In 11.1 Flameshaper is getting a big set of changes aimed at making it smoother to play, and more effective in dungeon content. Emerald Blossom also got a key mechanical change to make it effective in a wider range of builds. The latest 11.1 build also revamped our tier set! Let's look at the upcoming changes, and evaluate how well they achieved their Flameshaper goals, and how Evoker is looking going into the next patch.
Flameshaper Changes
What Changed?
This is quite a lot but the most important changes are that the
cooldown will scale with Haste now, and that your
Dream Breath will always hit yourself. In season 1 you sometimes had to do some crackpot plays like firing your
Dream Breath into the void so that it only hit yourself in order to guarantee your
would hit a
Dream Breath target. All of that's now gone. You'll have a consistent target every time you try and set up
. This is a fantastic quality of life change. Your
Consume Flames will also heal for more than before due to the
Expanded Lungs buff, and new Fulminous Roar talent - this should balance out the loss of the powerful Season 1 tier set.
How much Haste do I need?
As Flameshaper you'll always play around your 90 second
Stasis timer since that's arguably our most powerful cooldown. We know we'll want two
charges for our
Stasis which means to get value from the new hasted cooldown we'll need to get enough of it that we can fit in two
casts between each
Stasis (on live we can only fit one). This occurs at 20% haste and so that's likely to be a goal in season 2. Any haste you get above that starts to waste the cooldown reduction portion again since you're not going to be able to use it anyway.
Flameshaper in Mythic+
Chronowarden has almost a perfect kit for Mythic+. It has an extra personal in
Warp, very good DPS via
Chrono Flame and an array of powerful healing options via buffs to our most powerful spells like
Spiritbloom and
Dream Breath. So Flameshaper has a steep hill to climb to viability. The changes are inarguably a decent upgrade but a lot of Flameshaper weaknesses are still there. Let's look at a few:
- AoE healing? Flameshaper can combine a Lifebind combo with to handle AoE damage in a very similar way to Chronowarden and with similar effectiveness.
- Emergency spot healing? Fairly tree agnostic since Reversion is Evokers best response to unexpected burst damage. Flameshaper can use in a similar role though it requires the target have a few HoTs to be any good.
- AoE damage? Flameshaper does ok here. The revamped gives you a lot of free Fire Breaths over a key.
- ST damage? A major Chronowarden strength and Flameshaper weakness. does pitiful single-target damage, Disintegrate loses damage compared to live and Chronowarden brings Chrono Flames and Afterimage.
- Defensives and Utility? Lifecinders is a powerful single target defensive and a Flameshaper highlight. Shape of Flame is also quite strong at negating tank damage on large pulls. Losing the extra defensive Warp brings is costly, however.
Flameshaper is definitely closer than it was, and if you enjoy the playstyle more then you're unlikely to have any issues with it at most key levels. It does still feel like an overall downgrade from Chronowarden which is a rather perfect fit for dungeon content.
Concerns
The Haste Conundrum
While the changes are definitely buffs, they do introduce a little bit of jank into our gearing.
Stasis is our second most powerful cooldown and we'd like to use it as close to every 90 seconds as possible. That means any cooldown reduction we get on
needs to similarly fit into this 90s rotation. This all works very well at 20% haste, but if a fight has 1:40 damage patterns instead then our breakpoint would be lower. It's awkward to need different haste levels to play each individual boss optimally. In reality you're more likely to just carry a bit more haste than you need but this doesn't feel great. Early in the season, you might also struggle to get anywhere near 20% haste without getting lucky drops or dropping item level.
Blink and Dream Breath is Gone!
One of the new talents, Fulminous Roar, causes your Dream Breath and
Fire Breath to tick more quickly but with a reduced duration. This increases how much
Consume Flame heals for which is good, but also makes it more difficult to play since your
Dream Breath runs out extremely fast. If you ever accidentally uprank it then you might miss
Consume Flame casts entirely. It also removes the possibility of using
Dream Breath a bit earlier than your
charges. In a patch focused on Flameshaper quality of life, this talent is a bit of a miss.
Blossom under a Lens
Emerald Blossom is getting the following interaction change in 11.1:
This is a fantastic change for the usability of
Emerald Blossom. Its usage in the more popular Echo-based builds was being quite heavily restricted since wasting your Echo buffs on
Emerald Blossom was a significant healing loss. You effectively could only cast the ability at specific moments in the fight - usually right after you'd consumed Echoes with another spell. You also couldn't cast an Echo-generating spell after your
Emerald Blossom or its delayed popping mechanic would consume them. Anything more and you were more likely to just play a full
Emerald Blossom build that didn't cast Echo at all. The spec was split in two and thus our talent tree was split likewise. Most tiers you just never cast a single
Emerald Blossom which is a shame when we have entire talent paths dedicated to the spell.
With the change, almost every talent in our tree becomes situationally viable. Will we see the populace swap over to them immediately? No probably not. It's more likely that you occasionally splash a point into
Cycle of Life or
Ouroboros but with the right tuning this spec just opened up immensely.
In dungeons,
Emerald Blossom has some other issues as a button. In less coordinated groups it can be difficult to hit all five people. Your talent points are also very restrained. It's possible it could see some use if we get a Khajin or Talixae Flamewreath-type boss where you're dealing with stacked, heavy rot for 4 minutes but it'll be incredibly niche.
Tier Set
2pc Bonus: Your healing spells have a chance to apply
Insurance!! to their targets that heals them over 15 seconds.
Insurance!! is consumed if any ally drops below 40% health to heal them.
4pc Bonus: Verdant Embrace always grants
Insurance!! to you and your target for 6 seconds and its cooldown is reduced by 4 seconds. Includes Echo'd
Verdant Embrace casts.
This was previously a fairly weak bonus since
Echo Verdant Embrace casts didn't apply
Insurance!. That has been changed in a recent build and now we should find it quite good. Chronowarden should find the set replaces the Season 1 bonus as a key part of its
Lifebind combo. Your
Lifebind will heal for less, but everyone you hit will have a 6s HoT so you'll do similar healing in a different way.
Flameshaper gets a more interesting decision. While the tree primarily Echoed
Reversion in season 1, it was fairly flexible and your
Echo never really drove the majority of your healing. In Season 2 you could swap to
Verdant Embrace instead with the tier set offering an extra 200-300k healing to each cast. However, if
Golden Hour provides particular value for a boss then
Reversion might remain dominant which means we'd be back to a weak tier set. The risk in our tier sets power being
so connected to Echoing a specific spell is that if it's not tuned well then the set is not very good.
In Mythic+ the set is more obviously good. You
Echo Verdant Embrace a lot already and adding both a HoT and a "heal if low" is very strong though you do wish the HoT ticked more often than every 3 seconds since even with haste you're only able to convert two ticks to
Lifebind healing (and you need 20% haste
again to even do that).
Podcast
Prominent Evokers Harrek and YouTee joined me to discuss the 11.1 changes if you'd like to hear various perspectives on the incoming changes.
