoker debuted with flying over our enemies and breathing fire, and right now it’s a button we generally just press every 2 mins. Really a missed opportunity to have this spell synergize with more of the kit. Consider making it a 1 minute baseline for dev and adding more synergy talents.
General Playstyle
Eternity Surge should be looked at. It’s become a pretty boring button that you just send. Some talents that adjust its behavior (beyond target count) would be worthwhile. It feels like a less impactful Fire Breath currently. Fire Breath has several talents that it works with to create meaningful feedback loops (burn out procs, catalyze, etc). Eternity Surge is really just a Dragonrage extender and proc for Iridescence during Disintegrate spam.
The overall complexity of the spec is fine. It’s a little simple, but talent changes could increase the depth of play and add more variety, which would alleviate some of that.
The changes to the mastery have been warranted and were overall a net positive for the spec. It has pretty good stat priorities now.
Dragonrage can still last a little too long for a cooldown, but perhaps talent adjustments can reign that in a little more.
The 4pc this season was a bit of a miss. The damage amp during/after Dragonrage really brings us back to that era of having super long Dragonrages (in effect) and it makes our high damage windows so long that it adds a ton of volatility/risk to the output of the spec. Thus it comes at little surprise we preferred the Season 2 set bonus over the Season 3 set bonus.
Preservation
Overall Preservation started the expansion strong with a raid built around its toolkit and range, but it has since dropped off as raid design and balance have changed.
The range problem
Preservation started out Season 1 strong, as the spec was overpowered and raid fights were tailored around its unique limitations. The dominance of the Reversion build also masked some of the range problems. As the Blossom build gained prominence in Season 2 and 3 and fights were less tailored to Preservation’s range, this became a much larger issue. Even though Preservation has a longer range than Devastation, it’s generally harder to manage range to other players than it is to a boss, making Preservation feel worse in practice (Augmentation shares a similar issue).
This is perhaps even more apparent in Mythic+, where keeping all 4 other party members within range (and within directed spells like Dream Breath and Temporal Anomaly) has given Preservation a reputation as the most difficult healer to play alongside, especially for ranged DPS.
Unless Preservation dominates situations where range isn’t a factor, this limitation will continue to stifle representation. Why bring a healer who struggles to reach the whole raid/party when another one heals for just as much without this limitation?
The lack of utility
In addition to having poor range Preservation brings no extra or unique utility compared to Augmentation (or Devastation, for that matter). Since Augmentation brings an incredibly powerful and unique bit of utility in Spatial Paradox, unless that spec is significantly underperforming we’re likely to continue to see 1-2 Augs in raids going forward - which means a Preservation’s duplicate Evoker utility is nearly useless - a third Time Spiral is far less compelling than a third Spatial Paradox.
Bringing Spatial Paradox to the class tree is the most obvious way to resolve this, especially if Preservation had the unique ability to target DPS with their Spatial.
Echo management
Another common concern has been with managing Echoes. Getting them out in time before a damage event and making sure you don’t consume them prematurely with an inefficient spell. I know many long-time Preservation players do enjoy Echo, so I’m not advocating removing this mechanic entirely, but the limited mass-application options for Echo make it very punishing if you happen to either need to heal someone during a ramp, or make a mistake with a spellcast. Improving Temporal Anomaly’s Echo application method, targeting, and placement in the tree, or introducing a completely new minor CD that served as a mass Echo applicator would help alleviate this problem.
Emerald Blossom
A last, dishonorable shout-out to Emerald Blossom, which exacerbates Preservation’s range issues with a clunky-to-aim spell that has an awkward delay time and an unrewarding RNG feedback loop with Fluttering Seedlings and Field of Dreams. Its design also makes it a non-starter for the basis of a Mythic+ build.
It’s good to have at least two viable talent loadouts to play for the spec, but this spell needs a rework. A better implementation of this spell would lessen the concerns with Echo, as this is the only route offered to those who don’t want to deal with Echo’s quirks.
Closing
It’s been a wild first expansion for Evoker, and the current state of the class is in a weird spot overall with clear problems impacting all 3 specs. Hopefully the momentum of working on this new class and iterating on the unique playstyles it has brought to the game aren’t slowing. While some of these issues may seem like large problems… I do believe even small changes could yield very impactful improvements.