When it comes to the newly-revealed Season 1 Tier Set for Augmentation Evoker, Blizzard have kept things simple by going with two straightforward bonuses highly reminiscent of past tier sets that we’ve already seen for Augmentation. At the end of the day, these bonuses likely won’t have a significant impact on playstyle, but they do highlight changes that Augmentation players can expect to feel at the start of the upcoming expansion, as well as reinforce some of the existing challenges that players continue to face when playing the spec in a raid environment.
Bolstered by a combination of hero talents and new entries in the Augmentation talent tree, the 2-pc set bonus has an impressive degree of synergy with the spec’s core damaging abilities, and as a whole perhaps indicates a shift in the spec’s damage profile towards personal damage. For example, a typical Augmentation talent setup will have
damage supported by
,
, and especially the newly-added capstone talent
. The Chronowarden tree takes this a step further with
and
, which trigger three times even in single-target thanks to
. Scalecommander also has personal damage multipliers up its sleeve, but it trades off some
direct damage in the form of
, while
buffs both
and
. While we can expect additional tuning, as well as updates in the form of not-yet-implemented talents, I expect Augmentation Evokers in The War Within to be rather pleased with their personal damage contribution, especially in multi-target dungeon situations.
The 4-pc set bonus for Augmentation is quite similar to the Dragonflight Season 2 tier set
, but with an added twist: the bonus Intellect now ramps up in power over 10 seconds.
currently provides 6.5% of your Intellect (or 7.2% with
), so this is definitely a powerful effect, especially when combined with the additional
duration extension afforded by Chronowarden, and to a lesser degree Scalecommander. That said, this set bonus comes with some caveats which I hope will be resolved in the coming weeks. At the time of writing, refreshing
before it expires causes the set bonus to reset, which does not seem consistent with the written description of the set bonus. When it comes to raiding, I can’t help but see this set bonus as contributing to a growing set of unclear goals for the aspiring Augmentation player.
Augmentation is receiving a variety of boons through hero talents ranging from improved personal damage and improved
uptime to additional casts of
. What remains unclear to me is exactly how these tools fit into the currently dominant “spreadsheet-based” raiding playstyle, which involves carefully pre-planning specific buff recipients in set 30-second intervals over the course of a raid encounter. Players on Live servers can find themselves actively avoiding casting their spenders while waiting for
to expire in order to ensure that the next cast chooses new targets, which makes the ramping aspect of this new 4-pc set bonus a somewhat perplexing prospect. Additionally, carefully managing
targets is absolutely key to maximising output, and yet hero talents like
and
bring an element of randomness to the table that is simply confusing at best. Finally, new additions to the spec like
are absolutely welcome, but they simply don’t address the fact that Augmentation’s buffs must be online well ahead of time in order to be effective. If you as a player are relying on
to choose your upcoming buff targets in a raid scenario, you’re already too late.
That said, Augmentation players have quite a bit to look forward to in The War Within. The new tier set bonuses are strong and hint towards enjoyable gameplay, especially in dungeons. We have been told to expect to see additional tuning and talent changes in the coming weeks, and my hope is that we will also receive changes and additional clarity specifically oriented towards raid gameplay in that time.