Interview Highlights
As this is just a highlight, we may miss a few points. Be sure to watch the full interview for the full context of each question and answer!
Augmentation’s Initial Design
- Primary theme of Evokers is they’re made up of the magic of the 5 different dragonflights. Black was only represented in a few key spells, and we’ve never really seen a lot of pure black dragonflight magic which is significantly differently then all of the Shadowflame that we’ve seen in the past.
- Wanted to also expand on the Bronze time magic that’s really cool but Preservation only really scratched the surface.
- Saw a lot of support playstyle touches throughout the game’s history, but never really had the opportunity to fully commit to exploring that through an entire spec.
- Wanted to continue the story of the Dracthyr. Everything coalesced for them to create Augmentation.
- Creating a new DPS & Healer through Devastation and Preservation was more of a known quantity though they feel different than other healers, but Augmentation had a lot of questions that needed to be answered first. Delayed the specialization until those questions could be confidently answered and align with the continuing narrative of Dragonflight.
- Releasing mid-season also avoids a lot of interruptions to players and allows the combat team to dial in the tuning in a live environments with the entire playerbase engaged.
- Augmentation was not necessarily specifically planned for 10.1.5, but the development and story came together to be ideal.
Augmentation’s Learning Curve
- Major goal for Augmentation is for it to be incredibly approachable with a very high skill floor. As long as you’re hitting your core buttons you should contribute fairly significantly.
- Will likely be a perspective shift more than anything for damage dealers. Target audience is for more altruistic players which tends to be tanks and healers simply due to the role design.
WeakAura & Addon Dependency?
- Addon dependency will likely be based on the audience and type of player. Base UI has additional support elements to track some of these such as Ebon Might.
- Entry level shouldn’t need a lot of addons to be successful. Most things have built in or auto targeting to help.
- The more advanced you go where you want to specifically control the targeting and have perfect uptime, you might lean more on addons to help with that.
- Balancing act of providing a lot of information to players, while still keeping the length of tooltips in check and not overwhelming players.
Augmentation’s Tuning Challenges
- Tuning Augmentation in a variety of content can be challenging but there’s a lot of different tools available to help with that.
- PvP can be tuned independently and Augmentation does more direct damage in PvP relative to their buffs compared to PvE.
- Close as Clutchmates can be tuned easily and directly for 5-man content.
- Outlying metrics like key timers can be helpful for less experienced players.
- Damage meters will not attribute buff damage to the Augmentation Evoker, so it can be tricky if you’re wanting to see big numbers. Object should be to see your allies’ bars larger and them seeing even larger numbers.
Supplementing or Overlapping with Healers
- Not a goal that Augmentation replaces healers especially in Mythic+.
- Tried to have Augmentation’s buffs buff the healer rather than doing the healing themselves. You still need a healer to take advantage of those buffs.
- Very cognizant of that and an make further adjustments if that becomes a problem.
Combat Log Hooks & Addons
- Hooks are all in the Advanced Combat Logs, and results in additional lines of text showing how much additional damage is due to the Augmentation’s buff.
- Sites will then have control over how they present that data to players.
- In-game damage meters like Details will just attribute that damaged directly to the buffed players, so it’s a bit more difficult in-game to determine performance beyond seeing larger bars for your allies.
Power Infusion & Other Support Abilities
- Philosophical discussion ongoing about adding these combat log hooks to other support abilities like Power Infusion, Windfury Totem, Chaos Brand, etc.
- Generally, most of those other abilities are considered perks. Players are not tuned around those abilities so attribution doesn’t feel appropriate.
- Augmentation is replacing their own personal damage with these buffs so attribution is more appropriate.
- Power Infusion via haste is super complicated and technicalities of how we’d even implement and quantify attribution would require significant engineering resources that wouldn’t be guaranteed to be successful.
- Most of the combat log hooks are in-game and available on PTR. Final pieces still being worked on including ensuring pets attribute correctly.
Prescience Design & Implementation
- Determination of ability charges, duration, and cooldown is dependent on the goal for the ability and how it fits into the overall rotation.
- Charges help alleviate friction between procs, but not having them can also add tension and a level of skill and mastery for rotational abilities. Pacing also plays a large part.
- For Prescience, the 12s cadence is an intentional pacing on the rotation to remind the player they are a buff playstyle and support role. Felt like something was missing with only Ebon Might to manage.
- Prescience doesn’t have a lot of the other considerations that would make them want to add charges. It’s something they’ll continue to monitor as a point of potential friction.
Class Stacking Concerns
- Early on intention was to allow for multiple Augmentation Evokers in a group including 5-man content.
- Released mid-season to see exactly how big the delta is between less experienced players buffing their less experienced allies and more hardcore min-max players buffing their hardcore allies.
- Want the buffing your allies fantasy to really perform but in moderation.
- If the gap of multiple Augmentation is overwhelming then they’ll look to close that, but there’s not a specific design planned.
- Augmentation stacking pushing out more fringe DPS specs is a concern but they’re going to treat it like any other DPS spec in terms of damage and utility. It should not be a required spec and it is not a new role. It is just a damage dealer.
- Mastery: Timewalker nerf from 2 to 1 target was purely a tuning and playstyle change. Wanted to avoid having to offset Empower spells in order to buff the same players every time. Significantly more freedom with your Empower skill usage.
Solo Play & Warlocks
- Pick up Augmentation even if you’re a solo player. They approach the open world similar to tanks where they have significant survivability but rely a bit more on their AoE to clear faster.
- Augmentation also plays really well with other players who aren’t even in your party so try that out with the new Time Rifts coming in 10.1.5.
- Of all the races available for Warlocks including the ones coming in 10.1.5, Graham would still choose a gnome Warlock if he created one.
