Playstyle & Rotation
Raiding Rotation
The rotation for raiding will depend on which one of the two builds you are playing. The playstyle between the two are very different but both have a fairly low skill floor and high skill ceiling. Personally I’d say the playstyle of Preservation Evoker is quite unique compared to the other healing classes.
Both builds are considered proactive as they require you to be setting up part of the kit before the damage actually hits the raid. It is important to become aware of boss timers and to learn how to play around them to play evoker to its full potential.
The Echo build will be better by a large margin for season 4 so the only reason for playing the Blossom build would be if you much prefer the playstyle over the Echo build.
Both builds make use of Rewind for very big damage events as it is one of the best raid cooldowns and helpful in any encounter. Lifebind is another talent that is being used in both builds. These will both be discussed in the cooldown usage section of this guide.
As Evoker has a 30 yard range, this might be something to get used to when you first get into the class. You want to use the mobility abilities that are at your disposal to play around the lower range.
Try to position yourself pretty central if the fight allows for it to cover more of your raid group. Use Hover whenever you feel like you need to, it also allows you to cast while moving which is helpful in high mobility encounters. You can also use hover in place if you don’t want to change your position or if it’s dangerous to do so in that moment of the fight. This way you still benefit from being able to cast and move but you aren’t forced to jump into a different position.
Echo Build Raiding Rotation
The Echo build is a build that requires a lot of set up and being proactive with healing.
When you have about 8-10 seconds before the damage is coming out you want to start casting Temporal Anomaly and as many Echoes as possible.
You can follow these up with either a rank 1 Dream Breath for a strong HoT or if people already have Reversion on them, use Reversion for non-priority situations like non burst damage and as a filler, and even Verdant Embrace for some instant healing or set up with Lifebind. If you choose to use Verdant Embrace without setting up for Lifebind, make sure to follow it up with a Living Flame or Spiritbloom on yourself. Also cast Fire Breath on cooldown at the highest possible rank, because of the interaction with Leaping Flames.
You want to keep ramping for different scenarios in the fight and you’ll find yourself continuously starting new ramp cycles right after consuming all of your Echoes. In between ramps you want to use Living Flame on the boss, and you’ll also want to use Dream Breath and Fire Breath on cooldown for Essence Burst procs.
Keep in mind that for the general rotation and priorities, you want to avoid replacing your Reversions by overlapping them with another one, but you can stack Dream Breath with them.
For both builds you want to use Rewind for very big damage events as it is one of the best raid cooldowns and helpful in any encounter.
Emerald Blossom Build Raiding Rotation
For the Emerald Blossom build you’ll be looking at building up essences and Essence Burst procs.
You’ll also want to use Dream Breath and Fire Breath on cooldown and use Dream Breath in combination with Verdant Embrace for Call of Ysera, making your breath hit with an increased 40% healing. You want to use rank 3 Spiritbloom to cover moderate damage on either a single target or the raid. Dream Breath and Spiritbloom are not part of your blossom rotation so you are free to use them any time the raid needs healing.
When damage is about to hit, start using as many Emerald Blossoms as you have available to you on a stacked group of people. Spend your downtime DPSing with Living Flame on the boss.
When the timers are close to damage coming out, you want to prioritize this to fish for Essence Burst. If you get unlucky with Blossoms and absolutely need healing you can choose to cast Temporal Anomaly with Reversion, but you don’t want to cast this much during your downtime and only to fit more healing in burst windows, as it is a huge mana cost.
For medium damage moments you can opt into using Verdant Embrace with Emerald Communion for a Lifebind ramp and big defensive.
The Emerald Blossom build revolves around your blossoms and their interactions with specific talents. Blossoms send out Fluttering Seedlings that heal 2 allies (up to 40 yards away) when they burst. This talent in turn interacts with the talent called Field of Dreams; it makes it so that you have a chance at spawning free extra blossoms from the seedlings that get sent out.
To optimize the amount of healing you do with all those extra blossoms you want to play around the talent Cycle of Life. This talent summons a sprout that collects 10% of your healing for 8 seconds. When fully charged, the sprout then spreads the gathered healing evenly amongst allies within 30 yards.
In practical terms, this means you want to aim to spawn your third blossom 6-10 seconds before damage goes out so it collects all the healing you do during a burst window with the Emerald Blossoms to then spread it out and grant you more throughput. You’ll want to aim to get at least 2 Cycle of Life sprouts down during these windows and you can repeat this combo very often as it takes around 15 seconds to set up.
There are some other notable talents in this build that have interactions with Blossoms. First of all there is Bountiful Bloom, which makes it so that your Blossoms heal 5 targets instead of 3, this is important to cover the most amount of people. The second talent is Panacea which makes it so you gain a very powerful self-heal when you cast Emerald Blossom. This talent will make you heal yourself a lot before Blossom windows, increasing the chance that you will get a lot of Mastery value from them and increasing your throughput.
Mythic+ Rotation
In Mythic+ you’ll want to focus on playing the spec proactively just like in raid. You’ll be using Echo to set people up for damage and then finish topping people with either Dream Breath or Verdant Embrace for big heals. We are lucky in that we have a lot of burst healing and most of our combos will set up the group to get fully healed.
One thing to think about in Mythic+ is that while we do have a lot of tools to deal with big damage. You’ll need to spread those tools out to fully be able to cover the fights. Using everything all at once is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. Our sustained healing isn’t strong, so planning your big bursts appropriately is important.
As for the main rotation, you’ll want to cast Fire Breath on cooldown. This is mainly for damage as it is our hardest hitting damage ability. Cast Living Flame on allies or enemies right after. You’ll want to cast rank 1 or 2 Dream Breath for moderate damage, combine it with casting Verdant Embrace beforehand to make use of Call of Ysera. You can also cast Dream Breath fully charged if you plan for bigger burst healing. It is recommended to make use of the HoT as it helps with sustain, but both can have their uses in a mythic+ environment. Cast Spiritbloom on rank 3 if there is big damage going out on the group. Spend your time in between healing by DPSing with Living Flame.
Use Rewind as a group save, it is an extremely big cooldown and will likely save you from any high damage scenario.
Tank Healing
Tank healing on preservation is not ideal for our kit of abilities and it is just not where the class excels. We do have a couple of abilities to cover this or ways to go around this. First of all, our external Time Dilation is really strong, partly because of its short cooldown. To help the tank with self healing we have Reversion, it won’t top them but it will provide a bit of assistance so you want to keep this up whenever you can.
For bigger hits you can use a rank 1 Spiritbloom as it is quite a big burst, but this is also a nice ability to save for the group. If there is unexpected tank damage this is an ability you can use to cover it.
Verdant Embrace provides you with a big single target heal that doesn’t require set up or cast times when used as a spot healing tool.
For planned tank healing you can also use Stasis with the fourth combination that is mentioned in the Stasis cooldown usage part of this guide. This requires a bit of planning so you should know when your tank is taking big hits. Either communication with your tank or more in-depth preparation of the dungeons can help you find out when the best moments would be to cast this.
DPS Rotation
Dealing damage as evoker is very simple, as we only have a few abilities at our disposal. Fire Breath, Living Flame, Disintegrate, and Deep Breath are the DPS buttons available to Preservation.
The highest priority button in your DPS rotation for both raid and mythic+ is Fire Breath. This ability hits hard and also procs Leaping Flames, causing your next Living Flame to hit additional targets. In raids you want to use Fire Breath on rank 1 on the boss. This leaves a hard hitting DoT that will contribute to your overall damage.
Deep Breath is a 2-minute cooldown that allows you to fly over enemies, dealing a large amount of damage. Use this on CD as well, it’s very useful in dungeons for AoE damage. Do keep in mind that it will lock you in an animation for a couple of seconds and you need to make sure you are safe when you land.
Living Flame is your core filler ability, when you aren't healing or you’re just trying to push out more damage, you will be spamming this ability. It also generates Essence Burst procs.
Disintegrate is usually not worth casting. With no talents selected, this ability is undertuned and deals a very poor amount of damage. When you do spec into the talents, it is barely more damage than Living Flame, and since it doesn’t generate Essence Burst procs, it is recommended to use Living Flame over Disintegrate.
Cooldown Usage
Evoker has very strong cooldowns to help balance out the kit and make up for the lack of range compared to other healers. Rewind, Emerald Communion, Zephyr, Tip the Scales, Stasis, and Dreamflight are all cooldown abilities that can make healing much easier and they are important to understand in order to be truly successful. Below, we will take a look at all the cooldowns available to preservation evoker and how to use them effectively.
Rewind
Rewind causes you to heal all of the damage you have taken in the last 5 seconds. This means after taking a very large hit, or a lot of damage in a few seconds, you can use this ability to heal everyone back up. Whenever there is a lot of unplanned or unexpected damage you should consider using this ability.
Emerald Communion (+Lifebind)
Emerald Communion is a strong personal defensive cooldown but can also be used as a strong healing cooldown if you combine it with Verdant Embrace and Lifebind. How this works is if you put an Echo on person 1 and then Verdant Embrace person 2, Verdant Embrace will hit both person 1 and person 2 and both will get Lifebind buffs. Now, all healing you receive will be duplicated to both targets (at a 40% rate).
When Lifebind is active, you want to use Emerald Communion which heals us (and the people with Lifebind on them) basically to full. To make this an even bigger cooldown you can pair this with Temporal Anomaly and more manually applied Echoes. This will cover 6-12 people and makes it a big healing CD that can be used in both raid builds and in dungeons.
Time Dilation
Time Dilation is a strong external cooldown that for the next 8 seconds makes it so that 50% of the damage an ally would take to instead be dealt over 8 sec. Giving you space to heal the person up, or for a tank to deal with damage over a longer period of time. It is an extremely strong external and it has a 1 minute cooldown so you can use this very often.
Zephyr
Zephyr only reduces damage taken from AoE spells and not every damage window is considered AoE damage, but most of the hard hitting damage in raid encounters will be covered with this cooldown. You should look to use it preemptively before taking a large AoE hit to help with survival and topping people afterwards.
Tip the Scales
Tip the Scales is a tool that makes your next empowered spell an instant cast. Pressing this and combining it with Dream Breath or Spiritbloom will allow you to instantly cast a fully charged version of the ability. This is the most useful during high burst damage or during movement as you don’t have to stand still to cast it. This also works well as a reactionary tool for moments where people take unexpected damage.
Dream Flight
Dream Flight is a strong cooldown for the raid when players are stacked or lined up. It does initial healing on people but also leaves a very strong HoT. You should use this with dangerous mechanics in mind as the animation cannot be canceled and you will be locked, making your landing position something you’ll have to think about beforehand. You can also still be hit by the damage of mechanics while flying so try to use this in a safe place in the encounter.
Stasis
Stasis is a Capstone talent that sees a lot of play, especially in the dungeon build and in the Echo raid build. The ability will store the 3 spells you cast after activating it. After reactivating it, it will send out your stored spells all at once in the order that you’ve casted them in. The timer for your reactivation window is 30 seconds, if you don’t reactivate it, it will automatically send out your spells after 30 seconds.
The order of your spells is something you want to think about because you don’t want your Echoes to be consumed by spells you hadn’t planned for. It is not a reactive ability and should be pre-planned like the rest of the kit.
There are a couple of big spell combinations that can be helpful during specific scenarios:
- Green Combo: This is a combination of Temporal Anomaly + Dream Breath + Spiritbloom. This is generally a good combo for any occasion and should be your default. It is helpful for high damage as it makes for a very strong burst heal. Make sure to cast Verdant Embrace before the set up and before you release it to make use of Call of Ysera.
- Echo Pre Pull: This is a combination of Temporal Anomaly + Temporal Anomaly + Temporal Anomaly. This is a combo to start before the pull. Your 30 seconds timer doesn’t start until your third spell gets casted so you don’t cast your third Temporal Anomaly until the encounter starts. This combination allows you to spread a ton of Echoes through the raid and is a good combination in encounters where there is a lot of damage straight away.
- Bleed mass dispel (very niche): This is a combination of Cauterizing Flame + Cauterizing Flame + Cauterizing Flame. This is basically a custom mass dispel that removes almost all debuffs and bleeds from a target but doesn't go on cooldown if it doesn't remove anything. That means we can store 3 in our stasis before the pull and clear groups with it if needed. It’s not always needed but on bosses like Forgotten Experiments in the Aberrus raid this is a very useful tool to have.
- Spot Healing (Mythic+): This is a combination of Echo + Living Flame + Reversion. This is a combo which will help you keep up with tank healing as Preservation doesn’t have a lot at its disposal besides Time Dilation. This combo is only really recommended in a Mythic+ environment as in raid you have other healers that can take care of that better. Alternatively you can choose to replace either your Living Flame for a Verdant Embrace if you need to act more urgently, or your reversion for a Verdant Embrace if you need a bigger heal.
Stasis will require a bit of practice to use perfectly, but it will be useful with whatever spells you decide to put in it. As you play more of Preservation you will get a feel for which spells are needed in the moment and you’ll be able to use it to prep incoming damage.