Feedback: Devastation Evoker

In Development Midnight: Curse of Ula'tek Public Test Realm
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Foreword

This sort of serves as a follow up to my two posts in the Evoker section after looking at the PTR changes. These are also very early thoughts and I will likely reply with more updated thoughts when testing has been done:

Apex Talent

Positives

The change to Risen Fury (or rather Unbound Flame) adresses many of the pain points I originally had:

  • The Essence Bursts no longer tick into oblivion when out of combat and you have plenty of time to use them however you like.
  • Having an additional button is also a nice addition.

Negatives

Unfortunately it still has problems:

  • The lingering buff after Dragonrage still makes Dragonrage an excessively long cooldown window which is heavily unfavorable for M+.
    → Dragonrage as a whole should not surpass the 40s mark (currently its about 52-56s with the lingering buff)
  • The ramping buff is still very opposed to the snap aoe identity of Devoker.
    → It should ramp faster (around 10-15s is reasonable)
  • Unbound Flame feels slightly weaker than I think it should (direct damage impact)

Tier Set

Positives

The tier set, mainly the 2pc, is very interesting because it solves some of the ancient Eternity Surge Problems:

  • Eternity Surge is now definitely upranked based on target count.
  • Star Salvo is now usable in a non-suboptimal capacity
  • Eternity Surge hits like a truck when casted

Negatives

  • The 4pc only affecting Eternity Surge feels a bit weird. It should also buff Fire Breath since the theme is empower buffs
  • Disintegrate is now a slot machine of “Do I get Scintilation procs ?” because the damage from Shattering Star is not reduced by Scintilations.
    See the following log for a sample of a single Disintegrate cast with 2 Scint procs
    warcraftlogs. com/reports/FmXcagYxk1MThDGb?fight=5&type=damage-done&source=1&start=1188017&end=1192044
    → Make Shattering Star damage get reduced by Scintilation’s scaling effect
    or
    → Remove Shattering Stars from Scintilations alltogether and buff the talent accordingly

Overall Feedback

Spells

Most of the spells feel good to use and have varying use cases. Some of them are lacking, mostly in damage:

  • Fire Breath and Pyre still feel very weak and could use some buffs to their damage
  • Azure Sweep is basically dead and will likely not be used anywhere without substantial
    buffs
  • The filler spells feel weak and are pressed too much. They could use a talent like “Overflowing Energy” for Fire Mage which serves as a bad luck protection against filler spam so that you always have a payoff waiting

Talents

Most problems with the talents are already listed in the two posts at the start so I’ll avoid repeating myself.

Lay Waste

The position of this talent is a major head scratcher. The importance and use case of this talent heavily varies based on target count and hero talent. So heres the current state for all the relevant combinations:

  • Fully mandatory in all situations for Scalecommander
    Deep Breath is a core rotational spell for all target counts
  • Bad in AoE for Flameshaper (Sample AoE Build)
    The infrequent and clunky use of Deep Breath makes it mostly not worth to use. It gets outclassed by a single Pyre.
  • Useless in Single Target for Flameshaper (Sample ST Build)
    Deep Breath is not used in Single Target as Flameshaper.

So what are the options to fix this ?

  • Swap the position with a talent somewhere else
    Depending on the new position this obviously will harm Scalecommander.
  • Merge the talent into Onyx Legacy
    This would avoid the first problem but would leave an empty space in the talent build.
    Preferably this spot would be filled with a red spell talent that isn’t target count based.

Hero Talents

Scalecommander is still Scalecommander and Flameshaper still feels like playing without a hero talent but to specifically mention the biggest problem of each real quick

  • Scalecommander has no essence economy talents worth taking. Its constantly starved for essence and Essence Burst and the new talent requirements only make this worse. Scalecommander absolutely needs some built in essence generation that isnt on a choice talent which is far too weak to ever be good.
  • Flameshaper is overall pretty bland so there isnt much to complain about other than Conduit of Flame being the only thing you notice. Because when it vanishes at 50% you can watch your damage drop a solid 10% which just feels horrendous. As usual I recommend making it scale like Mastery: Giantkiller (Linear Decrease from 100% to 30% enemy HP)
6 Likes
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I sort of keep coming back to how Scalecommander always was the one that needed more essence when compared to Flameshaper. Although this is a bit evened out now in Midnight, it was highly the case back in TWW and we were already raising eyebrows when Flameshaper got all sorts of Essence Burst talents where Scalecommander has none.

I wholeheartedly agree with how Scalecommander feels horrible outside of cooldowns, very noticeable in Single Target (less so in AOE) and it is in desperate need of an enhanced essence regeneration talent or access to something that allows it to be flowy. Losing Power Swell hits Scalecommander right on its head, I do hope they’ll do something to give some flow to SC.

Power Nexus not being baselined also hurts, because its just more of a quality of life talent (it is pretty meaningless in single target) but feels very nice to have when walking between packs in a dungeon and you know you can shoot 2 pyres or 2 mass disintegrates when you open your rotation, this is especially true now because with Power Swell you had just the amount of regen to back this out, now, not so much.

It is more to do with the feeling and reception of the hero talent rather than Power Swell gives me 10% damage. Without Swell, the spec feels incomplete, yet the talent at the moment is just unreachable.

  • The spec feels far too filler-heavy outside of Dragonrage/Unbound Flame windows.
  • Shattering Star tier heavily incentivizes running Star Salvo, which means Scalecommander can’t afford to spec into Power Swell – its main source of essence generation – drastically killing the flow of the spec.
  • Unfortunately, taking Star Salvo means Scalecommander can’t really take Power Swell anymore. Without Power Swell, the only essence “generation” Scalecommander has outside of just casting your filler spells and praying for procs is from Imminent Destruction, which is not nearly enough to carry your rotation in between Dragonrage uses.
    This was mentioned and written by Gilgvoker on the US forums.

I’d also emphasize that pathing between talents, and having 3 Essence Burst talents (Ruby, Azure Essence Burst and Essence Attunement) does not help our case. Merging or moving some talents could help free up some much needed space.

Agreeing and adding on top of the Lay Waste note: Lay Waste is in an incredibly awkward spot and is a gatekeeper for Flameshaper and that hero spec never uses Deep Breath, which then just feels like you’re wasting a talent point to get to somewhere, whereas it is mandatory for Scalecommander in all content. I could imagine just moving LW into Onyx Legacy (which wouldn’t solve any problems we have in our capstone bracket though) and moving Power Nexus to where Lay Waste was so no talent would feel useless for either hero spec.

Mandatory Flameshaper rant: it feels like it is not a hero talent and absolutely feels abandoned.

EDIT: I move my thread here, so there are no duplicates of the same thoughts.

General Thoughts

To start it off with, thank you for getting rid of Risen Fury, it was one of the most frustrating spells/effects in dungeons, not being able to extract full value of your supposed-to-be-game-warping ability never felt good.

Onto Unbound Flame: This is a much needed flexibility added to Devastation, you can open up the next pull with Essence Bursts, in your hand and on your own demand which is amazing. Damage wise its a little bit lackluster, I was expecting it to hit a lot harder given we only have 4 uses of it every 2 minutes, therefore I think it should be a mini-nuke.

The Tier Set: I like the tier, Star Salvo made into a good talent, which has its downsides (will get into this next) but overall I really like that Eternity Surge is finally worth upranking in AOE situations and it actually is dealing a lot of damage (in the form of Shattering Star(s)).

The bad: We have nothing to “sacrifice” so that we could get Star Salvo. We’re sacrificing Power Swell as Scalecommander and it feels horrid after getting out of Dragonrage and consuming Unbound Flames, we’re just there spamming Living Flames or Azure Strikes depending on the context which does not feel good in any way.

Losing Swell makes us lose flow, which something Devastation was always great with. It had a very nice flow overall and even when theoretically Swell was a very small loss the feeling of the spec dropped tremendously, resulting in just playing Swell no matter what.

Another important thing before I come to conclusions is that we need Causality to be either baselined or moved to the first slot of the talent tree. There is no actual way we’re dropping Causality and we have never dropped it since it was introduced. The talent tree for Scalecommander now is basically locked in in every situation on the capstone part without being able to change up anything. Flameshaper can afford to lose Iridescence so it has Star Salvo but that is due to not having to play Onyx Legacy.

Which then introduces a whole new set of problems:
We have way too many mandatory talents as both hero talents, FS losing “only” iridescence shouldn’t be too big of a deal because it does not lose Swell and Flameshaper already has Titanic Precision, Essence Well to have increased Essence Bursts and flowiness.
Scalecommander at the moment has nothing to generate Essence Bursts with other than fishing for them when in downtime. Power Swell helped us get through these issues a lot, but having to take that talent off is just horrible.

Apex

The apex changes are welcome and Unbound Flame is a nice button with very good flexibility which feels extremely nice compared to Risen Fury.
But the Rising Fury part still just lasts way too long although a bit less provocative and polarizing given now we have complete control over our Essence Bursts instead of every 4 seconds. The ramping up should be completely done by 12-18 seconds.

Conclusion

  • Please baseline Causality and in doing so, do not replace it with anything. We’re hungry for Power Swell because it makes our kit and spec feel nicely flowing at all times.
  • Make Unbound Flame feel like an actual nuke and you can tune it just right due to it having 100% critical strike chance, a thing we always asked for when it was all about Engulf.
  • If you do not want to baseline Causality then move Onyx Legacy into the Hero Talent “Might of the Black Dragonflight” So we have access to Swell and/or Star Salvo.
  • Scalecommander is in need of enhanced essence generation, spamming fillers does not feel good in any way and this has been a problem for a very long time now but as of right now it is the worst it has ever been.
  • I do not miss Azure Sweep, but it had a purpose and it always felt okay to use to me because it dealt good damage in both ST/AOE and had CDR built into it which helped us be able to not even pay attention to spacing Empowers out for Power Swell.
  • Rising Fury still lasts very long but at the moment it feels needed due to the extra haste we get due to the loss of Swell.
2 Likes
Changes to Devastation in 12.1 - Initial Thoughts
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Heya,

I’d first like to thank both Baum and Nightscalie for their input
Following the changes onto 12.1 PTR, and to add my grain of salt, here’s the few takes i’ve been having and gathering:

General Gameplay

  • There are way too many Living Flames being casted, because it’s our most efficient way to fish for Essence Burst procs as Scalecommander
    → This ties into Essence economy of Scalecommander being poor with this 12.1 PTR

  • Tied to point above, Scalecommander needs some way to generate Essence Burst other than Living Flame spam (Throwing some random ideas but maybe being tied to Eternity Surge like the Nerubar tierset or to the Eye of Infinity / Event Horizon talents ? Add something to Onslaught since the talent is dead past 15sec into a fight ? Maybe around Azure Sweep ?)
    → Flameshaper already has it with Titanic Precision + Essence Well talents

  • I would really like to see Imminent Destruction get the Sweeping Strike for Warriors treatment, having no duration, just requires you to spend charges with spells - capped at 8 stacks as it is now - Feels wrong to waste stacks because you’re lucky and overflowing on Essence Burst or because you’ve lost the lottery and not been getting any Essence Burst to spend on your spells

  • Unbound Flame looks good enough, but i’m afraid that if it does a lot of damage, you’d be encouraged to press it during Rising Fury window for 15% bonus damage and be left with no way to get Essence Burst again, other than spamming Living Flame

  • Azure Sweep is so down bad if it stays as is, with a single charge + no damage amp from current 12.0 Tier set, and we’re too short on talent points to even give it a try right now
    → It’ll never get picked in such a state without support

  • Fire Breath looking really spicy bad as Scalecommander once again and really only good as Flameshaper due to the Consume Flame part - Fire Breath doesn’t really do much damage on it’s own, even on the Hero Talent based around it

12.1 Tierset

  • On point of Tier set, we’ll need help, having to spend 4 talent points on the 3rd gate for our tier to be at full power feels really bad, you already have little wiggle room, this feels forced
  • Tierset itself looks decent enough, sure it’s fully passive but it encourages you to cast more empowers (Tho i really dislike the Eternity Surge damage bonus, it should be baseline instead of the 4piece giving it)

Talents

  • Right now we’re running really low on talent points, even having to talent into points that do not make sense
  • We’re the only specialisation of Evoker having to spend 2 whole talent points just to get Essence Burst procs from our Red and Blue spells, where both Augmentation and Preservation get both in a single talent point
  • As said before, we need 4 talent points on the 3rd gate to fully buff our tierset, this severely limit the creativity or even theorycraftyness of builds, you’re very much locked into these 4 talents and having to get to them / play around them
  • Having to talent into Lay Waste (A 20% damage increase of Deep Breath) as Flameshaper just to get to Volatility or Power Nexus is horrible, as you do not ever press that spell
  • We have a grand total of 3 talents to increase Deep Breath damage (Lay Waste, Strafing Run, Might of the Dragon Flight) and this is not counting the other talents to support it
    → This means that without them, Deep Breath is completely dead for anyone not picking these talents
  • Ruby Embers and Engulfing Blaze feel so out of place and touch with the spec, trying to add a tiny bit of damage to a spell that hasn’t been doing anything for a while, on the 2nd gate of talents
    → Having to pick these two talents to get to Feed the Flames (Mostly a Flameshaper talent as Scalecommander does not have any room to get to that) that links to a Deep Breath (A Scalecommander talent) feels wrong and a big oversight to the left side of the tree - And probably won’t be picked because we want to get the most out of our tierset

Devastation feels like it has more to offer, but has been lacking behind with it’s talent tree design :

  • Mastery wants you to do big damage on pull when the target has the highest amount of health percentage
  • Risen Fury and talents such as Unrelenting Siege are making you ramp up damage over a certain period of time to unleash your full power

As always, i think Devastation has been an amazing addition to the game, i am really in love with the Class and Specialisation and all i want is to see it thrive

Thank you for reading up to this part, appreciate it a whole lot
I would like to once again thank anyone taking part into PTR and giving feedback, and to the people reading this

Appreciate you a whole bunch
– A lil Dragon enjoying Evoker ever since it came out

2 Likes
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Unbound Flame is a decent enough addition to the gameplay, but its visual should be spiced up… currently it’s a copy paste from Engulf/Pyre.

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So after the first rounds of M+ and dummy dome testing, as Flameshaper, I have changed some of the opinions and have observed some new things. If I dont mention something here then one can assume that I still hold the opinion mentioned above or in the linked posts. I can report the following things:

Red Spells

All red spells other than Fire Breath are just weak.

  • Pyre does very little damage and is completely outclassed by Disintegrate with Scintilations and Shattering Stars. This leads to Pyre being pushed to 4 or more targets WITH VOLATILITY. This is worse than Pyre has ever been.
  • Living Flame feels weak and should really get a boost to its damage. Fire Torrent should apply to it and Twin Flame should gain all Living Flame damage increases. It just feels right to have the majority red hero talent have more powerful red spells than Fire Breath.
  • Firestorm, or rather Feed the Flames is completely inaccessible because of the talent position and the requirement of the tier set to spec fully into Shattering Stars and Eternity Surge. This just feels bad because the entirety of the red talents are already rarely picked and now its just completely unreasonable.
  • Unbound Flame is the least bad of the bunch. Its new, its a great addition, but it could do more damage for being attached to a 2 minute cooldown. Right now it accounts for 3% in Single Target and I would prefer it being closer to 5%. This can be achieved with just buffing the damage or increasing how many charges we get which also helps the essence economy (which is a major problem for Scalecommander)

Most of these can be solved with buffs and slight redesigns and would help alleviate the common feeling that “Flameshaper just feels like having no hero talent”. Additionally I am of the opinion that the tier set just goes way too hard into Eternity Surge. Flameshaper has NOTHING in terms of synergies with it and I would really prefer if the tier set did incorporate some red elements to balance out the overwhelming amounts of blue.

Blue Spells

Blue spells are in a really good spot right now damage wise but the way they do damage is just completely whack.

  • Disintegrate does comparatively little damage. Most of its damage is tied to Scintilations procs and the Shattering Stars that come with it. This turns the spell into a gambling tool and this has a massive variance (especially in low target cleave). This just feels horrendous because you can simply do nothing about it and are at the mercy of a 15% proc chance. Disintegrate should account for way more of its damage and Scintilations should also scale down Shattering Stars or just dont proc them alltogether.
  • Eternity Surge feels amazing right now. You are finally incentivized to uprank it to match the target count and it hits hard. The only problem is that Flameshaper still has no synergy points with Eternity Surge and as such half of the talent tree is just adjacent instead of synergistic. I would love to have Eternity Surge interacting with Consume Flame to incorporate some blue synergies into Flameshaper.

Black Spells

Deep Breath is still too weak for FS to be ever casted outside of utility reasons. Its honestly a shame because I would like to have another component to the AoE rotation.
To become a bit technical:
Deep Breath currently has around half the DPET (Damage per execution time) of Pyre with Volatility. This metric does not include things like Causality which further tips the scales in favor of Pyre. The long cast time (at least 2.2s) and very mediocre damage combined with the complete lack of synergy just destroys any chance of Deep Breath ever being remotely relevant.

Talents

The tier set just murders all talent diversity because it requires a whopping 5 talent points to be invested. This hurts Scalecommander the most because it has to drop Power Swell and is in turn suffering from a very poor essence economy. For Flameshaper it just locks the entire left most row from being accessible since you cannot afford to drop the 5 talents.

Tier Set

Its just so blue. There is just no reasonable red synergy. Even the increased Causality Cooldown Reduction just favors Disintegrate because it doesnt need 5 targets for maximum effectiveness while also benefitting from the 2pc bonus. It should honestly get some red synergy.

Dragonrage and Apex

The ramp is still a major pain in M+ because starting to do real damage after 20s is just not reasonable. It should be at least 1 or 2 stacks shorter.
The overall duration is less of a problem now but is still annoying. Its still about 10s too long in total.

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After a couple of testing here’s my feedback on the spec as of the first round of changes.

Let’s start with newer things first:

  • Unbound Flame is a lot better then Risen Fury and it’s not even close, the previous iteration was horrible. The bluepost for Season 2 opens with this: “Devastation’s Apex talent, while powerful, hasn’t been as gameplay-affecting as we had hoped.” : i personally wouldn’t have used the world “powerful” for it but at least they acknowledged it missed the mark. This new one is NEAT : it fits the theme, helps us on resource generation and fills that 70/80ish seconds of pure downtime of Dragonrage fairly well. I wanted to try if Scorching Embers works with it and it does BUT it doesn’t do nearly enough damage to justify that talent route; i was expecting a “mini nuke” since it gains value from Tyranny and guaranteed crits but the damage is not mindblowing, it’s very reminiscent of Empowered Rune Weapon for Frost DK, granted a lot stronger; a “resource helper” with more damage attached on top.
  • Tier set is okeyish at best, the 2 Piece being the most interesting part: Font of Magic does give a good amount of extra damage to the whole Eternity Surge package, but still that talent path is nowhere near good enough for the current build, granted the extra damage on Shattering Star fired from Scintillation is pretty nice. 4 piece is a mix: the Causality part is great, simply more Empowered that translate to more Mass Disintegrate. The extra damage part is the bad one in my opinion: it just doesn’t add anything, it leaves out Fire Breath for some reason and it seems like an excuse to buff a spell that baseline is already not that good.

Now while i’m happy to see our Apex getting some love that’s where i think we need to start being more critical on the whole situation: the baseline for this spec is in an horrendous state.

If we look on how it performed in various content in the current season it’s very clear that Devastation is in a dire need for way more that just a fix to the apex talent: it’s good to fix the leaking on the ceiling but if the foundations are crumbling that little hole on the roof should be the least of your problems. Now i know it’s very early on the Season 2 cycle but i think it’s necessary to address the situation.

Let’s start on first culprit: Mastery: Giantkiller.

The premise is as interesting as unique: a “reverse” execute. Instead of becoming stronger the lower the health of your target goes, you are very good at cutting down those healthbars, or at least you should be.

Currently the Mastery/Damage gained ratio is nonexistent, it doesn’t have a floor for some reason and it just interacts weidly with cooldowns creating a not rewarding play pattern.

It’s a stat not worth investing into simply because even if you do the result is just “you gain X damage that keeps dropping , but the X is still very low so you have a very bad damage ceiling that’s not even stable”, literally the definition of “mediocre”.

Blizzard said that it wants for Season 2 to reduce burst damage during major cooldowns and lower the gap between In Cooldown Windows and Out of Cooldown Windows: Devastation in its current iteration is going to hit like a wet noodle if that’s the path they want to take because outside of Dragonrage we literally have nothing, and as i previously said Unbound Flame is just a little help on a gigantic hole.

Possible Solution: increase the ratio Stats/Damage, give a fixed + variable damage bonus and/or trade damage loss for something else.

The second culprit is a direct follower of the first: Talents and Talent Tree.

I don’t even know where to start here to be honest.

Let’s start with Spec talent tree.

  1. Why is Pyre the first talent instead of being a baseline spell for Devastation? First node should either be Dragonrage or Causality. Why? Because they are mandatory in every single build Devastation will ever play. They are so core that they warp all talents decisions in their proximity: Causality is probably better of the two, since it really pushes they idea of “i spend essence to reduce the cooldown of cool empowered spells”.
  2. Ruby Essence Burst and Azure Essence Burst should be merged, something like Improved Essence Burst,and Power Nexus should be in the same row: early nodes for resource economy are very common and they make sense together. Essence Attunement is another good candidate to be moved up.
  3. Lay waste should probably merged with Onyx Legacy, as a stand alone on the early left side (let’s call it the Red Side) doesn’t really make any sense. Something improving Fire Breath mirrors the right side with Eternity surge and the blu spell package.
  4. On left side i have little to no love for Ruby Embers: if buffs our filler and not even much, they can be more creative. On the right side Azure sweep is better but still very underwhelming. Here is where they could tinker with boss abilities like Burning Claws from Sarkareth, something that fuses Living Flame and Azure Strike into a single filler with the priority damage portion of Living Flame and the aoe spash from Azure Strike. Talents like Engulfing Blaze or Burnout are good because they either reduce cast time or completely remove it, smoothing out rotations; the fact that the filler puts a very meaningless DoT now that the Engulf as it was it’s not in the game anymore removes all the purpose of that talent.
  5. Dragonrage should have Animosity baseline and it’s just absurd that it’s not being already implemented: the fact that Dragonrage needs 2 extra talents just to be an “okey” major cooldown is insane in the current version of the game. Either merge Animosity or make it a choice node between a shorter cooldown or a longer extension with Animosity. Also without Tyranny it’s not even a “damage” cooldown (a damage loss prevention cooldown to be more precise) , just a forced proc resource managment talent : it’s unfanthomably disappointing for a 2 minutes spell.
  6. Firestorm i think is a missed opportunity: it’s relegated to the red side behind multiple Pyre cast, could be more accessible. It’s also a very cluttering ability in terms of visual, so probably shortening the uptime while upgrading the damage could reduce frustration for both the Evoker in case tanks need to kite mobs out of it, and for the party having less particles on the pack. Same thing on the other side with Charged Blast: concept is flawless here, but being capped is cutting its wing: Mass Disintegrate + Shattering Star + Star Salvo is going 100% to overcap with a single Mass Disintegrate, which is not great. The talent still works, i just think the execution could use a fresher design.
  7. Bottom side is mostly fine, granted Causality basically “locks” a Capstone slot , vastly reducing talent choices. Scintillation does something similar, being the two “mandatory” capstones for every single build, leaving just 1 slot open, which is not ideal. Power Shell is very valuable for Scalecommander, but Iridescence is somewhat weak for a capstone. Worth addressing Titanic Wrath and Imminent Destruction: the first one is in the right path BUT it could be more gameplay changing; the second one doesn’t really live up to where it’s positioned and what it offers. Devastation is all about resource management and having a “cost reducer” while your main proc literally makes the spells free feels kind of bland.
  8. In general, empowered spells should have a stronger feedback. It’s fine if Fire Breath, the generic one that all evoker have access to, is less interesting (it also has an entire Hero talent for itself to make it more flashy or something) , but Eternity Surge has to be more. The level up is not good, Eternity Span doesn’t fix it, choice node is the only good one. Again i think Sarkareth’s abilities could be explored (like Glittering Star or attaching Fire Bombs on the enemies with Fire Breath). Also levels matters very little right now: beside specific cases (like Eternity Surge right now with tier set) we NEVER want to rank up spells since it’s not really incentivized. There are exeptions to this but having talents interactions with the levels of Empowered Spells would for sure help the feedback they could give.
  9. Apex is being worked on and as i said it help Dragonrage a lot, but ramp time could be lower.

Hero Talents have huge problems too. Devastation needs to coexists with a healer and the only support spec in the game ; also themes tend to clash since Devastation uses Blue/Red, Augmentation uses Black/Bronze and Preservation uses Green/Bronze, and it’s very reflected in some talents.

Let’s start with Scalecommander:

  1. Mass disintegrate is the coolest spell we have, shooting multiple blue lasers at enemies is unmatched in terms of satisfaction. More Mass Disintegrate= More Fun, something this season actually adresses with a buffed Causality in the tier sets, but in Single target it’s badly tuned.
  2. Heavy focus on Deep Breath is fine, but Might of the Black Dragonflight for us literally only buffs that spell we cast every 40ish seconds, for Aug it literally buffs his essence spender and one of the empowered spells: there could be a better synergy there for us.
  3. Our base Deep Breath has way less impact than Breath of Eons and the cooldown-reducing aspect from Wingleader is way less valuable.
  4. Unrelenting Siege buffing fillers is just bad: we want to spend the least amount of time pressing those and we only do that for proc generation, their damage is not important. If it buffed “exeptional spells” like Pyre , Disintegrate, the two empowered spells and Deep Breath would be way better and more synergistic. Onslaugh it’s fine: as prevously mentioned things that helps us not wasting time on fillers are good.
  5. Scalecommander beside Diverted power has 0 Essence economy, creating downtime if unlucky with Essence procs or playing without Power Shell. In theory Imminent Destruction could help but in the actual gameplay free Essence Spells still consume ID stacks. (NOT TRUE MY BAD).
  6. Capstone is what tirggers me the most. Maneuverability should be baseline for all the Breath in 2026: it’s just a QoL for a fairly frustrating (and risky) ability to press, keeping it locked behind a Capostone in a Hero Talent is criminal. The DoT component is fine, but making the movement-part base and adding an actual powerful capstone would help immensely Devastation and Evoker in general.

Scalecommander has a couple of nodes that helps Augmentation way more than us but it’s a good Hero talent; needs a couple of tweets but the starting point is great.

Flameshaper on the other hand needs all the help in this world. It’s way too passive.

  1. It’s just damage. With Engulf we had a rotation warping ability that was fun as hell to use, albeit a bit toxic gameplay-wise and probably too strong ( yes i’m talking about you TWW S2 double Engulf): now you just do your base rotation and Consume Flame does damage , the extra empowered spells is just for DoT uptime.
  2. Energy economy is great here, between Titanic Precision and Essence Well.
  3. Defensives are way weaker than Scalecommander and it’s not even close, the change to Renewing Blaze did really hurt a lot.
  4. The entire Hero Talent is a glorified buff to Fire Breath like it’s the only Fire spells we have: no Pyre or Firestorm synergy makes it way too plain and even visually nothing really happens.

Flameshaper suffers more because it limits itself on the red side of the build, lacking interactions and being extremely passive and not engaging both gameplay wise and visually.

Third one is damage profile.

Now i know this is very M+ cave-dweller type reason but objectivley speaking our damage profile is terrible. Our mastery doesn’t allow for consistent damage outside of cooldown, creating big empty moments in terms of contribution during fights and the “first approach” when we should be at our strongest is incredibly underhwleming.

We have Uncapped AoE with Pyre, Firestorm and Deep Breath but limited, both in radial and cast range; our cleave is relegated to Scalecommander (not counting Scintillation+ Eternity’s Span since it’s somwhat RNG) and we have literally 0 priority damage, now one spell with Unbound Flame but it’s limited and not too impressive damage-wise especially if we consider that it comes from a Apex talent.

The TL:DR of this walltext is simple: Devastation needs a overhaul. Talents trimmed and made more unique, more synergistic, being playable in M+ and not being a “early season Raid Destroyer”.

There are a lot more information on little thing that could help the spec, but i think those are not relevant in this particual feedback right now.

I wanted to highlight the majority of problems i’ve encoutered with the spec not only on the current PTR but also on the current and past seasons so the situation of Devastation is clearer and it’s easier to pinpoint where to start repairing this sinking ship.

I’m going play this spec anyway as i’m doing right now, i simply don’t want to be the guy in the playgroup that “blocks” the progress because his spec is being left rotting in the dust.

7

Following up Baum’s reply I’ll add my own thoughts aswell because yesterday I had some time on my hand to experience how it looks in season 2 for us, I’ll follow Baum’s formality so you can easily compare opinions. I’m representing the position of Scalecommander because that is the spec/talent closer to my heart and Baum is already taking care of Flameshaper and sums up everything nicely.

Red Spells

I think overall Red Spells are at the moment in a horrible place. Charged Blast feels like it does nothing for Pyre, which severely hurts Scalecommander’s AOE and snapburst with Dragonrage.

  • Pyre: Incredibly weak, probably the weakest it has ever been and this is also an issue for Flameshaper, it just struggles to keep up with damage.
  • Living Flame: I’m absolutely surprised how 155 casts in a dungeon net me 1,45% of my damage, completely lackluster, it really needs some synergy so that even if it deals low damage it still builds up for something other than just fishing for Essence Bursts.
  • Fire Breath: Its pretty funny you can take off Heat Wave (the talent that gives 30% damage to Fire Breath) and not feel a damn thing about it. It is horrible that I am allowed to take talent points off of something so crucial to the spec, this isn’t acceptable and I do want to have ways of modifying Fire Breath damage even as Scalecommander. This ability is actually overtaken by Bombardments (which please remember, got nerfed by 10% in Season 1, actually laughable)
  • Unbound Flame: I feel like this ability is a bit lackluster at the moment. It nets around 3% or at most 4% of my overall damage, it should be around a total of 7% by either granting us more charges, which would help Scalecommander and the overall flow if you’re not willing to give us Power Swell (which would be a huge letdown by you guys, we’re taking our time giving and writing feedback and actually testing our specs for you) or just straight up giving it more damage so it snaps. This ability is also easily tuneable due to it always having maximum value from Mastery and is always a critical strike. (Think about adding Critical Strike chance modifier to the damage)

Blue Spells

As Baum said:

  • Disintegrate: I do feel like this is true, and is especially true for Scalecommander due to Mass Disintegrate. I feel like the Stars coming from Scintillation are pure RNG and we are heavily reliant on a measly 15% proc chance that adds very heavy variance to the output Scalecommander can do. I’d like if SS (Shattering Stars) damage were a bit toned down and in turn Scintillation proc chance would be upped, this way preventing the slot machine feeling of the spec.
  • Eternity Surge: This is what we’ve been asking for for a very long time. Upranking Eternity Surge feels amazing and so very worth it. I love the anticipation that builds up when we’re upranking Eternity Surge and the damage does not disappoint, amazing on this side.
  • Azure Strike: deals basically zero damage.

Black Spells

  • Deep Breath: I feel like Deep Breath should do more, but it is already a pretty polarizing button for most of the players and most are on the opinion that we should be casting less Deep Breaths, but it should be hitting for more. Personally for me, I do not mind pressing Deep Breath because I love the whole fantasy of Scalecommander, but I do see their reasoning and there should be a choice node where Strafing Run instead sends a Squadron (pretty much like Frostwyrm’s Fury) to do the job.
  • Bombardments: Perhaps this is one of the most frustrating spells to deal with. As Devastation I am not Augmentation and I do not wish to rely on other players to do my damage which in turn doesn’t even show on damage meters probably. We’ve given feedback how should you approach this and how could you fix Bombardments easily so that this controversy does not happen between players when the SC Dev player gets flamed for missing 15% of his damage just because you cannot make it happen to count on Dev’s damage.
    On a side note, Deep Breath is incredibly weak for Flameshaper and something should be done so that it gets added into the rotation. (and I do think this button shouldn’t be part of FS rotation as long as it has the ground targeted version of Deep Breath)

Talents

I am once again in agreement with Baum’s feedback:

The tier set basically forces us so much into a specific talent that requires so much, most points are immovable which makes the left side totally unreachable. Having us also lose Swell as Scalecommander severely hurts how the spec plays and it was absolutely horrid playing without it because it just had no flow. I was spamming 6-8 casts of fillers sometimes in my dungeon runs when there were 10 targets. Absolutely horrible and needs immediate adjusting to Power Swell’s position in the talent tree or just baselining it.

Tier Set

Its just blue. Barely any synergy for Flameshaper, and it favours using disintegrate even more due to the RNG-y nature of Scintillation and the tier set combined onto that is probably a higher output than using pyre on 4 targets with Volatility talented. I do not mind it as a Scalecommander enjoyer, but it causes issues for Flameshaper due to how Consume Flame works.

Dragonrage and Apex

Still incredibly long and is a major pain point in M+. Rising Fury should be ramped up a lot earlier, the haste and damage should arrive earlier but the overall duration should be lower. Dragonrage is a pretty meaningful button but not in a satisfying way. There is still room to improve, and we need Dragonrage to actually amp the hell out of our spenders and to make that duration whilst we’re in our cooldown meaningful, not just a glorified essence burst generator.

8

First of all I like the feedback but theres a two wrong-ish statements that I’d like to correct:

Onslaught is by far the weakest talent in the entire class and should just be reworked. A single burnout proc ? are they kidding me ?

They don’t. The only problem ID has is that the duration is too short which is just getting worse with the completely nuked essence economy.

9

I can agree on Onslaught being bad but at least it’s a free cast, personaly i value more spending less time on fillers than how much damage they do. That is most likely a personal thing.

On Imminent Destruction it was my bad , i though the problem was that they still eat the stack, not that buff duration was too low. Mea culpa. :saluting_face:

10

Oh totally missed this one. You might want to read the talent again. It already buffs Disintegrate

11

Unrelenting Siege: For each second you are in combat Azure Strike, Living Flame, and Disintegrate deal 1% increased damage, up to 15%.

Three spells buffed, only one of them is good and relevant enough to get buffed. The whole premise was for the talent to buff ALL our meaningful spells instead of just one of them.

12

Ah so I misread what you wanted entirely. my bad.
SC honestly has too many bland buff talents already

13

And the answer to that by blizzard was..nothing…Aug still bad. Dev even worse. I know there is still time till live hits but if it stays even remotly in this low ballpark i dont see any point in evoker in general.

14

I would like to share my thoughts on what I have seen on the PTR. I apologize for any repetition.

Apex Talent

This is a major improvement to what was previously a poor Apex talent. The ability to delay gaining Essence Burst, combined with the additional damage, is exactly what it needed.

I would like to see the ability’s damage increased so that using it actually feels impactful. I would also suggest giving it increased critical strike damage, similar to how Chaos Bolt works for Warlocks. Otherwise, it is still the same not weak, but slow Apex talent that holds Devastation back in M+ content.

Tier Set

I like the concept behind the tier set. I wanted to see Star Salvo become part of our builds, and now that is possible.

However, it has made our resource-starvation problem even worse, further exacerbating the issues for Scalecommander, since we currently cannot afford to take Power Swell. The tier set also synergizes extremely well with Scintillation, making Disintegrate even stronger while leaving Pyre so weak that it has almost completely disappeared from the Scalecommander toolkit.

Pyre

Continuing from the previous point, Disintegrate received a significant damage buff in the pre-patch, while Pyre’s cost was increased to three Essence without receiving sufficient damage compensation.

At the moment, Pyre has some value only for Flameshaper because of its increased Red spell damage and access to Consume Flame. For Scalecommander, Pyre has been almost completely replaced by Disintegrate, and there is currently no clear reason to use it without Volatility. Charged Blast nerf has further worsened these issues and was unnecessary.

Pyre’s weakness is one of the reasons Devastation is in such a poor state in M+ content. In its current form, the specialization simply cannot compete with other specs.

Pyre definitely needs a buff, but I do not believe that simply increasing its damage by approximately 20% would make it good again. Pyre does not have square-root target scaling, so it can be effective against large pulls, such as the first pull in Algeth’ar Academy. However, its much worse against smaller packs.

I would suggest increasing its damage by 70–100%, while introducing damage reduction beyond five or eight targets to compensate for the increase.

Living Flame and Azure Strike

I would like to see Living Flame and Azure Strike buffed. Due to the removal of many resource generators, Devastation is now forced to cast filler spells frequently, but these fillers deal almost no damage.

Fire Breath

Fire Breath also needs a buff.
Outside of Flameshaper, where Fire Breath is significantly enhanced by multiple talents, this ability has become barely noticeable in our overall damage.

Wingleader

The current change does not solve the problem described in the blue post.

It is still beneficial to spread Bombardment, because extending its duration extends both Bombardment applications. Meanwhile, Diverted Power can only be described as a meme talent because of its extremely low proc chance.

The effectiveness of Wingleader has also dropped significantly, especially in single-target. A reduction of 0.5 seconds per target hit is too small and is practically unnoticeable.

Other Talents

There are many talents in the specialization tree that raise questions.

Why are Ruby Essence Burst and Azure Essence Burst two separate talents when Augmentation and Preservation have them combined into a single talent?

Why does Power Nexus exist, and why is it locked behind an AoE talent? Why is Devastation forced to play with a maximum of five Essence without it when its abilities cost three Essence?

Why does our specialization tree contain so many talents that do nothing except increase damage, such as Lay Waste, Arcane Intensity, Heat Wave, and Scorching Embers? Honed Aggression can also be included in this category. Talents like these are not always a bad thing, but when looking at the tree as a whole, it feels as though only the final section contains talents that meaningfully affect gameplay.

Causality has already been discussed countless times, but this talent should not be located where it currently is. Devastation’s gameplay is impossible to imagine without Causality. How did a talent that forms the foundation of the specialization end up at the very bottom of the talent tree?

Survivability

Devastation’s survivability in Midnight is anything but good.

We currently have only one defensive ability with two charges. Obsidian Scales is certainly powerful, but outside of it, we are as squishy as possible. We do not have strong passive survivability like Demon Hunters to compensate for our lack of other defensive abilities. We also have a very limited toolkit for quickly restoring our health. The only thing we can realistically hope for is a critical heal from Verdant Embrace.

Turning Renewing Blaze into a passive effect was a bad change. Obsidian Scales did not need to become even stronger.

Although this problem may still be manageable in raids, it is a death sentence in M+ content. You only need to look at current Augmentation runs to see this: the healer is often forced to focus on keeping the Evoker alive, even though Augmentation has Defy Fate, which the other Evoker specializations do not have.

Please bring back the shield from Rescue and restore Renewing Blaze as a separate active ability, or add new survivability options for Devastation.

15

I am Sorry Blizzard, but you can’t really tell me that’s it. All this work of people in this forum put in on giving good quality feedback and the only thing that’s happening is a wingleader buff?

Like why? Really. Did you give up on that Spec? Nobody questioned the Aug nerfs, they were a bit to harsh imho, but they weren’t a surprise, but Devastation was never THE spec. It performed worse in M+ in Season 1, and it seems it got even worse in Season 2. Dev performed worse in all Raids beside 1 than Aug. Give this spec something to work with.