Reflecting on the Evoker as They Join the Death Knight, Monk, and Demon Hunter as a Veteran Class

 The Evoker is maybe the weirdest class they've added to the game.

Kind of.

In a few ways, the class broke precedents. In now just about 20 years of World of Warcraft, there has only ever been two ranged DPS specs added to the game, and both are Evokers.

Evokers are also the only class to be released that is mutually exclusive with its playable race - one cannot make an Evoker who is not a Dracthyr, but likewise one cannot make a Dracthyr who is not an Evoker (though this latter stipulation is one I can imagine changing in the future).

It also is the only class to have a full additional spec added in the middle of an expansion, with Augmentation not available until the second raid came out.

Furthermore, it's the only class to have a "support DPS" spec, which strongly emphasizes buffing allies' damage rather than maximizing their own (while some specs, like Enhancement Shamans, have long had powerful ally-buffs, the balance of the spec is still meant to allow them to bring a comparable amount of damage as pure-dps specs).

Finally, it's the only class built around "mid-range," requiring not quite as careful positioning as a melee character, but more careful positioning than a full-range character.

Because of the mutual exclusivity, it can be hard to talk about Evokers without talking about Dracthyr. Indeed, at least the last time I checked, the Evoker talent tree actually has some talents that affect Dracthyr racial abilities.

I've been playing a Devastation Evoker through Dragonflight. I think I pushed up his priority in the alt list due to his novelty, but I think he's likely to remain in kind of the middle of the pack. When Augmentation came out, I tried it for a bit - I love its aesthetics, which focus on the Black and Bronze dragonflights (the Bronze flight has always been my favorite by far, but that shouldn't come as a surprise given my obsession with time travel and chronomancy). However, the maintenance-based gameplay, which mirrors in some ways Breath of Sindragosa-based Frost Death Knights, stresses me out a bit (admittedly there's a similar mechanic in Dragonwrath for Devastation, but this is a rather short window and in my experience can only really have its duration extended twice - first immediately after you cast it and then when it's about 75% complete is when I tend to be able to use my empowered spells again to extend it further - but once that's over, I consider myself satisfactorily done). (Oh, and also, for some reason back when Shadow Priests were all built around Void Form, I think during Legion, I didn't mind that style of gameplay - perhaps because it was trivial to build up the Insanity required to return to it, so if you messed up one Void Form phase you could get back on your feet pretty easily.)

I'll also confess that there's a certain satisfaction in seeing your numbers on the damage meters rise, and Augmentation is built to expect you're significantly behind others in damage (indeed, you're inflating theirs, which is kind of the whole point!)

Devastation is a spec that can feel a little odd when soloing - the rotation makes the most sense when you have long-living enemies. Fire Breath is a bit counter-intuitive, because you need to spend longer empowering it in order to do a quicker burst of damage. Sometimes, especially when in groups, I find myself doing the longer-burn low empowerment simply in order to get the cast off before my allies kill the target. Perhaps it would be best to just save the ability in such cases?

Indeed, through much of Dragonflight, I found myself surprised at how good my DPS was with a rotation that was new and unfamiliar. I think in large part this is just that it's actually a simpler rotation than most, so executing it well is not terribly difficult. I do wonder if the class was also allowed to be a little more powerful in order to encourage players to try it out - which would likely mean a slight nerf moving forward.

It's funny, because other than the Death Knight, every new class added to the game has had mobility as a theme. Monks were rolling around, Demon Hunters have their Fel Rushes, and Evokers have Hover, which honestly feels a bit more unique of an ability.

On an aesthetic level, I have beef with the class/race.

It is infuriating that you can collect these new class sets, often with really cool design, but they're only on display when you're in your visage form (other than the shoulders and I believe belt). The customization options for the actual Drathyr appearance are cool, but they feel like something from a different game. I'd happily have every Dracthyr's "unarmored" appearance just be a naked reptilian dragon-person (well, with underwear) if it meant allowing our actual armor pieces to fit on our actual bodies.

This is a problem with the Druid class as well, but at least one of the Druid's four specs gets to use their primary form. Evokers just cannot show off their nice duds.

I also might have liked to see a beefier version of the Dracthyr - I realize that there's a certain adolescent boyishness to needing always to have hulking muscle-bound characters, and especially given that the Dracthyr are all basically spellcasters, it kind of makes sense. I guess I had just thought that if we were going to get WoW's take on D&D's Dragonborn, we'd get something more akin to the Drakonid, who of course got an updated model in Dragonflight (and unlike a lot of model updates, this one looks like it was rebuilt from the ground up).

Now, that said, I'm very happy with the change to their racial ability, Soar, that now lets them simply fly with all the same mechanics as normal Skyriding. My Dracthyr looks very cool when he's flying around on his own wings. And while the ability does have a 10-second cooldown, it's one that I barely ever even notice because I think the cooldown starts not when you land, but when you first take off.

Looking again at Devastation, I am curious to see if we'll see some complications added to the rotation. Even counting their Dragonwrath cooldown, there's only like 8 buttons to push (ok, 9 if we add Deep Breath, which feels only worth using on big packs of enemies) in the core rotation - with all other abilities being situational. This... honestly might be fine. There are some specs (Enhancement, for example) that sometimes feel like they have too many buttons to worry about (it's difficult when I have both Crash Lightning and Ice Strike in the same build because I've historically put them on the same keybind).

While I still hold out hope that Demon Hunters could eventually become available to other races (though I'm not holding my breath, and honestly I'm attached enough to my Night Elf DH that I wouldn't want to change him) I really cannot imagine Evokers ever being available to any other race, which makes them even more exclusive than the Vanilla-to-Wrath Druids (interestingly, Paladins were also only available to two races in vanilla, but that got doubled in BC with Blood Elves and Draenei, the former also introducing the class to the Horde for the first time. What did Horde groups do when they found intellect on plate back in the day? I mean, I know that all the stats did something for every class back then, but intellect was still only very marginally useful, helping your weapon and armor skills level up faster - a concept that must sound utterly alien to anyone who started playing WoW in the last decade).

I have not been keeping up nearly at all with any of the War Within beta stuff, so I don't know how Hero Talents will affect the class, but I'm eager to see how the class will evolve. The Death Knight underwent some huge changes after its first introduction (when initially pitched, Frost was actually presented as the tanking spec, Blood being a sort of PvE DPS spec, and Unholy was the utility/pvp spec. Then, during Wrath, all three specs could be built as both tanks and DPS. As a relic of the original intent, the "tank stance," was Frost Presence. By the end of Wrath, most DK tanks were going Blood and Frost was considered better at DPS, so you ironically had a lot of Blood DKs in Frost Presence and Frost DKs in Blood Presence. It was in Cataclysm that they killed Frost and Unholy tanking and Blood DPS. Also, you had specific types of runes - two blood, two frost, and two unholy, which would be used for different abilities. They massively simplified the class in... I want to say Legion?)

The Augmentation Evoker Needs Some UI Love

 In an unprecedented move, 10.1.5 introduced a new specialization for a class in the middle of an expansion. The only time we've ever seen a class gain a new specialization before was in Mists of Pandaria, when the new (now-defunct) talent system required Feral Druids to be split into two specs (for those who started playing afterward, Druid Tanks used to also be Feral, but would choose different talents to ensure that they had the survival in Bear form to effectively tank).

The Evoker - itself only introduced this expansion - began similarly to the Demon Hunter, having a single DPS spec and a single non-DPS spec. The Demon Hunter had been introduced in 2016 with only two specs out of a desire to concentrate all the iconic Demon Hunter abilities into the specs people would play - they said that they didn't want to do a ranged DPS spec for them because they felt that Havoc would have to lose Eye Beam to give it to the ranged spec.

But given how long development on these things take, there's no way that Augmentation wasn't in the works from the start. My theory was that they were still ironing out the kinks in it by the time they had to have things ready for launch, and rather than have another Azerite Armor situation on their hands (a feature that didn't make it to the Beta until mere weeks before Battle For Azeroth launched, and proved to be a headache for the rest of the expansion - arguably one of the worst mechanics in WoW history, which is why you don't even get it anymore when you level up through BFA content) they instead chose to tinker at it until they felt it was presentable, which wound up happening after Dragonflight's second raid tier had already come out.

On top of that, and probably the reason why it took them so long to figure it out, Augmentation is weird.

Now, in the past, a lot of classes/specs were built around buffing allies. DPS Shamans used to get a lot of their utility out of totems that buffed their parties (back in BC, Bloodlust/Heroism only affected those in your party, so high-end raiders wanted to have a shaman in each group within the raid - and Time Warp and other variants wouldn't come in until later). Paladins also used to have to distribute Blessings across all the different classes (I don't recall when Greater Blessings came about - these would put the buff, either to attack power or mana regeneration, or if you were specced for it, some other blessings, on everyone in the raid of the same class, and last a whopping 30 minutes, but consumed a reagent, so when I was raiding in Wrath of the Lich King, I'd always restock up to 200 Symbols of Kings before heading out to ICC so I wouldn't run out of them).

But even then, there was still a sense that the main power of DPS specs like Enhancement was meant to be their own damage output.

Augmentation is different.

Secondhand, I've heard stories about Augmentation Evokers being kicked from groups because of their low DPS. And yes, the damage Augmentation does itself is definitely lower than Devastation, the Evoker's more conventional DPS spec. On the raiding target dummy in Valdrakken, my Evoker can put out something like 57k dps with an item level of 409 or something (with full tier set bonus.) That puts it ahead of a lot of dps specs at that item level (my poor Demonology Warlock, at about the same gear level, is like mid-40ks). But my Augmentation Evoker has to push really hard and nail the rotation to get to like 30k dps.

But, of course, that's not their point.

Through buffs like Ebon Might (that one most of all,) Augmentation significantly boosts the damage of their allies. By how much? That's hard to tell. And that's part of the issue.

Damage meters - the addons like Recount that allow you to determine how much damage you're pouring out - don't know how to handle the contribution that Augmentation Evokers are providing. What we see instead is that the allies who are benefiting from the Evoker are doing significantly higher dps.

Other systems, like Warcraft Logs, have managed to find a way to show their contribution, and it turns out that, if you count the extra damage that the Evoker is providing to its allies as its own rather than the allies', it actually looks like Augmentation might be the best DPS spec in the game currently.

I'd even consider that Blizzard might aim to keep them that way - certainly some players will enjoy the novelty and just the rotation of the spec, but I think if Augmentation was only on-par with other DPS specs, players might be turned off from it.

Balancing specs has always been a huge challenge, but I think Blizzard has made the challenge even greater with Augmentation. Granted, I really respect a big swing.

Aesthetically, also, I actually love Augmentation. My favorite of the five main dragonflights is the Bronze one (I've always been obsessed with time travel) and I was bummed that Devastation really focused more on the Red and Blue ones, leaving Green and Bronze to the healers (every now and then I tell myself I'm going to try playing a healer, and then I get stressed out just thinking about it and remind myself that I play lots of tanks, so I'm still making queues shorter for people that way). Augmentation focuses on Black and Bronze (though admittedly more Black,) and I really dig the erupting earth and sands of time aesthetics to it.

What I'm hoping - and I have very little sense of what this would entail - is that Blizzard can find a way to make it easier for add-on makers to track the contributions that Augmentation is making. We do see in the in-game UI little orange numbers that I assume are meant to represent the greater damage our allies are doing because of our Ebon Might, but I don't know if damage meters are able to parse that.

The spec is very new, of course, so I'm hopeful that such changes will make it in.

Until then, I'll have to kind of remain faithful that when I play my Evoker in Augmentation spec, I'm making a good contribution to the group.

Finally Figuring Out the Evoker (Devastation)

 For I believe over a month now, the "Dragonflight Beta" has been open for everyone to create a level 70 Dracthyr Evoker, though you can't actually do stuff in the Dragon Isles.

Getting dumped into a level 70 class, especially with the new, complex talent system, can be a little difficult. But I've started to figure out how this thing works, at least at its most basic level.

The Devastation spec is the Evoker DPS spec, and thus likely to be the more popular of the two.

While you have mana as a resource, much as most casters (other than Arcane Mages) do these days, you don't really need to worry about it. Instead, you'll track a different resource: Essence. This takes the form of six little spheres below your mana bar, and actually works similarly to a Death Knight's runes (I haven't confirmed if it does the thing where only three can recharge at a time, but I believe it does). Essence regenerates over time, and so the rhythm here is that of alternating powerful spenders with filler spells.

Your bread-and-butter single target filler is Living Flame. This is actually both a damage and healing spell, depending on who you're targeting. It has a relatively short cast time and there are talents that will cause it to sometimes be instant-cast.

For cleave situations, there's Azure Strike, which is instant-cast and hits three targets. I believe there are times when you want to use this even in single target, though that's more of a strategy thing than an explicit design.

Both Living Flame and Azure Strike have talents that are triggered by them called Essence Burst, which make Disintegrate and Pyre free.

Your main single-target Essence spender is Disintegrate, which costs three Essence and channels a beam of destructive energy at the target.

For multiple targets, you can spend Essence on Pyre, which lobs a ball of fire at the target and splashes to hit anyone nearby. Like Azure Strike, this is instant-cast.

Eternity Surge is one of your main Empowered spells - you hold down the button (or hit it quickly once and then again to set it off) to scale it between levels 1 to 4. The levels of empowerment here actually only determine how many targets it hits, so on single targets, there's no reason to charge it up all the way. This does a big burst of arcane damage, and I think picks targets based on proximity. This has a 30-second cooldown, so you'll weave it in when it's up.

Fire Breath is another Empowered spell, and this one works kind of interestingly - it does a burst of fire damage in a cone and then puts a DoT on creatures it hits. However, charging it doesn't simply increase the damage. Instead, the longer you charge it, the more damage it does up front, and the shorter the DoT lasts. Essentially, it does the same amount of damage at any level of empowerment (or possibly slightly more at a lower empowerment) but you can pick between sustained damage or burst. On trash, for instance, you might choose to go for a full empowerment to burst enemies down quickly, but on a boss you might pick instead to do a low empowerment to keep the DoT ticking longer.

Dragonrage is your big 2-minute cooldown ability, and buffs your damage, while also doubling the chance to get the Essence Burst proc, and also shoots off several Pyres to start with.

Deep Breath is another 2-minute cooldown, which both does damage in the area and moves you to the targeted location, in a cool animation that has you do the classic dragon breath-strafe.

There are other abilities, but I think these are the basics you'll be using frequently and want easily accessible on your action bars.

Of note, Evokers don't get the 40-yard range of most ranged characters, instead fighting at 25 yards. This will make movement and positioning that much more important. Thankfully, your AoE abilities are mostly instant-cast, so you'll be able to keep up with the tanks and melee on a fast-moving dungeon run.

The nuances of various talents and passives, and other, more niche abilities are something I'll have to get more experience with the class in order to talk intelligently about it.

Getting a Sense of the Devastation Evoker

 Dragonflight will be giving us WoW's 13th class, which is also limited to the new playable race, the Dracthyr, and, in a far more unusual move, the Dracthyr will only be able to play as Evokers. One of the odd upshots of this is that the line between "racial ability" and "class ability" is seriously blurred. Blizzard has floated the idea that Dracthyr might have access to other classes in the future, but it's not confirmed.

Evokers have two specs - presumably following the logic of the Demon Hunter, where there's just a spec per role. Devastation will be the Dracthyr DPS spec, which makes them a ranged spellcasting damage dealer... though their range is not what you typically see.

Typically, at least in the past several expansions, ranged classes have been able to fight from 40 yards away from their targets, with Marksmanship Hunters gaining a little extra range thanks to their Mastery. Evokers, however, at it looks like this is true for both damage and healing spells, tend to have a 25-yard range.

This means they have to get significantly closer to their targets to affect them. Indeed, it can be a little misleading if you think purely in terms of distance - one of the major benefits of being at range means that you have a much larger area of targets you can hit (or, alternatively, a much larger area for you to be able to stand and still hit a target). Using some Middle School math, a 40-yard range means that you are covering a 5,027 square-yard circle. If your range drops to 25 yards, the area you can hit drops to 1,963 square yards, meaning you've got less than half the area you could cover before.

Range can be very important to allow you to stay on targets and not have to move (ranged classes are also typically forced to stand still more thanks to casting times and channeled abilities). The larger the area you can stand in, the easier it is for you to find a safe spot to be.

Thus, this is clearly a challenge being built into the Evoker - you're ranged, but positioning will be a more significant challenge for you than, say, a Warlock.

However, I also think that some of the design is being built with this in mind. Right now, I only have lists of spells and abilities, and don't have a great sense of what the "rotation" looks like, but it appears that Devastation will, like many classes, have a mechanic revolving around building up and spending resources.

That resource is Essence - you'll have spells like Azure Strike, which is an instant-cast spell with, I believe, no cooldown, that deals Spellfrost damage to a target and another nearby one. This is likely a filler ability, and I believe will help to build up Essence.

Then there are a smaller number of spells that spend Essence to do larger amounts of damage.

Only a handful of Devastation abilities actually have cast times - many have relatively short cooldowns and might cost Essence.

A few abilities, though, have a new mechanic - these are special channeled spells that allow you to either hold down the button or press it once to start charging and again to shoot it off (not being able to play I can't tell you which - though my instinct is that the latter would be somewhat more lag friendly) and will have varied effects based on how long you charge - like DoTs that last longer, cleave abilities that hit more targets, or just generally things doing more damage.

Deep Breath appears to be a big damage ability that also functions as a movement ability - you pick a direction and a distance, and then you fly over the area breathing fire on the region and land at your destination.

One thing of note is that it seems that the spells and abilities you have are often categorized by which dragonflight they're attached to. Devastation abilities have a number of Blue and Black spells, along with some Red, while I think that the Preservation Evoker - the healing spec - focuses more on Green and Bronze, along with, I'd assume, Red.

As with any expansion that brings a new class, I'm very eager to try it out. After my paladin main, my Death Knight and Demon Hunter are my next-most-played classes, and I think new classes can breathe a lot of fresh air into the game.

The Evoker looks like it should feel new and different, which is always welcome.

Looking into the Dracthyr Evoker

 So, a bit like Mists of Pandaria, Dragonflight will be giving us a new neutral race and a new class. While this meant, in 2012, that most people made a Pandaren Monk, there was nothing preventing you from making, say, a Pandaren Shaman or a Dwarf Monk.

Dragonflight will actually enforce that "new race and new class" build, as Dracthyr will only be able to be Evokers and all Evokers will be Dracthyr.

Honestly, I felt pretty good about every announcement for Dragonflight (maybe get back to me on the "quality" of profession-produced items) but this... leaves me a bit skeptical. Like, I think the natural pattern for a new race and a new class is going to be that most players do both with a single character. But in the ten years since Mists came out and Monks have been around for five expansions, over time that default race/class combo kind of dissipated into players picking up what they wanted.

I'm generally in favor of letting players play the kind of character they feel like playing. I'm still kind of shocked that after we had two Night Elf Paladin champions in Legion, that's still not a player option (I mean, how could you not imagine some Night Elves wanting to get a bit of Retribution for Teldrassil?)

The finer details on Dragonflight are scarce. I think I tend to agree with Taliesin over from Taliesin & Evitel that this expansion is probably a long ways off. Expansions are usually announced a year before they come out, roughly, and this one has some tantalizing ideas but not a ton that got showed off.

But I wanted to make this post specifically about the new class, which is part and parcel with the new race.

Actually, I think this is the surprising element of it: that Dracthyr can't be other classes. With the precedent of the Demon Hunter, I can see that Blizzard is willing to restrict some classes to only a single race option per faction - which is a pretty big reversal of the race/class option expansions we got in, for example, Cataclysm (yes, there was a time when Humans couldn't be Hunters... for some reason). Before Cataclysm, if you wanted to play a Druid, you could only be a Night Elf if you were Alliance or a Tauren if you were Horde. With the addition of Worgen and giving Druids to Trolls, no class was restricted that way.

Obviously, we have yet to get a really strong sense of what the Dracthyrs' whole deal is - apparently they were created by Neltharion (we don't know if it was pre- or post-corruption, though I'd assume the former because A: they use his original name and B: one would think the Dracthyr would be corrupted by Old God nastiness if it was post-corruption).

But I could definitely imagine these dragon-people taking on various established classes like Warriors, Mages, Priests, etc. Apparently not, though.

The Evoker fits into the exact niches that it seemed any new class should take. They wear Mail and can serve as ranged dps or healers. This actually makes them the first post-vanilla class in the game that cannot be a tank, and it also marks the first ever addition of a ranged dps spec.

Evokers' spells are all dragon-themed, and often built around the idea of the five Dragonflights. Apparently Devastation, their dps spec, will focus on the Red and Blue flights, while Preservation, the healing spec, will focus on the Green and Bronze flights. (Maybe the Black flight's near-extinction is why they're less of a deal).

One of the most interesting aspects of the class (no pun intended) is that there's a new type of input they're playing with: being able to hold down a key to charge an ability. In fact, this reminds me a lot of Elden Ring, where some spells can be charged up to do more damage, hit more targets, or go farther.

We saw a few spells, including one that has us take a Deep Breath like Onyxia and fly over targets, breathing dragonfire down on them.

Like the true dragons, Dracthyr will have their true, draconic form, and a "visage" form that looks like a sort of draconic elf - not unlike the humanoid forms the aspects take, but with draconic scales and horns and such. The eyes are somewhat more human-like than the Blood/Void elf models whose skeleton they clearly share, with visible irises and pupils.

While we got nothing in the way of specifics, the new dragonflying mechanics for the expansion (which will be a sort of more interesting take on flying mounts - in theory) it seems that Dracthyr might interact with this feature in a different way - I suspect by flying on their own wings.

Like the Pandaren, the Dracthyr will have a faction-neutral starting experience, at the end of which they choose one faction or the other. However, story-wise, at least, this choice is presented less as a huge philosophical decision and more of a practical choice - the plot is going to actually set aside the faction conflict, and in fact the beginning of the expansion is a joint Alliance/Horde expedition to the newly rediscovered Dragon Isles.

Evokers, and thus Dracthyr, are a hero class, meaning that the starting experience should spit you out at a level to start the main adventure with established level 60 characters. Also, like the Demon Hunter, these will be available in the pre-expansion patch so that players can get a feel for the class.

I tend to love a new class - my Death Knight and Demon Hunter are my two primary alts after the Paladin. So, this to me is the most important and exciting feature that the expansion could have. Again, I do have to wonder a bit about the wisdom of making the race and class options so profoundly limited, and wonder if that restriction could be loosened in future expansions, or if it's kind of set in stone.

Even though I will generally default to any opportunity to make a blue player character (it's one of the reasons I love the Draenei so much) I'm feeling a strong urge to make a Bronze Dracthyr, given how much I love the Bronze flight.

But we'll see. Ooh, and I guess I've got to throw a new class tag into the blog labels.