While the gameplay often pleasants, the spec is sorely lacking in variability and personal choices and the down time is not only an important part of our rotation, it is also highly unrewarding. The talents are either improvements on effects that should be baseline, or simply nonsensical. The choices are poor and their outcome minor.
First, a shallow dive into the rotation without empowered abilities to better summarize the problem: spam Azure Strike until we get an Essence Burst proc, sometimes use Living Flame if hover is up and we are not being focused, and the enemy is not kiting back. Use the Essence Burst proc on Disintegrate. Rinse & Repeat. As you probably have noticed, Living Flame needs a lot of conditions to be castable on an enemy, being a long cast when used in combination with Engulfing Blaze, and just not being rewarding enough to use without it. Even when all those variables are checked, living flame will still often be the wrong ability to use, which leaves us with spamming Azure strike, sadly kiting in a circle, waiting for an Essence burst proc.
There is a core issue here, our rotation is simply lacking in something, anything to make it feel more rewarding and satisfying. This is where the talent Burnout comes into play; it gives us a 16% chance per Fire Breath tic to make our next Living Flame instant, which would be good enough, if it weren’t for for four glaring problems: first, it is a dispellable dot, that is on a 30 seconds cooldown AND is the only way for us to utilize Tip the Scales. If that weren’t enough, we are more often than not forced to use it as a purge, being able to dispell 4 buffs on a 2 minutes cooldown is an important part of our offensive toolkit
Back to Tip the Scales: these two talents nearly invalidate one another. More on Tip the Scales, as always, for you to better visualize the problem, my humble apostles.
Tip the Scales will, on a two minutes cooldown, make our next Empower ability instantly use its maximum effect. That is definitely a good offensive cooldown to use with Fire Breath, however, using it this way will give Fire Breath’s dot component a laughable 6 seconds duration, making Burnout’s 16% chance to proc per tic insufficient to fix the gaping holes in our rotation. The other possibility is to use Tip the Scales on Eternity Surge, which will… make it hit more enemies. Woohoo? Clearly not the most optimal use for Evokers, as our burst damage, most of which coming from Disintegrate, is single target.
There are two possible easy fixes to both of these issues that I can see: the first is to tie Burnout’s Living Flame instant procs to something else. It could be on Disintegrate or Eternity Surge, including Scintillation procs. The second is to give us a third Empower ability, one that would deal more single target damage the longer it’s casted and to make Fire Breath’s dot undispellable.
I have no doubt that there are many fixes I haven’t thought of yet, but those two seemed to fit Devastation’s current gameplay and easy enough to be worth mentioning. There are other problems, currently, the spec feels as if it has been created from scratch within a month, rushed by deadlines and although the concept is great, it really needs to be polished to feel like a complete class.
