Devastation Evoker playstyle and rotation guide

Opener:

1. You’ll want to start the fight with a precast on Living Flame followed by using your Evoker Staff Kharnalex if you’re using it
2. You’ll then cast Dragonrage
3. Followed by a Rank 1 Fire Breath
4. If talented you will then use Shattering Star
5. Followed by an Eternity Surge (You can use Tip the Scales here to get an instant cast Eternity Surge but it’s usually best to save it for later)
6. Follow this with Disintegrates and then go into your normal priority system.

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 and whenever there’s nothing else to do we fill with Living Flame casts.

This leads to the following priority list:

1. Make sure to maintain the Fire Breath DoT by casting Fire Breath on cooldown.
2. If talented, use Shattering Star on cooldown, you will want to always follow this with an Eternity Surge if available or a Disintegrate. (You can pool your essence for a Shattering Star so you can cast 2 Disintegrates within the Shattering Star window)
3. Use Eternity Surge if available.
4. Spend Essences and Essence Burst stacks on Disintegrate. Try to chain Disintegrate as this is a net damage increase.
5. Cast Living Flame as a filler.

Multi Target:

We do a very different rotation on AoE, focussing on our Pyre ability and pretty much never casting Disintegrate.

1. You’ll want to keep an eye on your Charged Blast stacks as we want to ideally be as close to the cap of 20 before we use Dragonrage as this bonus damage applies to pyres we shoot out when we cast the ability.
2. You’ll want to cast both Fire Breath and Eternity Surge on cooldown. You can hold them to sync up with Dragonrage when the ability is almost off cooldown. Unlike single target, you’ll want to be proactive and adapt what tier you use your Fire Breath and Eternity Surge on; if the mobs are going to die pretty quickly, you’ll want to aim for a higher tier of Fire Breath and depending on the amount of targets you’re facing, that will dictate which tier of Eternity Surge you go to.
3. If you have a Burnout proc and have just cast a high tier of Fire Breath, use Living Flame, as you’ll hit extra targets from our class talent Leaping Flames.
4. Use your essence spending abilities, ideally, you’ll be just using Pyre on AoE; however, if there are just 1 or 2 targets, you should Disintegrate instead.
5. Use Deep Breath, ideally when the mobs are low HP, to make the most out of your talent Tyranny. You can opt to take the talent Terror of the Skies to make your Deep Breath stun as well.
6. Other than this, use Living Flame with Burnout procs or Azure Strike as a filler.

It is recommended that you don’t hard cast Living flame during Dragonrage, this applies for both single target and AoE, you always want to fill with Azure Strikes during Dragonrage. You only Living Flame with Burnout procs.

Playstyle

Extending Dragonrage

This is probably one of the most important things for an Evoker. The talent Animosity means you can extend your Dragonrage by 4 seconds every time you use an empower ability; with the nerf to this in 10.1, you can always extend Dragonrage 2 times with Fire Breath and Eternity Surge each for a total of 4 extends making the total duration 34s seconds instead of 18s.

If you have sufficient Haste (either Bloodlust or Power Infusion) you’ll manage to get a third extension for both spells for a total of 42 seconds of Dragonrage.

This is a key part of being a master Evoker, especially since our toolkit doesn’t provide any execute, so using Dragonrage during a lust execute phase, for example, is the only way we can keep up with other classes.

The general rule is never cast an empower spell if you have Dragonrage ready, always cast Dragonrage first. Always use your empower spells on cooldown within Dragonrage and make use of Tip the Scales to get an instant empower spell out during the duration as well.

You want to make use of all of your Essences and Essence Burst procs to reduce the cooldown of Fire Breath and Eternity Surge through the talent Causality.

It is worth losing out on Disintegrate ticks (during dragonrage only) to make sure you get every possible extend.

Learning to maximize Hover

One of the strongest abilities in our kit is Hover; this allows us to channel Disintegrate and cast Living Flame while moving. Unfortunately, we still need to be stationary when casting Fire Breath and Eternity Surge. Learning a fight is going to be key as we will pretty much be able to have 0 downtime as a ranged DPS, able to move out of mechanics while continuing to cast. Knowing when you can use Hover and when you have to hold for X upcoming mechanic will separate the top Evokers from the middle of the pack Evokers.

Utilize all that Utility

Evoker has a ton of utility in their toolkit, the most iconic ability being Rescue. There will be several moments for you to make use of this utility, providing strong support to your allies in both raiding and M+. You should always be on the lookout for opportunities to be more than just a DPS!