"As Blizzard themselves stated, Augmentation is a force multiplier. With the current tuning, I was doing about 40% of the damage I do as Devastation when playing this spec solo, which means that a lot of the damage will come from your allies."Random thought, why not just increase the amount of buffing done when there are fewer targets to buff? I worry that no one will play this spec outside of raids otherwise. Even arena's only give you 1 or 2 extra players to buff. IDK, I love the bard concept but it seems super unbalanced.
I worry for this spec during solo content, but it looks like it'll be fun if you enjoy playing roles that allow you to support your party alongside the healer such as spriest or enh shaman.
I'm expecting Augmentation Evoker to be a balance nightmare and a fairly dull spec to play itself.I'm not sure who came up with the idea and was confident enough that the balance department would be able to handle such a spec properly, but I'm not expecting them to manage it well enough for it to neither be too strong nor too weak. Especially with such vast differences between raiding and m+.Also after trying a few minutes of playing the rotation on a target dummy, I don't see how this spec works outside of Hover and Spatial Paradox, but to be fair, Hover and Spatial Paradox can have quite a high combined uptime.My biggest concern is how Motes of Possibility is gonna create even more degeneracy and people crying about external buffs. PI is bad enough as it is and Motes of Possibility is possibly even worse. Sure in a well structured raid environment, these things won't be an issue, but in a regular group, people are gonna fight over who gets those motes and are gonna "steal" them from each other, which will make the pug experience inevitably worse.I'm curious to see how all this turns out, but I don't have high hopes, personally.
So... no Evoker spec uses Polearms... So who the hell did we see in the Dracthyr Cinematics?
As someone who has played both FF14's dancer (a similar concept to the support dps evoker) and WoW for roughly 6-7 years now there is a huge difference why a support dps does work for a game like final fantasy 14 and will not work for warcraft without major systems, and game design changes and general player community changes. For one as stated above the general damage output of the augmentation evoker to be roughly 60% less than its pure dps counterpart, this is a massive downgrade in dps that compared to the dancer in FFXIV which for the few players who do have a dps counting addon has them sitting at 80%-88% compared against all dps classes, meaning when played at their highest point can easily keep up and match the lowest dps specs at the current time.All that being said encounters in FF14 arent designed, minus the very-very top to be a pure numbers game, everything is about mechanics and positioning, while most of WoW from the point of "end game" (anything beyond doing daily quests) is all about pure numbers, both the players and the greater community having the "meta above fun" idea with whole classes being unplayable for entire expansions because they are "not meta" to make a spec like augmentation evoker 'meta' enough to justify taking it over another top dps spec, they'd need to provide a large party buff roughly 35-40% in M+ while also dealing numbers equal to a well geared 'meta' tank, and for Arena to have enough stuns, roots and cleanses to off putt the fact they simply won't have the numbers to K.O. the enemy team by themselves, unless the spec has a huge damage increase in pvp which usually Pve specs are much like the pvp specs.Tl;Dr to get the spec to work for both pve and pvp they will need to do a fundamental change in how they design 2-5 player encounters in both pve and pvp.
After a quick swing on PTR, I had two thoughts for improvements.First is Eruption's cast time, same as mentioned in the article. It feels like it should take the place of Pyre in the spec's kit and makes it feel clunky by being planted nonstop outside of Hover. Considering that Aug's personal damage is pretty mild, I think just making it instant and moving on would be fine, but otherwise making it ACTUALLY take the place of Pyre by giving Aug back Disintegrate would help. Just give Ebon Might time per damage tick or something, retune the damage a bit, easy.The second is Prescience's auto targeting. It seemed to just recast on the same or closest person when not specifically targeting, and that would make you either lose a lot of damage from not buffing someone else or micromanage 20-30 second buffs on 2-3 people, which seems rough during any sort of content. Having it refresh on Pandemic timer seems like the best solution, as outright avoiding players with the buff seems like it could make some very harsh breakpoints for mastery or make you go right back to tracking each buff.Overall it's an interesting concept, and I'm hopeful that it pans out. I imagine that if it comes out even halfway decent, having at least one in raid will become somewhat mandatory for groups that care about comp, but hopefully they can find a decent sweetspot for m+ and PvP where it's good, but not mandatory. Like Preheat said though, it's as dependent on other specs' tuning as it is on its own.
shoulda just been a tank honestly or a new healer spec
not really a fan of a spec that's unplayable outside of group content
How is this spec NOT going to be part of the M+ meta? The damage buffs and absorbs are going to be insane for cutting edge key pushers... expect to see 1 in every group, and with Aug also bringing lust, every other lust class can forget it...
I look forward to Aug Evoker, especially in PVP. But trust in arena it will either be a wet noodle or absolutely OP at first.
i am pressing X to doubt