I played a whole bunch of different classes and while learning evokers, I constantly hear everyone saying their survivability is horrible from other players and youtubers etc… but I find their defensives to be really strong being able to survive +15 keys and H Raz on 250k hp. 2 stacks of 30% damage reduction for 12 seconds only on a min and a half cd. Blazing renewal (if that’s the right name) makes us nearly unkillable to dots or anything that doesn’t 1 shot us for 8 seconds and that’s only a 1 min cd.
Not to mention the passive defensive we have for magic damage, mail armor + 75% increased armor from passive which essentially making us a ranged plate wearers, zephyr and we have 3 instant self healing//shield if talented but they’re very accessible.
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Scales is terrible when you compare its cd and damage reduction to other classes. On top of the insanely weird reason that all the mail armor classes are considerably squishier than leathers and even some cloth. With priest buff I almost sit around 300k. During the raza fight in heroic if I get the circle enough times that my scales are on CD and get it again, I’m dead unless I take the circle way out of position.
The fire circle in the concil fight for example a shaman got targeted by the fire aoe. I was the only one that soaked with him. We both popped defensives. Want to guess who lived? Hint! Not me.
Shaman was considered to have the weakest defensive in the game prior to dragonflight. After a long time waiting they got improvements through talents. Evokers got an even weaker version but we get two stacks…? Great.
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Scales is actually great in pve when you compare it’s cd and reduction against other classes.
We have no passive defensive against magic
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The survivability of Devastation Evoker is not the same based on the content you are doing, so it is hard to judge out of context. I would not call it bad per say, but calling it strong is a stretch.
Almost all of Evoker’s defensive abilities must be talented and most require several talent points to become effective. Going for a fully defensive build means sacrificing a lot of the other useful talents. As a result, most builds will sacrifice the maximum potential survability of the specialization in one way or another.
The main survability issue I can identify with Devastation is that green healing spells are bit too weak. They are on fairly long cooldowns, so I would expect more out of them.
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Similar issues as with Hunter. Once your 2 defensive buttons are gone you’re kinda screwed. Not really noticeable in casual content, very noticeable in high end content.
Having extra armor from mail and the dragon passive doesn’t do anything to counter magic damage and the rest of your survivability is budgeted in mobility, which is useless versus pulsing aoes that the game has everywhere now.
At least Devoker has some self-healing so its not as bad Hunter but yean.
I don’t PvE at all but my survivability is ok in pvp until I’m focused by multiple players. Evokers are like a magnet for attacks. Once the first stun/trinket is over you are a sitting duck.
But maybe I just suck. 
You dont suck we have nothing to get out of stun. Mage for instance can iceblock or blink i think.
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im only playing feral shadow devoker and bm at the moment but i gotta say out of all of them my devoker is by far the squishiest with scales being the weakest defensive out of them all. depending on the mechanic i can just ignore a defensive and not go under 40% health but that same hit will either take me to sub 10k hp or kill me
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You need to pvp in the shuffle, every other class has better defence. That include thing like shaman and ret paladins.
4% magic resistance in the talent tree
Literally not even worth the 2 points required to pick up
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Unless you’re aiming for source of magic.
literally not even worth the 3 points required to pick up
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Survivability is worse in PvP than PvE. You’ll generally have to overlap Renewing Blaze and Obsidian Scales to survive anyone’s burst, and good luck if you didn’t pre-wall a stun.
From a raiding perspective, Devastation survivability is bad in two situations:
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You’re taking such a huge burst of magic damage that it’s sketchy to survive with 30% DR. This is generally stuff that is avoidable or covered by raid cooldowns (rally, AM, barrier, etc), or optionally soaked by an immunity class - but being able to survive mechanic fails or participate in soak mechanics are both desirable and Devastation doesn’t really have that.
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You’re taking so much sustained damage that you’re out of cooldowns. The moment you start thinking that living flame on yourself is a good idea, you’re in trouble. Compared to classes with powerful leech (DH, warriors) or passive shields/DR (locks) or spammable DR (rogues), you feel the struggle if your healers aren’t keeping up.
That’s why I advocate for the scales passive to give an extra 5-10% magic DR. Yes, the 4% passive tree thing exists, and yes you can/should take it on a few fights. But pretty much every class has that sort of class tree option. I just think they need a little more.
Survivability is good in a lot of situations too. There are fights where you hardly need healing if you use renewing blaze on the raid damage mechanics. There are mechanics (like Raz pushback ring) that you can effectively skip with mobility. And the armour passive does mean you will survive a melee hit from just about anything - this can be very relevant on stuff like M Kurog where it’s hard for tanks to grab the earth adds immediately. My biggest complaint about armour is that they designed a raid where you don’t take a single point of physical damage as a dps/healer player unless you get meleed. There are no mechanics that hit you with unavoidable physical damage.
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So the only way I could survive the first stage of the Raz fight is to stop my DPs and use my heal spells. Unless a you are activly getting healed you will be dead or have bad dps .