The Undermine(d) set bonuses coming in Patch 11.1 have a chance to activate a semi-random proc buff, depending on your role. As a ranged caster, Devastation Evoker has
"Jackpot!". Despite sharing the same name, this buff has very different effects for each ranged specialization.
The 2-Set Bonus for Devastation causes damaging spells gives you a random proc
Shattering Star that fires at 3 nearby enemies. This proc is 2 RPPM but is also
Hasted which means we will see it fairly often. We are also guaranteed a
"Jackpot!" with
Dragonrage.
The 4-Set Bonus is more straightforward. Each
Shattering Star cast and
"Jackpot!" will give a 20% damage amp on your next
Eternity Surge or
Fire Breath, stacking twice. By looking at the spelldata we can see that this buff (
Jackpot!) also has a duration of 40 seconds. This is a very good thing, because a shorter duration could lead to wasting procs. With
Dragonrage we will likely have both empowers hit 20% harder at the start of our cooldowns, so long as we
Shattering Star between them.
Update: Now that we have access to the tier, we can clear up how many of the interactions work (for now). Unfortunately,
"Jackpot!" does not grant
Essence Burst with
Arcane Vigor. This is a hefty blow to
Essence and
Essence Burst generation. Interestingly,
"Jackpot!" does work with
Eternity's Span and
Focusing Iris. This means that the
Shattering Star proc can hit up to 6 targets in AoE and increase your damage on them by 20% for 6 seconds. This is certainly tempting, but the loss of
Arcane Vigor can be felt in a huge way. Right now, our perception of added
Essence Burst procs is skewed by how plentiful they are but this will change. We are losing our current tier which gives
Essence Burst for each
Eternity Surge, and
Hoarded Power has been replaced by
Azure Celerity. This means that
Shattering Star will likely be the main supplier of
Essence Burst, and additional procs will be more valuable. Potentially dropping
Arcane Vigor for
Focusing Iris will remove this benefit.
The benefit of
Focusing Iris in AoE seems worthwhile, but it is less clear whether this will extend to Single Target as well.
Most of the benefit of Shattering Star isn't the damage it deals and the interactions are unclear. This makes the potency of this proc hard to gauge, but randomly cleaving damage amps into Mass Disintegrates will certainly feel good. The added Charged Blast stacks are also welcome.
Will the "50% reduced potency" apply to the damage taken increase debuff it applies? Can it hit up to 6 targets with Eternity's Span? Will it grant Essence Burst via Arcane Vigor? If so, will it give more than one by considering it 3 separate casts? Already, there are many questions that can only really be answered with playtesting, but if I had to guess it will grant a single Essence Burst per cast and be hard locked to 3 targets.A solid assessment on this tier bonus is still hard to make since we need time to playtest, but my hope is that
"Jackpot!" will be changed to interact with
Arcane Vigor. Otherwise, we will feel a bit starved for
Essence, especially if
Focusing Iris pulls ahead.
Devastation Evoker Guide
Preservation Evoker War Within Season 2 Tier Set First Impression
Two-piece bonus & the Insurance HoT
You might have noticed that the Preservation 2pc bonus is the same as every other healer. This is a part of a role-based tier set system they're trialing for 11.1. While the bonus is identical, the strength of the
Insurance! HoT isn't, and Preservation actually gets one of the weaker versions. We'll revisit this in a minute.
Expected Power
- With reasonable gear, each Insurance! buff heals for about 1 million over 15 seconds. If it procs early it'll heal them for 400k which is 5-6% of their health. Nothing all that exciting. The HoT should scale with everything except Mastery, which is a little bit cursed for a spec with as powerful a mastery as ours - particularly in raid.
- From the random 2pc procs alone, you can expect 60-80k HPS though with quite high variance. If you proc a lot of the HoTs early (via their target dropping low on health) then you'll get less value from your tier set, though arguably it'd have saved some lives instead. You can also proc some late which is more HPS but not something you can rely on.
Four-Piece bonus & the Echo Question
While we can be sure that
Verdant Embrace will apply
Insurance! to both ourselves and our target, there are a few (currently) unanswered questions:
- If I apply Verdant Embrace via Echo, will they get the Insurance! buff? For the rest of this article, we're going to assume it will. As mentioned above, the Preservation HoT is quite weak. We can assume then that this is intended to be balanced by giving us more opportunities to apply it which Echo would do.
- If it does Echo, then is the HoT modified by Echo strength, or is it the same every time? Primarily, would Temporal Anomaly Echoes apply Insurance! at a reduced strength? They do try and scale effects like this around Echo strength nowadays but there's still in-game precedent for either.
- Can I apply two instances of a HoT to a target? If not, will my Verdant Embrace Insurance! HoT overwrite longer duration HoTs from random procs? Likely will overwrite unless they're longer.
- If we cast Verdant Embrace on ourselves, which is by far the most common play in raid, is Insurance! applied to a random ally or is the second lost? For now we will assume it's gone. This isn't too big a deal.
So, how strong is it?
We'll definitely need to test this once the PTR is live but it gets a middling grade if it Echoes and may not even be equipped if it doesn't. There are some minor positives: whether it Echoes or not, the
Insurance! that's applied to ourselves will transfer another 300k healing via
Lifebind. If it does
Echo then that's another ~350k healing per target. But there are also some major downsides to the bonus:
- Chronowarden plays around Lifebind combos very often, but already does so much Lifebind healing that applying a HoT to targets during the LIfebind window is likely to heavily overheal.
- Flameshaper could get some value here but Echo selection is dominated by Reversion. There could be room for Echo -> Verdant Embrace to gain prominence as a solution for short and bursty damage windows where it already does quite well.
- In Mythic+, the bonus should be ok if the dungeon pool plays similarly to in season 1. Lifebind is already a dominant solution to the short, sharp damage patterns in Mythic+ and you're ok concentrating even more of your healing into these windows since slower damage patterns tend to be much less dangerous. While the bonus adds no damage, that does tend to be very rare on healer set bonuses. It'll also be weaker than our ridiculous season 1 bonus.
Role-based Tier Sets?
If the role-based tier sets are one tier only then I'm interested in seeing what they can do with them. It's definitely not a system I'd like to see in future but it works ok as an experimental one-off. I'd have liked to see more opportunities to interact with the HoTs. It feels like the healing metagame already has enough medium-coverage pad healing and the "drop below 40%" conditional here does paltry amounts of healing.