Couldn’t agree more with this. An increased emphasis on off-healing vs passive survivability through shields and heal/tank steroids accomplishes a few things:
Good aug players stand out FAR more and actually earn their spots, especially in dungeons.
Places an emphasis on needing to be reactive if you want to help your group survive, instead of creating situations where you innately let your group bulldoze through incoming damage/heal checks.
Makes you consciously choose if healing or damage is the right thing to be spending your time on in a given situation.
I’d love to see the mana issues with the Dream of Spring route eliminated and a playstyle around extending EM through healing actually be viable under the right circumstances.
It would be especially fun in a raid environment where a REALLY good aug player could actually let your comp play with one less healer on dps check bosses if your heals are good enough to make the comp work.
Not sure if it’s been said yet, but from what I have been told, Augmentation is OP in very high-level play because they bring tools that make encounters much safer than they would be without them (especially in M+). More specifically, they excel in organized groups because in order to get the most value from their kit, they need to line up their buff windows with the groups CDs.
I also heard that because they need a lot of coordination, they will likely be a detriment to an average or less experienced group due to the low damage they actually bring.
Those are 2 separate things. Aligning your cooldowns properly just lets you do bring the dmg you should be bringing to a group.
The survivability increases are largely passive just by existing. Only niche active thing could be timing breath in such a way you have the group barrier for a mechanic or something.
I’m ignoring rescue/zephyr etc because I compare Aug to pres/dev.
They just need to remove Augs passive survivability boosts to the group and that’s it. Add more active support like ret pally/shadow pri st.
Would LOVE if they took a Medivh from HotS approach with Aug. Well timed dmg to heal conversions or dmg blocks with bronze themes. But not really applying healing. Ironically flameshaper renewing blaze share does that.
Believe it or not Blistering Scales can reduce a physical based damage hit on a DPS by quite a lot. Consider that Evokers are a mail class that gain 75% increased armor as a passive, they effectively have more armor than any other non-tank, throwing this on someone before a hit can be the difference between life and death potentially.
Is it the BEST cooldown in the game? certainly not. But its a non-healer non-tank cooldown, and fairly unique.
I’m not sure what you’re arguing against. Are you trying to say blistering isn’t just a passive survivability increase? Cause that’s already true with the absorb portion so I’m not denying that.
Just that it constantly being on the tank otherwise is basically passive survivability that no one else can provide.
Also theres some physical dmg mechanics that don’t care about armor since it would create an imbalance. I don’t know which ones specifically are included or not but I specifically remember slicing maelstrom in court of stars ignored armor.
There may have been some on like halondrus or something random, but yeah on the whole blistering scales is not worth bouncing off the tank.
Molten barrier has also been nerfed so heavily that it’s not even really worth taking and not really strong enough for using to give someone a quick shield like it used to be.
Fortified and Bolstering Azure Vaults the shoulder charge guys after the second boss will 1 shot any non tank on a 10+ if they have even 1 stack of bolstering if they didn’t use a cooldown, with Blistering Scales people were surviving. It’s only one example of this being useful on non-tanks but it is an example.
I guess it would be more useful if it was just a base DR shield maybe. I don’t theorycraft aug much tbh. Or at all, I prefer Devastation.
If you’re talking about the person targeted getting one shot by the charge, that’s definitely not happening in a 10, even with bolstering. That charge does just about 500k damage to me in my gear in a +10 with a stack of bolstering on fort.
It would take someone with less than 1.2 mill hp with zero armor, vers, or avoidance for that to one shot them, assuming they don’t use a DR, which is a pebcak issue. You’d actually reduce far more of the damage by simply hitting the group with a zephyr or just giving the target a rescue shield before the charge than you would moving scales to them.
I just did the math and it would take a +23 key with a stack of bolstering to kill me outright without the use of a DR. Additionally, getting a stack of bolstering for more than like ~2 seconds on that pack would make very little sense, since you don’t chain into that pull and you kill them evenly (if you aren’t skipping them outright).
Most groups don’t even actually fight those two, but they still don’t hit that hard and everyone should have defensives on that pull anyways but I suppose that’s not the point of the comment.
Given that molten blood is just not worth anymore, there are just almost no times blistering has value on a non tank which is a shame. When molten was good and you could juggle that shield around, it made the spec far less of a snooze fest in dungeons.
yeah but if you have no cooldowns you have no cooldowns. Bad RNG can gib anyone.
This happened earlier in the season, before people had tippy top gear, so yeah lower than expected non-optimal HP, Armor, and mobs were living longer because we weren’t omega giga ultra blaster just quite yet. So it sounds like you got it right, lower armor, lower hp. Might even be before any tuning happened too.