We break down all the reasons you should consider playing Preservation Evoker in Patch 10.1 and even throw in a few reasons of why you might not. From all the changes since launch to the new tier set bonuses coming in 10.1, join us as we explore Dragonflight Season 2 Preservation Evoker!
Why You Should Play a Spec in Dragonflight Season 2 Series
Protection Warrior
Dragonflight Season 2 Evoker Tier Set
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Why You Should Play Preservation Evoker in Dragonflight Season 2 (and Why You Shouldn’t)
Preservation Evoker continues to try and find its place and identity in the game in Season 2. After running amok in season 1 as a powerhouse, its sophomore season should feel slightly more balanced – even if it’s still superb overall. You can look forward to a revamped playstyle with the tier set changeover, slightly new builds, and more of the same mobility and AoE burst healing that you might have enjoyed in season 1. You’ll continue to put powerful DoTs and HoTs out with Fire Breath / Dream Breath, Echo will remain a spec centerpiece and Spiritbloom will develop into an even stronger cast via our new tier set.
Healers are looking at least somewhat more balanced in season 2 so you’re unlikely to find you do 30% more healing than your friends, but with good play you should still be able to compete for the top and prove to be a very valuable addition to your group. You’ll find a lot to love in this incredibly unique spec.
| Why You Should | Why You Shouldn’t |
Why You Should Play Preservation Evoker in Dragonflight Season 2
Why should you bring a Preservation Evoker to Raid/Mythic+?
Huge healing output – Beneficiary of the 25% damage and health buff
The season 1 healing metagame was defined by the raw power Preservation brought to both raid and Mythic+. Early in the season it was one of the few specs that could even handle high key healing checks, and it was completely dominant in raid up until 10.0.7. With a very strong season 2 set bonus you can expect to continue your streak of doing a ton of healing. The stats might be a little less skewed in our favor than in season 1 but it’s still a clear spec strength.
We notably benefit a lot from the recent change to increase all incoming damage and stamina by 25%. We actually have a ton of talents and spells that scale with one of the two of those things and the end result is a net Evoker buff. Rewind and Golden Hour are more obvious examples, but Lifeforce Mender, Renewing Blaze, Twin Guardian and Emerald Communion also see power increases. The patch isn’t quite here yet and there’s a chance these get cut down before season 2 launch but for now they represent decent damage and healing increases. They also happen to be two of our strongest cooldowns which is even more valuable.
Unique Utility
Overall Evoker utility in raid is just ok. Blessing of the Bronze is easy to waste, Time Spiral is strategy dependent, Source of Magic is subpar and Fury of the Aspects is often already covered by other specs. However, what we do bring is also very unique. We saw with Mythic Razsageth that if Evoker utility is required then it’s really required. They’re unlikely to drop another mechanic like Hurricane Wind on us but Rescue, Zephyr and Time Spiral can be incredibly clutch in the right scenarios and with the last boss not tested it’s valuable to be able to cover those possible unknowns. This is particularly important this expansion where Blizzard might feel playing into Evokers strengths is most fitting.
In Mythic+ our utility is more consistently valuable. Being able to bring Fury of the Aspects as a healer gives your composition a lot more flexibility and Zephyr, Wing Buffet, Tail Swipe and Quell all see regular usage. Even sleep walk is occasionally useful.
The Role of Preservation in Raid
Preservation fits in as primarily AoE-based healer with very good tools for stacked raids and moderate flexibility for more spread raids. Our triage healing (single target healing on low HP allies) is very poor but we do have a few life savers in the very strong Time Dilation and Rescue (especially via Twin Guardian). We don’t regularly save people from mistakes through a fight but if someone is in a real jam then we’re very good at getting them out of it. Our very high throughput, as noted above, also reduces the amount of time people spend low to begin with.
Preservation is also very good at “ramping” or preparing for dangerous mechanics in advance and then hard countering them by cashing in our extensive setup. Temporal Anomaly -> 3-4 Echo casts -> Spiritbloom is a near full heal on half the raid with a similarly massive HoT on each of them for 10 seconds afterwards. Rewind is even more powerful and is a button press away from reversing a mechanic entirely. Few specs can match our burst healing, and the true highlight is that our most powerful combos have just 20-30 second cooldowns. Evoker is an amazing fit against bosses that hit the raid hard regularly like Magmorax and Rashok, and in Mythic+ Forgemaster Gorek among many others. We’re unrivalled in our frequency of big healing. When playing Preservation you’ll learn how many of your mini-cooldowns to commit to each instance of damage and you can find tune that in between pulls or dungeons. It’s very rewarding gameplay.
Extremely Strong Season 2 Preservation Evoker Tier Set
Our season 1 tier set offered a very nice damage increase, but paltry healing returns. You were usually looking at 6-7% across the two bonuses on fights where you played heavily into Reversion and much much less on Lifebind heavy fights like Broodkeeper Diurna. Our season 2 tier is quite a big step up and you can expect 15%+ from it at current tuning. It also unlocks a new version of the Echo-based playstyle that we played a lot in season 1. Spiritbloom already felt like a near party-wide full heal and now it’s also a huge heal over time effect. Not bad!
The minor downside is that we’ll want our new tier set ASAP which can add a little bit of turbulence during the first few weeks – particularly before the Revival Catalyst unlocks.
Rotation Evolution since Season 1
The season 1 rotation was very mobile since playing into Lifebind or Reversion can be done on the move and while Lifebind wasn’t very intuitive they were both very easy to fit into any raid or dungeon boss without a ton of extra thought. Your base rotation was a fairly straightforward:
With Dream Breath and Echo fitting in as valuable fillers. You had some interesting choice about how much you wanted to front load your healing but you could do much the same thing on every boss, just alternating which gameplay pattern you used.
In season 2 the spec gains a lot more complexity.
Both of the above “mini priority lists” are simplifications, but in general your rotation should feel much more involved than it did before. This can be a positive or a negative depending on your taste. You’ll also find you spend a lot more time hard casting and standing still than in season 1 since Spiritbloom becomes a centerpiece of your strategy and benefits from being empowered to rank 3 or 4.
High Mobility
We might be stuck standing still to cast for a portion of our rotation but we make up for it in what you could call “burst mobility”. Hover, Verdant Embrace, Zephyr, Time Spiral, Exuberance and Tailwind give us ample ways of getting across a battlefield extremely quickly. This is really valuable when you’re targeted by mechanics or when the raid is very spread out. Rescue even lets you share your mobility with a friend!
Why You Shouldn’t Play Preservation Evoker in Dragonflight Season 2
Limited Talent Tree Adjustments
The Preservation spec tree is the smallest among healers and feels extremely restrictive. I could write a full article on this, but some of the particular pain points are:
- Strong raid capstones (Cycle of Life) are gatekept by two pointers that don’t fit into the build at all (Grace Period)
- The last section of the tree where nodes should be most powerful is filled with quality of life or low throughput choices like Time of Need, Power Nexus, Timeless Magic, Erasure and arguably Energy Loop.
- The tree is so narrow and restricted that we’re only really offered the illusion of choice. The tree has three chokepoints at Call of Ysera, Lifebind and Punctuality. After we take the nodes we’re required to for pathing in the second section of the tree we’re left with only 1-2 extra points. Instead of making interesting, fight dependent choices for these we instead put them into sub 0.5% nodes or even quality of life like Flow State since there’s no alternatives nodes that are strong or even that offer utility.
- Newer players often fall into talents that look good at a glance but don’t actually offer much power like Exhilarating Burst and they’re not even losing much from it since there are so many other low value nodes in the tree. For a spec with green dragon and time magic themes, we could do with at least 3-4 new talents. The design space here is really interesting and I’d love to see what more they can come up with to add to the tree. Maybe we could even see an expansion of the splash of Red that currently fills the center of the tree.
- Our tree has a fairly strong DPS node in Lifeforce Mender but its position in the center of the tree effectively makes it a four cost node. In Mythic+ this doesn’t tend to be too big an issue since you’re ok dropping a lot of healing for it but in raid it’s too expensive to do so. Improving availability in the area would make it a much more interesting choice.
Limited Range
Vault was fairly kind to Preservations limited range, though it definitely got a little bit rough on Dathea, Raszageth and parts of Sennarth. It’s a bit more difficult to push for changes to spec downsides after a tier of overperformance but the range issue will continue to irritate more than it contributes to the playstyle. Tools that are supposed to make this easier like Verdant Embrace get you into trouble more often than they save you and while Hover is superb, it doesn’t cover empowered spells which represent most of our hard casts so we kind of lose our opportunity to heal on the move.
Lower DPS in Season 2
Our DPS in raid doesn’t matter all too much, but in Mythic+ it was quite a strength through season 1. A portion of this power came from our season 1 4pc bonus which we can’t realistically keep for another season. This was also a really nice quality of life bonus and instant Living Flames felt great. Given the lack of talent options mentioned above, this set bonus could be a good candidate for inclusion as a talent in season 2 (thought maybe in a slightly different format). Preservation would also benefit a lot from a slight rebalancing of our DPS spells:
- Our offensive essence spender, Disintegrate, requires two talents to be a minor and situational DPS increase over Living Flame.
- Azure Strike is sufficiently weak that we’ve mostly been using it to kill Explosives or when mobs are close to death. Given hitting a priority target is already more valuable than AoE damage, it could stand to deal more relative to Living Flame – particularly given it requires an investment in tier 3 node Protracted Talons to be castable at all.
The result is that we tend to be a two button spec right now which doesn’t leave us too many opportunities to learn and master this aspect of the spec. A slight rebalancing would give us twice as many keys to press and well over twice the decision making. A healer DPS rotation doesn’t need a ton of complexity, but in this era of the game we should expect more than pressing 10 consecutive Living Flames during downtime. The spec already has all spells it needs too – they just need some moderate tuning.
For more information on playing Preservation Evoker, please see our class guide updated for Dragonflight:
Preservation Evoker Guide
