Augmentation Evoker Design and Damage Attribution Interview with Warcraft Logs

We’ve summarized the talking points below, but a full transcript can also be found on articles.warcraftlogs.com.

Spec Design

• Graham is a part of the combat design team, which takes care of all character classes, PvP balance, and everything combat related – working closely with other teams such as encounter, quest Design, and content design; they build the monsters, while the combat team builds the tools to fight them.
• While working on Evoker prior to launch, one of the core concepts was using all five schools of draconic magic – Devastation primarily focused on red & blue, while Preservation used green & bronze, leaving black magic represented by only a couple core spells. The idea of exploring black dragon magic before it became synonymous with corruption and shadowflame was appealing, and they knew they still wanted to do more with bronze time magic. Putting those two ideas together led them in the direction of Augmentation.
• The idea of support playstyle is something that their team has been interested in exploring for awhile, as it has a unique playstyle and an audience that isn’t served very well by any of the existing classes/specs. Adding it as a mid-season update has particular advantages and is lower risk than “show up at launch and see what happens,” giving them time to answer various questions about how to balance and make it work in varying group sizes.
• Originally, the team experimented with a Beacon of Light type mechanic – marking a specific players to automatically receive all of the Evokers buffs over a period of time, since the goal was to make Augmentation very approachable, rather than spending a lot of focus on maintaining buffs on several different people. Several different buffs granting haste and overriding other player spells were tried, but the biggest change was from a single target to group-oriented design.
• An early version played more like a healer, watching raid frames to buff different people, but it wasn’t as approachable and had burden of knowledge issues of knowing who would be the best player to buff at any given time. Eventually that changed to the sort of automatic targeting seen today, and they’re really excited to see if players latch onto that concept and want it expanded to other spells in the game.
• Some of the new things done with Augmentation required extra support from engineering, UI, and art teams, such as the new floating combat text of Ebon Might or Prescience, displaying the amount of stats gained by the target in real-time. Making that work inside the existing floating combat text was important in order to give feedback to the Augmentation player, the same way other players would see traditional damage or healing numbers pop up on screen.

• Community perception and reaction is going to inform their decision to put any additional support specs in the game. Augmentation was a confluence of a bunch of things coming together, which would also have to be present to add a new class or spec – does it fit with the story being told? Does it align with future expansion storylines? It’s a pretty high bar. If they were going to, they’d probably add new specializations rather than change existing ones. Enhancement had some support playstyle in the past, but you play it today because you like lightning your weapon on fire, and pulling that out from under players is a pretty big ask.
• In terms of adding more support spells onto existing specs, that’s not a hard yes or no – the nice thing about Augmentation’s support playstyle is that you’re purposefully opting into it rather than having it added onto your existing role/spec. Chaos Brand and Mystic Touch are instead designed as perks not taking away from how the class is tuned; those players didn’t sign up for sacrificing their own performance to buff everyone else.
• There are a couple reasons for the lack of Haste buffs in the Augmentation kit. Initially they wanted to try it, because Haste is a very noticeable stat to most classes, but they ran into issues of damage attribution – Haste is a very complex stat, which isn’t as easily separated out as Crit, Versatility, or % damage done buffs. There are also already a lot of haste buffs in the game, and stacking too many of them can start to feel like they devalue one another. Numerically they may still be valuable, but they start to feel a bit samey. Instead, the team decided to explore more unique buffs that Augmentation could bring to the table.
• Balance was a big question when designing Augmentation, since it needs to play solo in the outdoor world, PvP in groups of 2-10, participate in 5 player dungeons, and raid with 10-30 players. They discussed a lot of options to make that work, but they ended up using variable target capping – Ebon Might hits four players, Prescience targets one and can be kept up on two, even the major Breath of Eons cooldown only really works on four additional players. They paper-designed a lot of raid-wide abilities, but it became a balancing problem without some kind of second Exhaustion debuff, encouraging stacking a lot of Augmentation Evokers, which didn’t feel very satisfying.
• Target capping solved this, covering most everyone in small group PvP or dungeon content, while still allowing room for multiple Augmentation Evokers in large group PvP and raids. This still created a question of effectiveness in dungeons vs raids though – Ebon Might prioritizes DPS, but a dungeon only has two other DPS alongside the tank and healer, which doesn’t create the same value as buffing four DPS in a raid – giving the healer primary stats may help survivability checks, but it isn’t fulfilling Augmentation’s main role as a DPS. That’s why they added the Close as Clutch Mates passive ability, increasing the effectiveness of Ebon Might and Breath of Eons outside of raid content. Right now it’s a 40% buff, to make sure that you still provide as much damage to a small group as another DPS would, but that number is very easy to tweak up and down once they get more data after Augmentation goes live.
• They also have PvP mode systems which have existed for awhile. In arena, Augmentation actually delas a fair bit more damage than they do in the open world, since their buff service is slightly less effective. You still want to cast and maintain those buffs, particularly for setting up burst windows, but PvP is a different beast than PvE, so it makes sense to balance them a bit differently.
• The advantage to releasing Augmentation mid-season is that it gives them time to evaluate its live performance outside of progression or the Race to World First. PTR testing is awesome and they really appreciate folks who participate and help find bugs, but the sample set is very limited compared to the full game. They’ll probably have to do some post-launch tuning, and that’s ok, it’s expected, but by the time they get to the new raid in Patch 10.2, they should have Augmentation already dialed in.
• On the high end, some players are probably going to really min-max Augmentation, and the team is excited to see what they’ll do with it – they already have some thoughts of what they might need to tweak or change if it gets too out of hand, but that’s the promise of Augmentation buffing others. Your knowledge of what they’re doing and their knowledge of what you’re giving them should have an impact on how well you and they perform.
• Opposite that, the team has done a lot to make Augmentation more approachable. Ebon Might is a pretty steady buff with 60-80%ish uptime. Breath of the Eons is a burst effect, and Prescience is only +3% crit, not +30%. Maintaining these buffs and Augmentation effectiveness should have a pretty high floor, which should help players on the lower end. On average for your group, as long as you’re doing your job and they’re doing theirs, you’ll be equivalent to them.
• There was a concern going in that stats like Leech and Versatility may have a different impact on Augmentation than other classes, but that ends up being a math problem – if you’re giving primary stats to other players, any primary you give them is scaling with their secondary stats. If the amount given also scales off your secondary stats, it double dips, and now a low-geared Augmentation Evoker might be worth 80% of another DPS and a high-geared one might be worth 120%. That’s not great, and trying ot keep that gap as close as possible was an important goal for the health of the game. Ebon Might scaling off primary stats means you’ll want to get better gear and improve item level, but having secondary stats not as strongly impactful was a known cost going in and something the team is going to keep an eye on.

Combat Logs

• Associating various spells to support events in logs, so that they can be attributed back to the buffing player is something that will be done on a case-by-case basis. Right now, the focus is on giving Augmentation the tools to evaluate their performance and ask if they’re contributing enough damage or buffing people at the right time. They want to make sure players have the ability to analyze that if they want to.
• There are still a couple abilities that aren’t attributed yet, which is a complicated but ongoing process. Past that, they’ll be looking at what is most impactful to the developer and community to have attributed. Things like healing could be a good win, especially since Augmentation has some healing received effects that they can apply. Damage mitigation is definitely interesting as well.
• The Evoker legendary is a hot topic of debate. Philosophically, it’s more in the perk category – because the buff you’re giving isn’t coming out of the budget of the weapon, it’s on top of its primary and secondary stats, making it more of a raid resource than a personal one. Attributing it back to the Evoker doesn’t really align with their approach, and they’re unlikely to give it the same attribution model at this time.
• No answer regarding past issues with raid-fire sync events like Sylvanas in Sanctum of Domination, but concerns that Augmentation may impact that is something which Graham will mention to the engineering team.
• The class design team was in constant communication with the rewards team building the legendary. They knew they wanted to do an Evoker legendary during Dragonflight, since Evoker is the hero of the moment and they wanted to give them something cool to chase while telling their story. They saw the gauntlet shatter off Neltharion’s hand during the Dracthyr Legacies cinematic, but where did it go after? That was the spark of the idea.
• They also knew Augmentation was coming, and that the themes would overlap a fair bit. The gauntlet is about dominating and controlling, affecting a lot of people, and the way Dracthyr reimagine it is similar to Augmentation. A lot of early legendary design used what became Augmentation abilities, so there was definitely some parallel design, but they believe what they came up with was really cool.