Preservation Evoker Review of Chronowarden Hero Talents – Temporal Fun But Spell Hook Overload?

First Look at Hero Talents in The War WithinHero Talents Overview

Chronowarden Evoker Hero Talent Tree

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In patch 10.2 Preservation has two key playstyles – an Echo-focused one and a Blossom-focused alternative. We also see a Reversion build pop up every now and then. The moment Chronowarden was announced it was clear that it was likely to be an Echo or Bronze-centric tree and the reality is a little more agnostic than expected – to the trees credit. Chronowarden is also an excellent thematic fit for the class.

Key Nodes

Let’s look through some of the more interesting sections of the tree. We’ll notice a few of the nodes are Dragonflight tier-set bonuses.

Chrono Flame & Afterimage

This isn’t a perfect clone of our current 2pc bonus but it’s very similar. It plays very well and it’s an interesting bonus. It turns our empower spells into essence burst generators and also adds an extra direct heal portion based on the healing we dealt to the target in the last 5 seconds. Note that while our current 2pc sent out proper Living Flame casts, this new one only sends out the Chrono Flame portion which means we’re unlikely to get a full 20% chance of an essence burst from it.

Careful Contemplation

Your intellect and stamina are increased by 10%. Your cooldown times are increased by 10%.

It is difficult to put into words just how good a deal +10% intellect and 10% stamina is for +10% to cooldowns. This is stronger than most nodes in any healing talent tree and we’ll likely see a much smaller version of it eventually go live. If not, see further below for a discussion on healer power scaling.

Instability Matrix

Each time you cast an empowered spell, unstable time magic reduces its cooldown by up to 15 seconds.

Reducing the power of our key empower spells by a random range is a bit of a nightmare for a healer spec. This would likely function better with a much smaller range otherwise this is a lot of RNG added to a spec that already has way too many dice rolls through a fight.

Threads of Fate

Casting an Essence ability during Temporal Burst causes a nearby ally to gain a thread of fate for 15 seconds, granting them a chance to echo their damage and healing spells for 15% of the amount.

Bronze builds have always contributed less DPS than green Blossom builds since they get fewer GCDs to spend on damage and damage-centric nodes like Life Force Mender are more difficult to take. Threads is a fairly interesting way of closing that gap though I’m apprehensive about the growing number of noisy support abilities that make evaluating personal performance very difficult. This is a combined Preservation / Augmentation tree so some support nodes are inevitable. It should at least play quite smoothly. A poor pairing with Tip the Scales for Preservation given that’s already a key ability for us through a fight. I’ll discuss this further below.

Golden Opportunity

Echo has a 25% chance to not cost Essence.

Decent talent that improves your Echo coverage and I am excited to play with it. This is a great opportunity to use Deck-based RNG instead of pure chance. Deck RNG guarantees one proc in every four casts which makes the talent much more reliable than a dice roll. Preservation already has a ton of RNG in the spec and a more controlled format might be desirable if they’re looking to add even more. I’m curious as to how this will interact with free Echo casts via Essence Burst.

Is Chronowarden Powerful? Fun?

This is an excellent tree. It’s difficult to talk too much about power on a tree that’ll change a lot before it goes live. However, so far we have:

• A node that gives us 10% damage and healing outright for a very small cost.
• Our Aberrus 2 set bonus that was worth 8-10% healing.
• Our Amirdrassil 2 set bonus that was worth 10%+ healing (note that the new version appears weaker).
• 25% more Echo casts on average for Echo builds.
• A blink that also has a defensive attached.
• A form of augmentation-like support power.
• Various minor stat buffs.

Ruby Adept is going to have to be very good to come close to this. Keep in mind when comparing historical effects that we don’t know how Preservation will look in 11.0 yet. There’ll be class changes, base talent changes, a new tier set, and more. We’re missing a lot of context and probably will until Alpha.

Twenty Effects, Four Spells

From a gameplay perspective, the tree is still pretty good though will benefit further from iteration. A pattern that Blizzard is increasingly moving toward and that I am cautious around is attaching more and more effects to the same 3-4 base spells. In older versions of the game, some specs felt like they had way too many buttons and many ended up removed to keep the game reasonable to play. In the modern game, Preservation has just as many effects as the old days, but they’re all tied to a few abilities instead. It’s easier to find binds for your buttons but in exchange, the purpose and identity of each key ends up unclear. Is Verdant Embrace a key single target heal? Or is it part of my mobility kit? Or am I just using it for the buffs it gives me? If I am explaining the ability in a guide, how might I describe it? It isn’t just Verdant Embrace either.

Some of these icons are placeholders for the new effects. Don’t worry if you don’t recognize them all.

Here’s a brief list, adjusted for Chronowarden but note that most Evoker spells are like this:

• Spiritbloom. Base function: Direct single target heal that becomes AoE when charged. Extra hooks: Has 3 or 4 max ranks, a random cooldown, a large HoT, an extra heal based on the amount healed but only on three targets, gives mana to a friend, sends out Chrono Flames that might give me a buff, gives me a haste buff depending on targets hit, might increase my essence regeneration rate and might cause time to flow faster.
• Reversion. Base function: Heal over time effect. Extra Hooks: Might give me an essence burst, might increase its duration, increases my healing on the target and heals recent damage taken.
• Verdant Embrace. Base function: Large direct heal & mobility. Extra Hooks:Buffs my Dream Breath, gives Lifebind to any targets hit, and makes next Living Flame faster.

Spells often can’t be strong versions of themselves because they have so many hooks that they would become overpowered. Spells being able to fill different roles isn’t always a bad thing either and it’s ok if I have to use an ability differently through a fight but when we end up with 4-5 hooks the spell’s key identities become so muddied that I’m just pressing button X because the guide told me so – not because it is strong at a glance. I can’t get a good innate feeling of how good or bad anything is. If I’m teaching a new player I have to tell them to press something like Verdant Embrace on themselves 90% of the time because the buffs it gives you make it a worthwhile cast but that makes the spec difficult to learn.

In the Chronowarden tree, we get even more spell hooks. Tip the Scales, which is currently used as a catch-up tool, gets generic power added to it. The spell loses its identity because instead of using it to cover tough movement or even a personal mistake I’m now using it near on cooldown to buff the group. Hover is now also a personal defensive, Spiritbloom regains its HoT (which is very good) and a random haste effect. Living Flame gains a new spell hook that heals or deals damage based on the amount I’ve healed or damaged the target. My buttons become increasingly overloaded and I seemingly don’t gain any new ones. The spec becomes quite complex to play because it is difficult to know why each button is good without already having in-depth knowledge of the game.

Healer Power Scaling

This topic has been widely discussed at this point but it deserves at least a brief mention here. With the amount of power hero talents appear to be adding healer power levels will be extremely high going into The War Within. When every spec gets past tier sets and in some cases, legendaries baked into talents power creep becomes very real. There are a lot of ways they can handle this and they have a lot of time to do it before the expansion launches but with the power we’re seeing here we’re going to need very big health pools as a minimum to counter the amount of healing we’ll be able to do.

Final Takeaways

I’m positive about the overall direction of Chronowarden. I think this will be a very fun tree to play and they’ve done a good job of making it appealing to multiple Evoker builds – even if bronze Echo builds get a little bit more out of it. We know they’ll iterate on it a lot through Alpha and if fine-tuned this could be one of the strongest hero talent trees. Ruby Adept has a lot to live up to.

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.