Blizzard’s new specialisation, the augmentation evoker, has continued to fire up the sport’s meta in bizarre and attention-grabbing methods. It acts as a assist DPS, with most of its injury coming from buffs to its allies—a very new playstyle for an MMO approaching its twentieth birthday.
It is tremendous highly effective—almost vital for high-level content material. But it has been inflicting spats in lower-level teams as a result of DPS meter weirdness and the inevitable baggage of a pick-up-group neighborhood used to their private efficiency being precedence primary.
This bumpy introduction continues with a zany experiment documented by WoWhead. Information author, evoker specialist, and streamer Jereico has been cooking up a hotfix-causing strat, bringing two dying knights right into a raid with 22 augmentation evoker cheerleaders to assist them soften face. It isn’t even an exploit, technically—only a deadly flaw in how the courses are designed.
Of their full breakdown of the strat, WoWHead’s Squishei explains: “every Augmentation Evoker scales multiplicatively while you add extra Evokers throughout [their burst phase].” On their very own, their talents are highly effective, however not a lot to put in writing dwelling about. Stacked collectively, nonetheless, the injury will get nuts.
It is because bonuses from Ebon Would possibly, Shifting Sands and Prescience—which buff Mind, Versatility, and Crit respectively—create a swell of injury that is all multiplicative. Destiny Mirror additionally provides an opportunity for every spell or potential to deal 15% of its injury once more.
This all folds into Breath of Eons, which retains a 10-second tally of the injury your ally offers to a goal, then offers 15% of that injury as a crucial hit. In the event you’ve simply acquired one Augmentation Evoker, this clearly is not a giant deal: the difficulty is scaling.
On this case, that ally is having fun with 22 large multiplicative boosts to their base injury, 15% of which is often fed again into the loop. This racks up an absurd quantity of ache throughout their very own burst home windows, which may push their DPS previous ten million.
To make issues worse, that colossal injury burst then will get echoed for 15% of its complete injury in a ten second window by 22 gamers abruptly. Add all of it collectively and also you get the next face-melt of Kazzara the Hellforged, which is the primary boss of the Aberrus raid in World of Warcraft: Dragonflight.
Seems having 22 Augmentation Evokers in a single raid is fairly good. I am right here for this new meta. 💪 pic.twitter.com/2ALKyg7MtQJuly 16, 2023
Trying on the battle on Warcraft Logs and sorting the battle by period throws it into even starker perspective. Under the blisteringly quick 24 second augmentation-zerg runs, the following highest kill pace is 1:44, with most skilled raiders killing Heroic Kazzara in round two minutes.
Within the full video, this combo goes on to chew its method by means of the complete raid on Heroic problem, slaughtering most bosses in beneath half a minute. The one factor that stops this deathball are transitions when the bosses turn into immune or extremely resistant to break—in any other case, it is a bloodbath.
That is clearly not meant, and we are able to assume a patch is already within the works. It isn’t fairly so simple as stopping stacking totally, although—that simply trades one design challenge for one more, soft-capping the quantity of augmentation evokers one can convey to a raid. Whether or not or not WoW’s new assist DPS play model will survive its teething issues is but to be seen, however I am wanting ahead to seeing what else the neighborhood can obtain.
