Augmentation evoker is destroying M+ since its release

Community General Discussion
1

Augmentation will be taking up one slot in every dungeon for the next few years if we continue the way it stands now
Ever since the augmentation specialization has been introduced augment always has 1 permanent slot in your dungeon group alongside the tank & healer.

Before augment, you had more choice of what to take, there were more different compositions of groups, and everyone had a chance to play the game. As there were usually 1/2 "Meta dps slots " with a 3rd dps slot was usually provided to any sort of dps. You can actually see this in the past of the raider.io page aswell in previous seasons.

Now however it’s only a certain amount of long term teams that play without augmentation, but pugs? would never go without augmentation in any keys above +10, and that’s a major problem.

Augmentation provides more tankyness for the entire group. And this should not be a thing in World of Warcraft for a dps spec.

Main problem it causes:
Buffing the survivability of the tank, and impacting the Hps of the healer.

Solution:
Option 1: Make it so that augmentation only buffs the Dps in terms of survivability, so don’t increase the tankyness of the tank & don’t increase the healing output of the healer.

Option 2: Revamp the augmentation specialization entirely. and implement support specializations lateron when the time calls for it.

Option 3: Make dungeons 6-man dungeons and create the specific roles " Tank - Healer - Support - Dps" so more variety is provided for the player base. This way the majority of the playerbase can actually play the game for the class and specs they want.

Ignoring the problem?
Then augmentation will continue to be meta, for atleast the next few years in World of Warcraft, going forward with the trend of always having 1 slot for your augmentation evoker. Many people will say only elitist would choose augment over other specializations, however lets be real, almost everyone in WoW is elitist these days when it comes to making the dungeon feel 1 key level easier. Those people aren’t the ones to blame, it’s Blizzard who created this problem in the end afterall.

21 Likes
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I do not understand why AnyWant to play the spell that is VeryBad unless you are with another . I think healer is already invent for this .

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why not 1 tank- 1 heal(already forced in the great push because you dont need him as it looks like)- 2 dds- 1 sup? 6 man dungeon wont be happening, when the system works with group is up to 5 man and bigger is a raid

4

Sounds like the perfect way to make queues even longer having to have an even bigger variety of class types.

Sounds awful to me, sorry.

My playerbase seems fine tho. Even in S4 quiet time I’ve had no issue doing keys.

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no it has not and it is not a major problem its a problem for 0.1% of player base that play high keys.

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but i have to agree, that there are player which wanna copy the meta, even its not neccessary to get +10 done
…even we dont know which key level the op have in his eyes, while creating this post

2 Likes
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It’s Madspatula.

It’s for sure not going to be +10s.

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then why cry about the aug and not about mage, which is close to always in the dps comp as it looks like? Just watched into the last seasons, plus from shadowlands
Im no key pusher, but in my pov its just the “new kid”, which gets all the hate.

but i can understand its boring/frustrating to see the last seasons ven dh/op heal / shadow priest, mage and aug

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Biased opinion, but anything that inconviniences minmaxers is good in my book.

That being said, I also would prefer the solution of introducing more support roles and increasing the “default” group size to 6, but I believe that it’s not feasible due to technical reasons.

Another idea I had was to introduce a NPC in every dungeon which will act as a 6th party member and use AI like the one in Follower dungeons but always on Follow mode, and which will cover the “missing” role. Meaning:

  • If a group of 1 tank, 1 healer and 3 dps enter the dungeon, the NPC is support
  • If a group of 1 tank, 1 support and 3 dps enter the dungeon, the NPC is a healer
  • If a group of 1 healer, 1 support and 3 dps enter the dungeon, the NPC is a tank
  • If a group of 1 tank, 1 healer, 1 support and 2 dps enter the dungeon, the NPC is dps
    That would massively increase flexibility in group formation, not to mention that pretty much every Automatic Group Finder dungeon would become near-instant exactly due to that flexibility.

But of course it wouldn’t solve the minmaxing issue, since minmaxers would find which NPC is the “best” and then raise the complain that only one specific group composition would be viable.

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I don’t really see why I’m supposed to have my favourite spec removed just so the top 0,1% can have a bit more variety when it comes to their comp.

4 Likes
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I wouldn’t mind having 6 man dungeons, even if we ignored a spot as “support” and just had 4 DPS slots because DPS far outweigh tanks and healers in numbers to such a level because those two roles are often incredibly unpopular to play for a variety of reasons.

The implementation of Augmentation was poorly done as a new spec but you can’t forget that each season will have a meta that even casual players who don’t care for being at the top will aim to get for their parties because they think its some sort of guarantee for success. This is as much a player issue as it is a Blizzard issue.

4 Likes
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It affects even the lowest of groups. in +10 all the way to +20 you see it everywhere.

1 Like
13

Exactly. This way there would be more room for different kind of dps in groups. Everyone could experiment around a bit. Instead of taking the same classes every season like in dragonflight S2 S3 S4. Aug priest mage. Obviously aug will stay meta as it’s the support class and wasn’t really put in WoW on a good moment.

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Anything that inconveniences players trying to play classes to their max potential is bad? Why? Cos you can’t play to that level?

1 Like
15

Correct. Because minmaxers and speedrunners (or rather Blizzard succumbing to their pressure) have caused the vast majority of the current design issues of the game, ranging from the destruction of the RPG feeling (fire deals 100% damage to fire elemental, makes amazing sense from a lore point of view!) to the current design paradigm where even world quests and world events happen exactly at prescheduled and equally spaced time slots so that minmaxers can do everything as a checklist. A casual player who logs in and suddenly gets informed by the game that a rare enemy is spawning 1 minute of flight away from their location will only see its dead body when they get there since the minmaxing speedrunners were already at its spawn location before it spawned…

-=EDIT=-
And as this thread also kind of shows, minmaxers are also the reason the developers do not get positive feedback on new ideas like a support spec.
At this point I should point out that the “true” minmaxers simply find out the optimal path to complete something and just try to follow it. It’s the “faux” minmaxers who do not like new ideas and who want the game to be streamlined to the absolute maximum.

2 Likes
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It’s casuals that give most of the negative feedback and it’s generally bs like this

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I do think there’s something wrong with the spec since it is limiting with what other specs you can play and it is too good in survivability for your group.

It is also hurting the spec itself, since you probably do not want to play with an AugEvoker till like +16’s and up. It is a negative when players are not pro’s and the right specs aren’t in the group.

18

Aug tools should be every healers tools.

1 Like
19

Aug does suck design-wise because you can hardly tell how good/bad an Aug is and as an aug you can’t really know if you’re playing bad or if your allies suck, while every other spec has its metrics.

That sure is a stretch to say that the " playerbase is declining and this is one of the many major reason why", especially when you contradict yourself and say that “many will hate the revamp/deletion of aug”.

More class variety is always good for sure, but Aug does seem to be a blunder, especially since Blizzard said we’re not likely to see other support specs.

1 Like
20

Agree. 100%.

Aug is bad for the game. Unless they apply the solutions you proposed.

And for those that said it : Its not a 0.1% problem. The Aug issue is deeper than that and trickles down to lower tiers.

2 Likes