General Guide to Preservation & Devastation Evoker Abilities

6 min read 0 0

One of the more intriguing additions of the upcoming Dragonflight expansion is a new class called Evoker. It’s directly tied to the new dragon-like playable race, the Drachtyr, so that only Drachtyr can be Evokers, and vice versa. This unlocks a unique playstyle, amplified by the Preservation and Devastation Evoker abilities.

They are the two specializations available to Evokers. One is a DPS route, and the other is a healing approach. Evokers have class powers that buff them and help save their allies. In the end, players get a versatile supportive class that is fit for any role in a fight but is best positioned as a healer or a damage dealer.

New Talents System

Before diving into the intricacies of the new class, it’s important to give a bit of a spotlight to the talent system. You see, it’s getting a massive update in the coming expansion, alongside the reworked Dragonflight professions system. Following the change, the talents will be divided into two trees: one for the class and one for the specialization.

The Evoker talents are a great showpiece of how that’ll work, considering that Blizzard has already shown the players what they look like. The talents are supposed to be a pair of branching pathways. You’ll be able to pick class and spec abilities on each new level and specialize your character in a fresh, nuanced way.

Class Abilities

The Evoker class tree offers several dozen abilities. They are too numerous to go over all of them, but you can catch up using this Dragonflight Evoker new class overview. Here, you can count on a generalized preview of what you’ll have to deal with. There are plenty of class abilities, but most can be divided into two categories.

One category is what you could call support abilities“. Naturally, you get some buffs that heal, shield from damage, and even restore mana. And the target isn’t just you — there are plenty of spells that assist your friends, as well. For instance, “Source of Magic” essentially shares your mana with a nearby ally.

This category includes Evoker abilities that showcase the effects of tying a class and a race to one another very well. One instance is the spell “Fly With Me”, which lets you fly to a friend, pick them up, and carry them while airborne to a selected location. Mind you, it’s not a racial skill, but a skill that can be selected or ignored later on.

The other category helps strengthen your spec abilities. There are four distinct types of spec spells. For instance, the blue dragonflight path unlocks a lot more frost magic. Now, if you plan to be a blue caster, you might select a neat passive early on. It will slow down any enemy that gets hit with a blue cast. Other such improvements are also available.

Of course, there are many other skills in the Evoker talent trees, which damage enemies directly or indirectly. Some will buff effects cast onto unfriendly mobs, while others just deal damage right on. That is to say, there is a lot of variety in these trees.

Drachtyr Racials

There are racial abilities, without which the Evoker gameplay would be a lot less exciting. Most notably, you can fly above ground for a while, which gives your character a sizeable mobility boost. What’s more, you can continue casting while airborne. It creates opportunities for many new class combos in Dragonflight.

Other abilities let you use your wings and tail to knock hostiles away or up, respectively. They disable certain enemies for a moment or, more importantly, interrupt a cast. You can move around the area as you please and interrupt spells whenever you want. Very helpful for the team effort.

Devastation

The first specialization on the menu isDevastation. Where class talents have utility value, spec spells are your main tools in each fight. The Evoker spec talents are mostly DPS-oriented powers. There is one tree, divided into two main directions: red and blue. As you might’ve guessed, they stand for fire and frost magic.

A lot of it comes down to breathing the respective element from long range using your very own mouth. The core difference between these two types of damage powers is how you target your enemies. Fire magic deals blasting damage to multiple enemies simultaneously, while spellfrost typically uses a more precise single target damage

Fire magic can deal plenty of damage to a group of hostiles, and the mobility that comes with the Evoker baseline abilities allows you to line up these spells perfectly. Frost magic is more about focusing on one or two specific targets and slowing them down in the process. Your mobility lets you pick on an enemy, slowly damage them, and drift away when they come near.

Devastation Mastery gives you a passive buff to damage output proportionate to the target’s remaining health. The more HP they got – the more damage your spells will do. You can do whatever you want with this information, but a good opening salvo by a Drachtyr seems like a good choice for boss fights.

Among the Evoker class specs, Devastation skills allow for constant damage done from the fringes of the battle. The Empower mechanic (also a new addition) lets you charge these spells up before releasing them, with 3–4 stages in a chargeable spell. The more you wait the more damage you do.

Preservation

source: Wowhead

There are two types of magic here: green and bronze. Green mostly specializes in the healing of multiple targets, while bronze spells buff specific or multiple allies via time manipulation. In many ways, Preservation Evoker abilities are just reversed opposites of Devastation powers.

Many green spells are just red spells with the opposite effect. For instance, both magic schools let you fly above your foes and spray magic over them. You can make a quick burst of healing in front of you, much like you’d do with fire. In this category, you’ll deal with many Drachtyr Evoker abilities of the AoE variety.

Bronze spells are more curious. Time dilation is what these skills are all about, and it means you can reduce the damage done to your allies and reverse it to fulfill essentially a healer’s role. What’s more, several bronze spells are used to temper with skill cooldowns — most notably, the mobility abilities of your friends.

Mastery of Preservation provides a passive that increases healing done to allies proportionate to how much health the caster has left. Fortunately, you have plenty of self-casts meant to keep you alive, making this skill pretty impactful. As such, the new class abilities in Dragonflight make it wise for Drachtyrs to stay behind the frontlines.

Preservation skills, in short, allow you to protect your allies from damage in one way or another. Where green skills have good old healing properties, bronze skills are more sophisticated. They basically give their targets more chances to live rather than outright mend them. See this Dragonflight class meta prediction to see how combining these could work out.

A Preservation caster is perfectly positioned to keep their allies alive, one way or another. You can invest in green or bronze, but you’ll still have plenty of skills from both directions, making it a fairly multifaceted experience. Not to mention, Empowering works for many Preservation Evoker spells WoW will add, as well.

0 likes 0 comments

Author:

Buran
36 articles
Tags:

Comments