Playstyle & Rotation
General Rotation
Evoker has a fairly easy rotation to pick up. It revolves around using all three of our short cooldowns: Fire Breath, Eternity Surge and Shattering Star as they come up. Disintegrate is used to reduce their cooldowns and spend resources. This leads to the following basic priority list:
- Use Eternity Surge (Rank 1) on cd
- Use Fire Breath (Rank 1) on cd. Note that you might want to delay empowered spells if Dragonrage is about to come up.
- Use Deep Breath on cooldown.
- Use Shattering Star on cooldown
- Spend Essence Burst and Essences on Disintegrate. Try to chain Disintegrates as this is a net damage increase. You don’t want to chain Mass Disintegrates, let these tick until the end and cast a new one after.
- Cast Living Flame as a filler. Use Azure Strike instead if you can’t use hover to cast Living Flame on the move.
Opener
Single Target
- Precast Living Flame
- Followed by Deep Breath (Press Deep Breath again to cancel it mid air)
- Dragonrage
- Fire Breath Rank 1
- Shattering Star
- During this Shattering Star GCD you want to use Potion and Trinket
- Eternity Surge Rank 1
- 2x Mass Disintegrate
- Use Tip The Scales for your 2nd Fire Breath
- Make sure to end your Dragonrage window with 2 stacks of Essence Burst
Multi Target
- Precast Living Flame (Skip this if a pack is already pulled and grouped up)
- Shattering Star
- Deep Breath
- Dragonrage
- During this Dragonrage GCD you want to use Potion, Trinket and Tip the Scales
- Fire Breath
- Eternity Surge
- Mass Disintegrate
- Pyre
- Mass Disintegrate
- Pyre
Playstyle
The “Starter Kit”
Getting into Devastation is not too hard. The ability to Move while casting and an intuitive system of single target and AoE fillers and spenders give this spec a great foundation. Two empowered spells, a 2 minute cooldown and the signature spell Deep Breath to finish it up.
There are a few rules you want to hold onto, to have an easy start with Devastation.
- Use Fire Breath and Eternity Surge on cooldown, if possible during Dragonrage.
- Use Dragonrage and Deep Breath on Cooldown
- When fighting up to 3 enemies, spend essence on Disintegrate
- When fighting 4 or more (stacked) enemies, spend essence on Pyre
- Fill with Living flame on 1-2 targets
- Fill with Azure Strike on 3+ targets
One more thing should not be left out! When you have a lot of essence and are about to cast back to back Disintegrates you want to “chain” Disintegrates. This means casting your next Disintegrate after the second to last tick of the current Disintegrate cast. This is done because you don’t actually lose a tick of Disintegrate, it smoothly chains after each other without delay in between the casts. If you don’t see said ticks on your cast bar ingame make sure to check the UI/Weakauras section!
Cooldown Usage
Extending Dragonrage
Animosity: The bread and butter of devastation. Extending Dragonrage is key to excelling in dps. Right now this is capped at 4 extensions. Although abilities casted with Tip the Scales don't count into that so you can extend Dragonrage up to 25 additional seconds.
Defensives
You have a few defensive abilities with different use-cases. I’ll go over them to give you a general idea where they can be used.
Obsidian Scales: Flat damage reduction, great to survive lethal abilities.
Verdant Embrace: Stores damage taken and releases it as healing over time, make sure to use this early enough so you don't miss out on the healing!
Zephyr: Reduces AoE damage and gives a neat movespeed boost. This also buffs your party so make sure to use it whenever there is AoE damage going on.
Rescue / Twinguardian: Gives you and your rescue target a shield.
Focus areas
As soon as you’ve found yourself comfortable with the basics it’s time to get a bit deeper into the spec. I’ll be listing some focus areas where usually there is a lot to optimize.
Hover management
Everyone knows the moment where you run out of hovers but have to move. You end up spamming space and pressing Azure strike after Azure strike. In single target scenarios this results in a dps loss. Since you can't channel Disintegrate while running without the Hover buff up. So before mindlessly casting hover just to adjust your position by a few yards try to second guess yourself sometimes and pre plan hover casts depending on where you can generate the most uptime. Also “Hover-Weaving” is super easy to pick up once you know how it works. After casting an instant ability or empowered spell your gcd will take one turn until you're able to cast again. This gcd can be used to cast hover so it's masked in the gcd and you don't have to stop any spellcasting for it.
Spend Iridescence Procs on the right spells
Scenario: Single target, Eternity Surge has been casted and Iridescence: Blue is on 2 stacks.
The damage buff should be spent on Disintegrate instead of Azure strike. This can only happen if you are a) in a good position and don’t have to move during your Disintegrate, or b) you have a hover buff up and can reposition while casting. If you find yourself in position c) you are in a bad position and don’t have any hover charges left, then try to work on your Hover management.
Dispels and Utility
An underrated and unique way to express skill! With Rescue, multiple dispels, knockbacks, a stun, slows, a soothe (this list could go even longer) Devastation has tons of utility. Check in details how many casts of what utility spell you had over the course of a dungeon. Is anything flying under the radar? Are you missing out on crucial dispels? Also take a critical look at your UI and maybe you find a way of making use of your utility a bit more convenient.