Season 1 of The War Within continues the recent trend of delivering sizeable nerfs to Augmentation Evoker's support buffs and unique utility, with the changes to
Ebon Might,
Black Attunement, and particularly
Spatial Paradox being the most relevant for raid content. And while these changes were accompanied by new talents aimed at the Evoker's personal damage, like
Rumbling Earth and
Molten Embers, Augmentation's damage profile is still first and foremost all about buffing your friends.
When it first debuted in Dragonflight Season 2, Augmentation Evoker was essentially able to top damage meters with exceptionally little effort,
leading to some rather hilarious results. Since then however, Augmentation's role in raid content on average has been much more subdued, with the spec generally finding itself at the bottom of the WarcraftLogs Statistics page week after week. Even still, the spec generally managed to secure at least one spot on the average Mythic raid team because of
Spatial Paradox allowing specific healer specs like Discipline Priest and Mistweaver Monk to perform their ramp-based healing rotations in some of Amirdrassil's hardest encounters.
With
Spatial Paradox now an Evoker class talent on a three-minute cooldown and part of a choice node with
Time Spiral, Augmentation is largely back to relying on its damage profile to secure its position on a competitive raiding roster, and this is where things start to get a bit complicated. At the moment, sims and testing suggest that Augmentation Evoker has the potential to contribute highly competitive damage in a given raid, and an ideal composition would almost certainly run two and expect it to be one of the top performing specs in the raid. However, the stark reality is that the spec's output is dependent on two key factors in addition to simply executing your rotation: the exact timing of your buffs matter, as well as the specific players that you select with your buffs at each moment of the fight.
Augmentation Evoker has the potential to top charts in the right hands. Coordinated guilds with skilled,
predictable DPS players will certainly continue to make use of Augmentation as a strong DPS that is adaptable and able to conform to different damage patterns in a given fight just based on the players it chooses to buff. However, the amount of effort and coordination that is necessary to perform at this level is often not trivial, and typically involves specific tools, deliberate pre-planning of your intended buff targets, and careful positioning to best make use of proximity buff targeting. While Blizzard seems to be aware of this skill disparity in output, for example having recently added
Sense Power alongside
Prescience auto-targeting changes, the fact remains that it is still too difficult for the average player to achieve competitive DPS playing this spec, and this is exactly what the WarcraftLogs statistics show.
At the end of the day, while I certainly expect Evoker to be well-represented in this tier's Mythic Race to World First, this spec truly deserves changes to its buff targeting and raid gameplay so that the average player can enjoy its unique support playstyle without feeling like a hindrance to their group when they are not able to perform at the absolute highest level. Until that happens, I expect Augmentation will remain just about where it stands today.
