Why You Should & Shouldn’t Play Devastation Evoker in Dragonflight Season 2 – Patch 10.1

Unsure what class to play in Dragonflight Season 2? Whether you’re a returning player coming back to play the new content or a longtime veteran just looking to explore a new main or alt, we’ve got you covered.

We break down all the reasons you should consider playing Devastation 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 Devastation Evoker!

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Dragonflight Season 2 Evoker Tier Set

Why You Should Play Devastation Evoker in Dragonflight (and Why You Shouldn’t)

In the years World of Warcraft has been live, they have never added a new ranged class until Dragonflight. Do you like dragons? Have you ever wondered what it would be like to fly above your enemies while raining down volcanic death from above? Do you like the idea of playing a Ranged caster that feels like more of a Battlemage with flashy spells? Evoker might be for you.

Devastation Evoker plays differently than most other classes and provides unique and interesting utility in terms of their damage profile and support abilities. Hover provides the ability to cast on the move. Mastery: Giantkiller makes you very proficient at target swapping, and your empowered spells, Eternity Surge & Fire Breath, can be pre-empowered and used to cleave to new targets the instant they spawn. Examples of utility include: Rescue, Cauterizing Flame, Time Spiral, Unravel, and Zephyr.

Evoker talents in Dragonflight have changed a lot, and the design has been tumultuous. As a new class, it is only natural that it has growing pains. In Season 2 the talents are reworked with the stated goal of removing the “Clipping” playstyle, and I’m happy to say it’s improved. Devastation tuning is solid, and the talent improvements can be felt across the board. This means that regardless of the content you are doing, Devastation feels better and has more value than when it was first released in Dragonflight. Here is a table to summarize why you should (and shouldn’t) play Devastation Evoker in Dragonflight:

Why You Should	Why You Shouldn’t

Why You Should Devastation Evoker in Dragonflight Season 2

Devastation plays better in Season 2 and should perform better across the board. It also brings all the same tools it had before, but those tools have new uses.

Tuning
Keep in mind this could change, but tuning in Season 2 is a bit of a mess with big winners and big losers. Devastation happens to be a winner.

Devastation has great Single Target and provides exceptional priority damage. In Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible, most of the encounters are Single Target with instances of 2 target cleave. Fitting with the theme of Evoker, it is proficient at cleave while also having a focus on priority damage. Season 2 has many instances where mobs have huge, important absorb shields that need to be broken quickly. This means that Mastery: Giantkiller and Unravel have huge value and lean into the niche Devastation has as a priority add killer. For these reasons, Devastation is a very good fit for raid.

Mythic+ Evoker has incredible uncapped burst AoE and strong boss damage. Fitting with the theme of Evoker, it is proficient at cleave while also having a focus on priority damage. AoE damage is up, which will help a bit. Having great damage isn’t everything though, and although Devastation has a lot of utility, it has nothing like Vampiric Embrace or Ancestral Guidance. It also is just generally less sturdy than many other classes which means that it may continue to be overlooked in Mythic+ despite having good damage.

Devastation Evoker Utility for Dragonflight
We can’t talk about Evoker without first bringing up utility. Devastation Evoker utility isn’t changing in Season 2. These spells should already be familiar, but the usefulness is changed with new content. Much of this utility is also available to Preservation Evoker, which means that the value of Devastation is a bit tied to how powerful Preservation is. In Season 1, Preservation was the best healing spec hands-down which caused Devastation to be a bit overshadowed. At this time, it seems that things are a bit more balanced in Season 2.

Most Useful Utility Spells:

Unravel: I’m going to go out on a limb here and saying that effortlessly dealing huge damage to shields is utility. The value of this talent is completely dependent on how common absorb shields are, and how important it is to break them right away. In Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible, the new raid in Season 2, this talent finds a lot of use on difficult encounters.

Time Spiral: Time Spiral’s usefulness also depends on how useful extra movement abilities are to the raid. In early Season 1, a Time Spiral rotation was required for Mythic Raszageth. It remains to be seen just how useful it will be in Season 2.

Rescue: The signature Evoker utility, you fly to the player and bring them with you to your destination. Twin Guardian provides a shield to both players. This ability isn’t always required, but it is extremely useful in many cases. Similar to Time Spiral, this was a requirement in early Season 1 for Mythic Raszageth because it was the only reliable way to bring Priests to the encounter.

Expunge: A poison dispel on a short cooldown, many of the new M+ dungeons have nasty poisons to dispel. This also works wonders for Afflicted, a new affix in Season 2.

Cauterizing Flame: Remove all Bleed, Poison, Curse, and Disease effects from an ally and heal them. Similar to Expunge, this is very useful for your typical debuffs in Season 2. This ability is unique in that it also removes bleeds that are extremely deadly in Brackenhide Hollow and some of the other new dungeons.

All the Stops
Stops refer to AoE abilities that cause mobs to stop their casts. They are usually used for uninterruptible spells and skills. This is mainly important in M+, where having less players means your cooldowns to stop mobs are more stressed. Evoker has many stops on short cooldowns. Deep Breath+Terror of the Skies provides a stun, Tail Swipe knocks up, and Wing Buffet knocks back. Oppressing Roar also buffs the crowd control of others.

Deep Breath cooldown can be reduced to 1 minute. Tail Swipe (or Wing Buffet) can also be reduced to 45 seconds. The short cooldown of these spells means that Evoker has multiple ways to stop mobs every pull.

Other Utility:

• Zephyr: Reduce the damage taken by area of effect and increase movement speed for you and your nearest 4 allies. Mostly useful in M+.
• Oppressing Roar: Increases the duration of Crowd Control. This talent is a bit niche, but with Overawe is an AoE de-enrage that has a cooldown that scales with the amount of dispels. At 6, it is reset instantly.
• Sleep Walk: Crowd-control, useful for the new Incorporeal affix.
• Fury of the Aspects: This is the Evoker version of Bloodlust. Increase the haste of all allies for a time.
• Blessing of the Bronze: Raid buff. This spell decreases the cooldown of your allies movement ability. The affected ability depends on the class. For Evoker, it makes Hover a shorter cooldown.
• Source of Magic: Place a buff on an ally that returns a small amount of mana each time you empower a spell. The mana returned depends on the empowerment level. This talent is very undertuned and has little value.

Redesigned Talent Tree
In Season 2, the Devastation tree has been reworked considerably in the capstone area. Many of the talents (Causality, Imminent Destruction, Feed the Flames, Font of Magic, Arcane Vigor, and Eye of Infinity to name a few) have also been changed to do different things.

The biggest change here is to Causality, which is how we get cooldown reduction. Cooldowns are shortened per tick for Disintegrate and on impact for Pyre. Arcane Vigor has been reworked and makes Shattering Star feel much better now since it procs Essence Burst. Firestorm also has a new option now with Raging Inferno (more on this later).

View on Dragonflight Talent Tree Calculator

Many talents where also merged from 2 points to one. The takeaway is that these changes make the capstones actually feel impactful. We also get to play Iridescence now, which was out of reach before due to Power Swell blocking it off and the the lack of “extra” points to play around with.

For more information on the changes see the following articles: Evoker Talent Tree Update and Talent Tuning.

Clipping got (mostly) clipped

Clipping, or cutting Disintegrate short (generally after 3 ticks) in Dragonrage in order to gain additional uptime on the cooldown, was incentivized in the old talent design for Devastation. This was mainly due to cooldown reduction being tied to casting the spell. With the new Causality there is less of a reason to cut Disintegrate short, since we instead want the ticks for cooldown reduction.

It is still worthwhile to cut Disintegrate short in Dragonrage when cooldowns are available (such as Fire Breath, Shattering Star, and Eternity Surge) or we are capped on Burnout procs, but we no longer clip with Azure Strike. This means that clipping is now the exception, not the rule. The result is that the rotation is much more intuitive, with us wanting to let our Disintegrates finish unless we have something better to cast.

Chaining, or the act of recasting Disintegrate between the penultimate and last tick to move it into the next channel, is still fine to do but it isn’t required if you rather let all your channels fully finish. Chaining is easier, because the window to recast is much bigger than trying to time your next channel down to the millisecond. Below is an example of what chaining looks like:

Notice how the remaining duration of the last tick is moved into the start of the next channel

Why You Shouldn’t Play Devastation Evoker in Dragonflight Season 2

Devastation still has many of the issues that were present in Season 1, especially when it comes to survivability and the overall playstyle.

Survival and Agro: Devastation is Prone to Death
Devastation has a steep learning curve when it comes to being able to survive. Even though Evoker is sturdy if you know damage is coming and are experienced, it still heavily lacks in the ability to survive if damage is unexpected or big damage events are too frequent. Despite having a range similar to some melee, it has no built in leech from talents and can easily bleed out without special attention since it lacks a shorter cooldown ability to deal with smaller damage events.

Threat is also a huge issue, and is only getting worse. Threat or “Aggro” refers to the attention of enemy NPCs in the game. The player with the aggro is usually the one with the highest threat, normally a tank. Getting aggro means that you are more likely to be attacked and killed. Because Mastery: Giantkiller is so powerful, it is very easy as a Devastation Evoker to rip threat from tanks and die for it. Pulling threat means instant death before you can even react in most cases. This means you often have to wait before doing damage, making your Mastery: Giantkiller less effective. This goes against the core identity of Devastation, known for being frontloaded with its damage, and is not fun. It also causes conflict between players in group play, especially with tanks.

This is further exacerbated by the fact that Devastation is a spec that has to play near melee in AoE since our stops (Wing Buffet and Tail Swipe) are melee range. Many players don’t know this, but being in melee range significantly reduces the threshold for you to pull threat off your tank.

Deep Breath still feels unreasonably dangerous since ground effects still affect you, and once you begin the cast you are locked in. It makes absolutely no sense for an earthquake on the ground to kill a flying dragon. This isn’t a matter of just being careful, since much of the time you die from a ground effect that happens after you cast it. The result is that Deep Breath feels as if it has a dangerous aura, similar to sticking your hand in a garbage disposal that is turned off. Is it worth the risk?

New Talents, Old Pathing
There are some changes to pathing in the tree but some of the biggest pain points remain. The biggest problem right now is that the area on the left of the tree, below Volatility, has terrible pathing. There should be a link from Volatility to Firestorm. The choice node below should link to Feed the Flames. The only reason I see why these aren’t linked is due to the visual aesthetic of the tree being symmetrical, but this is having big consequences. In AoE, picking these talents feels hard to justify due to the additional cost of routing through weak talents such as Imminent Destruction and Engulfing Blaze (which is nerfed).

It also probably makes sense to connect Eternity’s Span with Charged Blast, since the only real way to the talent is through the Eye of Infinity choice node which is either purely for single target or fairly weak with Event Horizon.

Firestorm is Still Bad
Even with all of the previous buffs and new changes, Firestorm still misses the mark and will continue to disappoint until it is reworked. I mentioned above how the pathing issues make Firestorm more expensive than it should be but even with better pathing it is still not really worth it. The issue is with the design of the spell itself.

All stationary ground effects have an issue where they require the target to stay in the circle, but few have it to the same degree as Firestorm. 12 seconds is a very long time for targets to stay in an 8-yard radius. Compare this to Rain of Fire or Blizzard, both of which are primarily instant cast, have much shorter cooldowns, and generate resources or reduce cooldowns. Having mobs that aren’t slowed stay a full 12 seconds in an 8-yard radius is completely unreasonable in the current meta of M+. Too many swirlies on the floor, frontals, and other mechanics cause movement for tanks to ever see this actually deal full damage.

The choice nodes can help a little but they have issues too. Snapfire is a lot stronger after the buffs in Season 2 but it still only procs from Living Flame instead of Azure Strike or all Red spells. For an AoE spell, this makes very little sense. Raging Inferno is a cool concept but it doesn’t reduce the cast time of Firestorm. This makes it feel really bad in practice, especially during Dragonrage.

But wait, there’s more! Even if you assume targets will remain in the Firestorm and give Devastation a direct path in talents from Volatility to Firestorm the damage is still lacking compared to other AoE talents. This means that even the best case scenario for Firestorm is worse than other options.

Other Playstyle Quirks

I call these quirks because I don’t think they are bad enough to be called issues and I only include them because some players who enjoy Devastation reference them as reasons they were hesitant to try it. If you don’t think you will like Evoker due to its slow playstyle or short range I still encourage you to try it out and see for yourself.

Devastation Evoker is slow to play, and has the lowest Actions Per Minute (APM) of any dps spec. The gap isn’t small either, since you press a button around once every 2 seconds which is about twice as slow as most other class. This isn’t necessarily a problem on its own, but it can make the spec feel a bit off.

Getting used to the 25 yard range is an adjustment, but Blizzard has done well to make it less of an issue. You hardly notice it most of the time but when you notice it, you notice it a lot. In Season 1, bosses like Azureblade and Ner’zhul felt especially punishing and there will certainly be more examples in Season 2.

Mastery
Last but not least, we have to mention Mastery: Giantkiller. This is a blessing and a curse depending on what is needed to succeed in an encounter, but most have tight execute phases. The fact that Devastation can top the meters while also doing tank damage at the end of the fight is a bit of a problem, and means that bringing a Devastation Evoker can be a liability. That being said, the value of Devastation in getting you to that last phase is huge, and with proper play and Dragonrage timing some of the negatives can be mitigated.

Lowering the ceiling and raising the floor of Mastery outside of Dragonrage could go a long way in making Devastation feel like less of a gamble when deciding on a comp.

About the Author

This guide is written and maintained by Preheat, previously a World First raider and founding member of Liquid. Preheat plays Evoker and Mage and has participated in the MDI and multiple Race to World First events over the years. He has also commentated multiple community events such as the Keystone Masters, numerous charity events, and the Team Liquid Race to World First. For all things Evoker and Mage, you can find him in his Discord, on Twitter, posting videos to YouTube, and streaming on Twitch.

For more information on playing Devastation Evoker, please see our class guide updated for Dragonflight:

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