Augmentation Evokers, a third Evoker spec, has just seen its first weekly reset. Unfortunately, Blizzard Entertainment doesn’t have anything special for them, only nerfs and you can blame World of Warcraft streamers for this.
On July 18, WoW devs shipped a new round of Patch 10.1.5 hotfixes and, for the first time ever, Augmentation Evokers are on the list. In total, Blizzard changed and tweaked three features, but the biggest change by far is that Augmentation Evokers’ buffs don’t stack infinitely anymore. Instead, a single player will now benefit from a maximum of “four each of the Ebon Might, Prescience, and Shifting Sands effects.”
Although Augmentation Evokers have been incredibly powerful in Mythic+ dungeons when paired with Fire Mages and Shadow Priests, the real reason why Augmentation Evokers have a cap now is the fact that streamers started stacking Augmentation Evokers in raids and one-shotting Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible bosses. In one instance, WoW player and streamer Jereico brought 22 Augmentation Evokers with only two Unholy Death Knights and the result was that these two lucky Death Knights reached the record-breaking 13 million DPS.
After reading these nerfs, players commented in a post on WoW’s subreddit from July 18 that this was entirely expected, especially after Unholy Death Knights reached the numbers we should be all just dreaming about in Dragonflight. The players suggest that four Augmentation Evokers per raid is actually a very balanced number:
“4 DPS and 4 augments will still work fine without any issues with buffs not stacking. That means that on a full raid of 20 people you could have 10 Augmentation players and you’d not have issues with buff stacking. Now of course a lot of these people will be tanks and healers so some of it goes to ‘waste.’ But realistically, you can throw like 5 Augmentation Evokers into a raid group and there’s no problem,” explained one WoW player.
This is surely a step forward in the right direction, but Blizzard still has to address the state of Augmentation Evokers in Mythic+ dungeons because there isn’t a single high-end run without them. As a result, other classes like Warlocks and Hunters are struggling to find a spot in Myhtic+ group, making the meta feel like it’s stale and boring to play.
