Initial Thoughts: 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.

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)
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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.
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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 ?)
    → FS 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 SC once again

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 ES 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
  • 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

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 it a lot
– A lil Dragon enjoying Evoker ever since it came out

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