Augmentation Evoker blew the community away when it arrived during Dragonflight, as the first true support specialization that World of Warcraft had ever seen. The War Within’s release has refined that formula further, so we’ve prepared this complete guide that covers everything you need to know.
Outside of being the only support in the game, Augmentation is also shockingly good in its allotted DPS role, to the point where several will likely be included in World First raid race teams. For those who have yet to sample precisely what it’s all about, it really does follow a unique playstyle.
In the first instance, the immense damaging abilities of the Black Dragonflight allow players to scorch the battlefield with impressive AoE and single-target output. Many of the spec’s support abilities come from the Bronze Dragonflight, and it’s via cohesive usage of both that you will truly excel while playing Augmentation.
With that in mind, read on for everything you need to know about getting the most out of your Augmentation Evoker.
Augmentation Evoker Class changes in The War Within
Unsurprisingly, for a spec that was performing with such brutal efficiency in the previous expansion, Augmentation did get a few nerfs for the launch of The War Within. Happily for existing players, however, there are almost no changes that will make a tangible difference to how you play in PvE or PvP.
The biggest thing to be aware of is the addition of Molten Embers, a new capstone talent that emphasizes keeping Fire Breath up as much as possible. When you do so, Molten Embers offers a 20% boost to damage that comes from Black spells, and it should make a notable difference to your output if you play around it.
Outside of that, it’s important to be aware of Sense Power, a new toggle ability that gives a visual indicator to allies who have cooldowns active. It will allow you to track when others in your group are doing big damage bursts to ensure they are in the best state for maximum output.
Augmentation Evoker talents, Hero Talents, and build
The Evoker tree that we build below contains much of the utility that the Evoker has become famous for as a class. This includes notable healing abilities like Verdant Embrace, cleanses in the form of Expunge, and damage resist via Obsidian Scales.
There is also significant crowd control in this tree via Landslide and Oppressing Roar, as well as crucial passive stat and damage buffs using nodes like Draconic Legacy and Instinctive Arcana.
The end nodes of the tree grant us two abilities that should feature heavily in situations where your extra role as a support comes to the fore. Spatial Paradox is immensely useful, granting movement while casting and increasing spell range by 100% for both the player and a friendly healer. This comes in particularly useful during Mythic+, where there are a ton of floor hazards to look out for this season.
With the prevalence of Fire Breath in achieving success as an Augmentation Evoker, we have also opted into several nodes that improve its efficacy. These include Blast Furnace, which buffs the damage-over-time effect, and Leaping Flame, which causes Living Flame to strike one additional mob per empower level after casting Fire Breath.
The Augmentation tree is where the real fun begins as a DPS player, but the whole tree starts with another support node in the Ebon Might keystone. This leads to Eruption, which will serve as one of the crux abilities in your outgoing damage rotation, which we then further buff via the Richeting Pyroclast passive node, which brings further destruction in an AoE setting.
In the next tier of the tree, we get access to two of our major active use damage abilities. The first is Breath of Eons, which accumulates damage from allies affected by Ebon Might before discharging it in a brutal salvo. The other is Upheaval, which shoots enemies up in the air, before bringing them back down for solid damage.
As the tree continues, we build into essence buffs as well as buffs to individual abilities and stats more generally. This then leads to further active use abilities that are much more geared towards Augmentation support.
The first is Blistering Scales, which increases an ally’s armor and allows them to cause explosive damage every time they are hit by an enemy. Draconic Attunements allows us to choose a buff for four nearby allies, increasing Maximum Health by 2% or Movement Speed by 10%
The rest of the tree is heavily geared towards buffing Essence Burst when it is used, as well as Eruption and the relationship between the two. The best example of this is Ignition Rush, which reduces the cast time of Eruption by 40%, which can make a significant difference when avoiding complex mechanics and maximizing damage output.
The big nodes to look out for at the end of the tree are Interwoven Threads and Molten Embers. The former offers a universal spell cooldown reduction of 10%, which is huge for getting the most out of our rotation. Molten Embers causes enemies to take 20% increased damage from Black Dragonflight spells after they are hit by Fire Breath.
Hero Talents
Despite how impressive Scalecommander was during the initial part of The War Within beta, Chronowarden has overtaken it as the best Hero Talent tree for Augmentation, in both raids and Mythic+. Though it requires you to be more attentive to buffs and knowledgable about how your abilities synthesize, the payoff is well worth it if you get it right.
As with many of the other Hero Talent trees in the game right now, Chronowarden is largely set in its design, with three choice nodes for players to use in buildcrafting. The first of those allows us to choose between Temporality and Motes of Acceleration. We’ve gone for the former, as the damage reduction is much more useful than the movement speed in most scenarios.
In the second slot, we have gone with Double-time over Time Convergence. Double-time gives Ebon Might and Prescience the chance to grant 50% additional stats. This chance is equal to our Critical Strike percentage, which takes reasonably high precedence in our overall stat priority for the spec.
The last choice node allows us to choose between Master of Destiny and Instability Matrix. In most scenarios, you’ll want to take the latter as it reduces the cooldown of empower spells by 6 seconds every time we cast one (which is regularly).
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Scalecommander isn’t currently that far behind in the overall landscape and, with some relatively minor tuning, it could become the Hero Talent tree of choice. If that does happen, or you want to give it a go anyway, there is a standout way to build into its overall theme.
All three choice nodes appear at the end of the tree, just before the Capstone talent. The first slot allows us to choose between two damage-reduction abilities. The best option here is Hardened Scales, because we will use Obsidian Scales more frequently than knock-up abilities.
In the second slot, we went for Extended Battle over Diverted Power. The former extends Bombardments by 1 second for each essence ability that we use, providing a much more reliable and consistent benefit during general play.
The final slot is clearly better used by building into Nimble Flyer. This reduces floor-based AoE damage by 10% when hovering and gives us a regular mitigator in Mythic+ and raiding. Deep Breath isn’t really worth taking, as Hover’s cooldown rarely presents any significant issues in our rotation.
Stat priority
Happily, Augmentation Evoker stat priority remains consistent, regardless of what activity type you are playing or which Hero Talent tree you are built into. The Primary stat to look out for when grinding for new gear is always Intellect, mainly thanks to its relationship with Ebon Might and the frequency with which we use that ability.
From there, you’ll want to pursue a secondary stat priority as follows:
- Mastery
- Critical Strike
- Haste
- Versatility
Critical Strike provides us with a chance at double damage from spells (in this case), and it’s always useful to have as a DPS with a high-volume rotation. There is one fascinating extra relationship when playing Augmentation, in which the Sands of Time passive talent causes other spells to have a chance at extending the duration of Ebon Might by an additional 50%.
Haste is great because it reduces the overall cast time required for all of our spells. It also adds additional ticks to any of our DoT effects, as well as reducing the Global Cooldown of all abilities. This is most useful for squeezing in extra goes at our staple damage-dealing options.
Mastery: Timewalker grants Shifting Sands to one ally every time we cast an empower spell. This then grants them a 3% Versatility increase for 10 seconds, with the system automatically favoring DPS players. It also extends the duration of many of our ally buffing abilities and should help maintain our damage across lengthier encounters.
Versatility is the most all-round of the Secondary stat options, but it isn’t compelling enough at what it does to prioritize as an Augmentation Evoker. It improves damage and healing, also reducing incoming damage taken, so don’t abandon it entirely when balancing your stats.
Rotation
The big thing that you need to do as an Augmentation player is to maintain the appropriate buffs on the DPS and Tank players. This amounts to casting Prescience on two other DPS players and Blistering Scales on the Tank for the additional damage reduction. Aside from that you’ll want to follow this general rotation:
- Prescience
- Blistering Scales
- Ebon Might
- Breath of Eons
- Tip the Scales
- Living Flame
- Fire Breath
- Upheaval
- Eruption
- Living Flame
Essentially, we are using Tip the Scales to set ourselves up for our damage burst phase, after we have set the group up with buffs. We then hit our major abilities while using Living Flame to fill in any potential cooldown-related gaps that may pop up during the rotation.
Don’t forget there are plenty of additional utility abilities that you should add in to the rotation when needed. The most obvious example of this is Azure Strike, though there are others that can come in useful in group PvE content.
Augmentation Evoker Tier Set breakdown
Tier Sets are powerful armor collections for each class, that offer specific bonuses when 2 and 4 pieces of the set are equipped. For Augmentation Evoker players, you can pick up the Scales of the Awakened, which provide the following bonuses when equipped.
- 2-Piece Set – Every third Prescience lasts 100% longer.
- 4-Piece Set – Casting Prescience enhances your next Eruption with smaller fissures for each Prescience you have active, each dealing (110% of Spell power) damage and extending Ebon Might by 0.2 sec.
The buff to Prescience’s duration actually results in a tangible improvement to your outgoing damage. The additional uptime should allow you to keep it up consistently and use it more opportunistically.
The 4-Piece bonus is the more interesting of the two, allowing us to get even more mileage out of Eruption. Prescience Fissures stack up to five times and, in combination with the 2-Piece bonus, you’re looking at around a 10% boost to outgoing damage (as first calculated by Wowhead).
Gems and Enchants
As has been the case in many of the recent WoW expansions, there are a series of Enchants that are significantly outperforming the competition. With that in mind, the best choices to go for in each slot are as follows:
| Slot | Best Enchant |
| Weapon | Enchant Weapon – Authority of Radiant Power |
| Cloak | Enchant Cloak – Chant of Winged Grace |
| Chest | Enchant Chest – Crystalline Radiance |
| Bracers | Enchant Bracer – Chant of Armored Avoidance |
| Legs | Sunset Spellthread |
| Boots | Enchant Boots – Defender’s March |
| Ring – Regular | Enchant Ring – Radiant Mastery |
| Ring – Cursed | Enchant Ring – Cursed Mastery |
Enchant Weapon – Authority of Radiant Power is the big one to look out for here. Every time you deal damage, it has a chance to proc, offering massive single-target damage and a sizeable, temporary increase to your primary stat.
The rest of our slots are again used to increase our output as much as possible. Crystalline Radiance does a lot of the heavy lifting in the chest slot, permanently increasing our Primary stat by 745. The rest of our Enchants are more focused on Secondary stat buffs, including Mastery. We also have some nice Stamina increases and some positive backing for our Avoidance stat.
That’s the complete guide! To see exactly how the Augmentation Evoker is performing right now, make sure to check out our DPS tier list. If you fancy a change of scenery, we have also done the same for the Healer and Tank players.
