A Look Back at Preservation Evoker in Dragonflight & War Within Wishlist – Editorial

With the sun setting on Dragonflight and The War Within on the horizon, our Preservation Evoker Writer, Voulk, offers a retrospective highlighting Preservation’s journey in Dragonflight and shares their hopes for the spec’s next evolution with a War Within Wishlist.

Preservation Retrospective: There and Back Again

Preservation has been a fantastic spec to play through Dragonflight and while it’s a little awkward to play in some places I’ve enjoyed my experience with it a lot overall. Let’s have a look back over the expansion and the full circle we ended up taking from a reversion-heavy build to not pressing it at all and then back again.

Late Beta: The Dream Breath spec
Late Beta saw a ton of Preservation changes in a short time and the dominant build changed about 4 times in 2 weeks. We saw some of the following:

• Dream Breath used to have a lower cooldown at higher ranks and no in-built HoT, so if you cast only rank 4s you’d be able to cast it once every 10 seconds! It was a turret like playstyle where you didn’t move much and did 70% of your healing via Dream Breath. It was soon after reworked to the current, much smoother version.
• Next, Lifebind was adjusted to bind you to more than one target at once, but worked on external healing. The best play you could make as a team was to have your other healers heal the Evoker and Lifebind that out to the raid. Thankfully this was changed right before launch but the now unrestricted Lifebind was still dominant early in Season 1.

Echo lost its cast time and Temporal Anomaly was completely re-imagined from a heal orb to an Echo spreading absorb. All extremely positive changes and the spec went live in a fun (and overpowered) state.

Season 1: Vault of the Incarnates & an M+ Surge
After I called our utility underwhelming during Beta, the expansion opened with Vault of the Incarnates and a two-Evoker hard requirement on Mythic due to Rescue being essential for Raszageth. Thankfully we were more than a little overturned and double Preservation comps were very common. Spell hooks like Golden Hour and Lifebind didn’t scale down with Echo strength and so the tier was dominated by abusing these two hooks wherever possible. It didn’t matter too much that we had a weak tier set (we’ll revisit this later) because the spec itself was very strong.

In Mythic+ we were one of only two healing specs that could handle high-end healing checks and so we saw a lot of play early on as a result. We also brought very competitive DPS, a mainstay of the spec through the expansion in the Mythic+ space. Similarly to Raid we heavily abused spell hooks like Lifebind.

Season 2: Aberrus & the Blossom resurgence
With Lifebind and Golden Hour now nerfed we refocused our ramp-based playstyle around Spiritbloom instead in tandem with an incredibly strong set bonus that gave us a HoT for 40% of its healing. Our rotation was quite fixed around wide Echo ramps with Temporal Anomaly that we’d consume every 20 seconds. This format of mini ramp power was both very satisfying and strong. Halfway through the season we also got some blossom buffs in both power and usability and it became a second competitive build – shining particularly on fights like Rashok that were very stacked.

In Mythic+ we performed fairly well with a reversion-heavy playstyle until patch 10.1.5 which overbuffed Paladin by about 40% and replaced all healing slots in Mythic+ until the end of the season.

Season 3: The Fall?
I love the season 3 Preservation playstyle and associated tier set. I have the freedom to play both Blossom or Echo on every fight in the raid and there’s infinite depth to explore in terms of min-maxing. Funnily enough, this season has also seen the least Preservation representation in both content types. Kind of a combined result of mid-tier throughput, poor general tuning and the existence of Augmentation (discussed further below). The spec is in a weird juxtaposition of being more fun than ever yet barely played.

The Range Issue

Throughout the Dragonflight beta, I wrote about how a limited range on a healer wouldn’t be very enjoyable to play and how the only real way to balance it would be to overtune every other aspect of the kit. So, 18 months in, how did the limited range play? Not very well. Vault of the Incarnates was fine but we were heavily overturned and Rescue was required for Mythic Razsageth. Any notion that fights would be designed around us was getting shaky by Aberrus and gone completely by Amirdrassil. Fights like Nymue, Tindral, and Fyrakk are extremely punishing for a limited-range healer and throughout progression, there are many moments through each fight where you can’t reach people in danger and have no way of changing that since the precise movements of the fights prevent you from using any mobility to close gaps. Some fights even go out of their way to stop you trying to play a limited range mobile healer. Nymue has big lines that’ll debuff and eventually kill you if you move through too many.

M+ only fares a little better with fights like Ancient Protectors, Kyrakka, Raging Tempest, and more being very frustrating – particularly in less organized groups. Playrates plummeted quickly from being the most common pick in Vault to the least-played healer in Amirdrassil. Healers like Mistweaver have better utility, way more healing and aren’t arbitrarily hamstrung so why bring the disadvantaged lizard instead? As it happened I played it anyway since I enjoyed the spec a lot despite the range but the spec will have a much brighter future if they focus the identities of the spec elsewhere. Experimentation can be valuable in a game with as long a history as WoW but this one can safely be filed under “didn’t work”.

Preservation & Talents

10.2.5 made some pretty nice strides for improving the general usefulness of a lot of Preservation nodes but it’s still one of the oldest trees at this point and it has started to creak in a lot of places. We have some of the least useful nodes across the game and the general structure resembles a lot of other early trees that eventually got a revamp. Let’s have a look:

Dead Nodes
Time of Need
Time of Need is an awkward emergency heal on a long cooldown. If someone drops low then it’ll Verdant Embrace them and then spam Living Flame. This inherited a lot of the issues guardians can sometimes have – they don’t scale with our mastery properly and the Living Flame they cast never benefitted from the many Living Flame buffs we got through the expansion. As a result it’s a poor life saving tool deep in the tree.

Erasure
Gaining a second charge of Rewind is ok on paper for niche scenarios where all of the healing you care about is concentrated in one short area of the fight. Unfortunately a 50% reduction to Rewinds power means that it can’t fill its role as a decent healing cooldown regardless so you end up just never taking the talent.

Low Value Nodes in Powerful Positions
In general there’s an expectation that nodes toward the bottom of the tree are the most powerful and this holds pretty well for most healing specs. Preservation is the opposite, outside of our capstones our tier 3 nodes are some of our weakest and we often don’t even maximize the number of points we drop down there. It’s severe enough that you could completely replace most of the section with few complaining.

Energy Loop
It’s rather unfortunate that the “mana restore” talent lets you turn an essence burst into a 7200 mana gain when you could simply spend that burst on a 13k+ mana spell instead without paying a talent point for the privelege. Energy Loop does see some play in M+ – mostly owing to the minor single target DPS gain it offers but it wouldn’t be overpowered for Disintegrate to simply deal 20% more damage in exchange for this talents removal.

Power Nexus
There’s nothing wrong with Power Nexus necessarily, but as the expansion progressed a greater and greater amount of our essence spend comes from Essence Burst so gaining +1 essence is a very weak bonus. This is exacerbated by its position in the bottom of the tree. It’s a quality of life node and barely qualifies as that. It only really sees play as Blossom builds because the two talents next to it somehow do even less than “minor quality of life”.

Punctuality
Another fine quality of life talent, except this is in a key gate position and the bottom right third of the tree is locked behind it. These “barely quality of life” nodes could be made baseline or moved to an expanded first section of the tree.

Pathing Issues
The Middle Column
A big part of how restrictive our tree can feel is the center column. Lifegivers Flame isn’t very strong and LIfeforce Mender is great but in a DPS niche only. As a result for all but the most DPS enthused you end up with a dead column right in the middle of the tree that you have to awkwardly path around.

Key Nodes Pushed to the Side

Related to the above point, your strongest throughput nodes like Temporal Anomaly and Emerald Communion are pushed toward the side and without consulting a guide it isn’t obvious just how powerful these nodes are. Many a newbie player is seen without them and then immediately gains 15% throughput upon minor coaching. These could be much more central. Together they also form the powerful Emerald Communion Lifebind combo but to pick up the pieces you need for the combo you’re in three completely different parts of the tree.

Capstone Restrictions
A sign of how old the tree has become, every capstone has only one way to path to it. Our capstones are also stronger than a lot of healing specs, representing 10%+ healing each in a lot of cases. They generally fixed this issue on most other healers and added 2 or even 3 ways to path to every key node. A funny side effect is that through the expansion we sometimes took nodes below capstones even when they gave us 0 healing or damage.

The Class Tree
The class tree mostly works for us, though you have no real flex points and as a result a lot of quality of life type nodes are just impossible to ever take: Recall, Tailwind, Extended Flight and the list goes on. The mix of throughput and utility nodes tends to just leave you taking all of the throughput nodes. Class trees would maybe be more effectively if there was less of an emphasis on throughput. Notably some of the nodes are better than even spec tree talents with Lush Growth, Panacea, Bountiful Blossom and Leaping Flames all representing very big throughput increases.

Talent Successes
I’m fairly critical of our tree overall but it has also succeeded in a few ways that should be mentioned:

• Successfully hosted both a distinct Blossom and distinct Echo build for two of the three tiers.
• Decent distinction between optimizing DPS and healing in Mythic+.

Augmentation

The surprise release of Augmentation in 10.1.5 was a rough time for Preservation. In raid, it didn’t matter all that much since there are a lot of raid slots and while raid buffs are still key there’s still room to bring a few good players playing whichever spec they’d like. In Mythic+ though, Augmentation all but replaced Preservation in a lot of groups. Preservation went from being the second-most-played healing spec in season 1 to dead last in season 3. Now a lot else happened over the expansion but nothing was quite as damaging as the release state of Augmentation. Releasing in a half patch instead of a full one was a poor excuse for the obvious tuning errors and season 2 of Mythic+ in general became a nightmare unless you played 1 of exactly 5 specs. Preservation still has a decent toolkit for Mythic+ with excellent healing and very good damage on top of a decent utility kit – particularly Zephyr and Twin Guardians but none of it is essential and most groups just opted to run healing specs that could do more at a higher power level like Holy Paladin in season 2.5 and a slightly large mix now.

Augmentation also harmed the ability to measure your performance via logs. A multitude of bugs, including some big ones affecting heal over time effects, continue to persist to this day – months after release. This also resulted in Augmentation getting hurried changes every few weeks and Preservation changes became rare. This particular form of support-type gameplay hasn’t been a very good fit for WoW and I have pressing concerns about getting even more of it in War Within. The Lightsmith Paladin tree is an even worse format for similar types of buffs and even our Chronowarden tree gets a little bit of it.

Topics of Interest for The War Within

Stat Balance: Mastery too good, Haste not good enough

Back in the Dragonflight Beta we were certain our current Mastery scaling was just a placeholder. It never changed. As a result it’s an incredibly powerful stat that we stack through diminishing returns. This does happen pretty commonly across the game: haste for Resto Druid / Discipline Priest, frequently crit for Holy Paladin, mastery for Augmentation and the examples go on. The downside is it does restrict gear a little bit by nearly requiring it on pieces that drop and opening up a large healing gap for players who would like to focus on damage since Mastery offers none. Its most direct comparison is Holy Paladin mastery, so let’s see how they compare:

• Evoker: 100 rating required for +1% mastery. 85-90% uptime.
• Paladin: 120 rating required for +1% mastery. 85-90% uptime.

Mastery is a very good stat for Holy Paladin healing and so the fact that Evoker mastery is even better is remarkable. Design wide I enjoy our mastery a lot. It adds extra value to keeping yourself healthy and you sometimes play around it in interesting ways like bouncing Spiritbloom off yourself. It’s just a little overtuned.

Haste on the other hand goes the other way. We have some haste hooks through the kit like cooldown reduction on Reversion and Temporal Anomaly, HoT scaling on Dream Breath and essence recharge scaling. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t add much healing and it especially doesn’t add much mana efficiency which is very relevant in most raids. We also rely a lot on medium cooldown spells that don’t benefit outside of minor cast speed increases like Spiritbloom. We even have an anti-haste synergy in the Reversion extension cap that reduces Grace Period uptime the more haste you have.

This is a more difficult problem to fix and specs with poor haste scaling like Resto Shaman often stay in that state for a long time. I very much doubt it’s a goal of the developers for each spec to have perfectly identical secondaries but right now haste lacks a clear niche to the point where it’s just avoided entirely if possible.

Spell Hook Explosion

In season 4 with our tier set, Reversion, our HoT that self-extends will have the following “bonus effects”:

• 15% chance on cast for Essence Burst
• +15% healing to anyone with Reversion (not reduced by Echo strength).
• Will heal for 15% of the damage they took recently (reduced by Echo strength).
• Its healing is increased if you cast an Empower spell in the last 6 seconds.
• Each tick has a 2% chance to make your next Living Flame instant and do 20% extra damage or healing, stacking up to two times.

Very few of these appear in the Reversion in-game tooltip, but if they did it would look something like this:

Reversion isn’t the only spell that looks like this too. Spiritbloom is arguably worse and every Evoker ability is affected in some way. It makes it awfully unclear what role each is supposed to fulfill in your kit without reading through a guide (of which I have a good recommendation). It can also mean that the base function of a spell isn’t allowed to be tuned well because that would make it overpowered. It was telling to me that in 10.2.5 in an attempt to make Reversion a better button press they buffed everything except the healing it does. The spec plays very well right now but moving into The War Within we’re going to get another 15 talent points via Hero Talents and if they push further on this design of each spell doing 20 things then the spec will continue to be unapproachable for beginners.

The tight balance of Echo choice

Echo is by far one of the most interesting mechanics in the entire game. For people newer to Evoker or for Augmentation mains, here’s what it does: Echo puts a buff on the target and when you next use a healing spell it’ll consume all echoes across the group and cast an identical version of the spell on each of them. If you echo’d 10 targets and then cast Reversion then all 10 will get a Reversion. The strength of the cloned spell depends on the strength of the Echo and we have a few talents that can vary this like Temporal Anomaly and Timelord.

The spell opens up a lot of choice over what to consume your Echoes with. In a perfect game, you’ll make dynamic choices through a fight. Need a long duration HoT? Consume with Reversion. Handling sharp burst damage? Consume with Verdant Embrace. This also makes it a very delicate spell to balance because if any of the spells you can consume it with are themselves overtuned then your decision-making gets replaced with “just use spell X”. We saw this in season 2 with the 2pc Spiritbloom HoT making it an overwhelmingly correct choice and pushing out all other spells. In Amirdrassil we’ve seen maybe the best version of this playstyle yet and in a typical pull I might echo 3 different spells.

They should continue to pay the same attention to Echo choice since from what we’ve seen of Chronowarden so far we might be headed back to a season 2-esque Spiritbloom domination. Still fun to play, but far less dynamic. Echo-based Evoker builds are some of the most fun you can have in healing and I hope they approach the decision carefully.

The War Within Wishlist

I’m always a little cautious around making suggestions because it’s my role to point out things I’d like improved rather than tell the developers how to fix them. So this is my list of things I’d like improved in a concise list:

• Longer range on non-breath healing spells and utility abilities. The short-range healer experiment failed.
• The talent tree needs a refresh focused on pruning unused talents and adding new ones. Key bottlenecks before Capstones should be expanded. The center of the tree shouldn’t focus on niche damage talents.
• New spells should be considered when adding effects rather than attaching them all to three spells. Clear spell identities should be preserved where possible.
• Every new or revamped spec probably doesn’t have to be released 30% overtuned and balance will be less topsy-turvy if this stops.
• Clear niches or playstyle differences between Chronowarden and Ruby Adept such that both have strong places in the Preservation ecosystem rather than one being numerically stronger than the other
• I know there are some technical limitations in the area but being able to use empowered spells while hovering would be a great improvement – Spiritbloom at the very least but ideally the two Breath spells too.
• Some form of choice node for Verdant Embrace so that I can harness the single target healing potential without flying through 5 bombs, 3 lines and a swirl on my way to the target.

Sending off Dragonflight

Preservation is the most beautifully strange healer I’ve ever played and I enjoyed playing and guide writing for it throughout Dragonflight. Its mix of “stand and deliver” AoE healing and frenetic movement is a blast and the technicalities of the spec give it endless min-max potential. It is difficult to add any spec – particularly a healer – to an older game without it feeling too similar to ones that already exist. Adding the Echo mechanic as a unique form of ramp was an excellent design and if carefully managed could carry the spec for years to come. The green blossom side was a little less unique but both visually and mechanically distinct and the spec has played very well by having multiple viable builds. The spec is visually distinct and beautiful and the sound effects are some of the best anywhere in the game. I think its identity is starting to cement itself and I’m excited to see where they take it in Season 4 and then The War Within.

This page is being updated and maintained by Voulk. Voulk is the author of healer blog Questionably Epic and created healer gearing & theorycrafting app QE Live and the Dungeon Tips addon. He is also a moderator in Dreamgrove and Wyrmrest Temple. If you have any questions you’re welcome to DM him on Discord at Voulk#1858.