[00:02] ride since it's come out. In season 2 of Dragon Flight, it was broken, doing way too much damage, way too much utility, and allowing keys to get pushed to the moon. But then after that, it's still been meta. Well, all the way up until
[00:15] this season in the War Within season 2, where it's been gutted. How did this spec sit as meta for so long? And is there any way to save this support style DPS? My name's Bowser the healer and I think that the support DPS is actually a
[00:29] cornerstone of the MMO and I think I know how we can save it. So, let's talk about AUG and what we can do to keep it relevant in the game but without breaking it any more than it already has. For the uninitiated, AUG is a DPS
[00:42] spec that works on buffing other targets. So, they cast spells, they do their own damage, and their spells provide damage amplification for their personal damage and the damage of their teammates, you typically get one DPS
[00:55] worth of damage. Now, when it first came out, it was super overpowered. In season 2 of Dragonflight, it was tuned a little too well. Uh, it was doing way too much damage. Wasn't necessarily the play, but it's remained meta since then. And it
[01:10] was never really the damage as after they nerfed the damage back down to like planet Earth, the real problem was that it had too much utility. The most egregious of which was blistering scales and the draconic atunements. Blistering
[01:25] scales was typically put on a tank. It protects an ally with these explosive dragon scales that will explode periodically when auto attacked by mobs. This damage does count as the damage of the target that it's on. So this would
[01:38] help with say tank threat, but also it formerly gave 30% of the AUG's armor to that tank or to whoever you gave it to. Now it's down to 20%. And while armor
[01:50] Warcraft, so this example doesn't make sense if you don't play a whole lot of tank, but at 23,000 something bonus armor I would provide back when it was armor I would provide back when it was 30%. For brew master, that's roughly
[02:04] half of their armor value. But for prop warrior, my undergeeared warrior right now is at 154,000 armor. But still, getting a bonus 23,000 wasn't something you'd say no to. When you think about how much damage a tank can take and how
[02:19] big a pull can get, it really is. The more defense that they have, the bigger they can pull more easily or without just immediately falling over. So, blistering scales was pulling in a lot of weight for those specs. However,
[02:32] there was also the draconic atumins. This is essentially a stance bar that augmentation gets to have and you get two stances, black and bronze atunement. Bronze atunement gives you and your four nearest allies 10% increased movement
[02:45] speed. Black atunement provides you and your four nearest allies 2% increased maximum health. Now, this value used to be quite a bit larger. And then when you add to it the talent below the aspect's favor, right now it's a two-point
[02:59] talent. And when it's maxed out, you can get quite a lot of bonus health by pressing a defensive or get a bunch of bonus speed when hitting hover. While this isn't necessarily like broken on its own, this combined with the constant
[03:13] uptime of black atunement was so much extra living that you could push key levels far beyond anything that was possible beforehand. And that's sort of what's kept it meta. Even if the damage was subpar compared to other specs, as
[03:26] long as it was in the ballpark of being good enough, this defensive utility would allow you to do more dangerous pulls. And it doesn't matter if you're doing 10 or 15% less damage than the average DPS if you're able to do an
[03:38] entire extra pull or one less pull, excuse me, in a dungeon. You would save a lot of time. That has single-handedly been one of the biggest reasons AUG has been taken. It has access to the entire evoker utility and it has this utility
[03:54] along with it. And remember, the evoker side of the tree has a lot of really good stuff. I'm not going to go through all of this like in depth, but oppressing war is a 2-minute that increases crowd control duration by 50%
[04:07] on the targets that it's hit with. So, you can do really long sigil of silences, source of magic, and potent mana. Give the healer back mana and increase their damage in healing throughput by 3% raw. They have the best
[04:19] dispel in the game with cauterizing flame. It's a one minute cooldown that gets everything but magics including bleeds which is a very unique thing to have. Not to mention their standard dispell's poison. This means that
[04:31] level keys where you have to dispel and they're amazing on higher level keys effects that can go out and your AUG can take care of sometimes two of them which is a pretty big deal. And it doesn't stop there. I mean Zephyr is also one of
[04:46] the strongest too. A 2-minute cool down that reduces area of effect damage by 20%. Which is avoidance. 20% avoidance on essentially you and four other people, which is a whole party, is a ton of survivability. When you combine a
[05:00] vocer's tree with the augmentation side of things, it's easy to understand why this was meta for so long. Now, all of this brings about some anything is meta, there comes this sort of problematic side to things being
[05:16] meta. And you already know how this one goes. People felt they needed an AUG. higher keys, if you really wanted to push the limits, yes, an augmentation evoker would make the difference. So, you did need one pushing a world record.
[05:30] But outside of world record content, um, no you didn't. But not that anyone else in World of Warcraft knew. Plenty of pugs in tens and twelves or formerly 20s would be talking about how they absolutely need an AUG when just a few
[05:44] weeks ago we were clearing those 20s without an AUG. Even in the game at that point, this is in season 2 of Dragon Flight. This happened for multiple seasons. And then of course you get people in twos, today's twos, saying
[05:57] something along the lines of, "Oh, we need an AUG player." Then you get groups AUG player." So, if you're a casual player just trying to push yourself a people didn't want you because they thought AUG players weren't going to
[06:11] what they did. And because AUG was so overpowered in season 2, people didn't actually learn what made it good. So, there was this large population of play the new spec, who were trying to play the spec in later seasons where you
[06:25] had to be a bit better at it, not knowing how to play. So, you get the best and the worst of all of these worlds at different key levels. And I had. One of the biggest points though, and as a preservation player, I know
[06:38] people would get weird about having a preservation or devastation player in the same key as an Ugg because yeah, if you can bring more classes, you can typically true, there'd be nothing wrong with having two dragons in your party.
[06:53] But people would decline the devastation evokers because while they're good, they weren't metag was metag. So you're going to basically always pick the AUG. Furthermore, you're less likely to pick a preservation evoker with an AUG in the
[07:05] party already. And because all these keys want AUGs, you can see how this still got into plenty of keys as preservation or devastation, especially because I know what I'm looking for in a party, but not everyone does, and I
[07:18] understand why so many people got stuck on group finder because people do think that way. But I need to pause this for a second here. This isn't very fair to augmentation. This is a place to how the people have wanted for a while. I even
[07:31] got an interview with the lead designer of Evoker back when augmentation was Blizzard knows that players have wanted for a while. This support style DPS can
[07:43] be seen in so many other MMOs, and it's a cornerstone of those games. I'm talking things like Final Fantasy 11's Bard, Final Fantasy 14's Dancer, PSO2's Tekker, and even Monster Hunter with its ever popular hunting horn. And I think
[07:57] the hunting horn is a really great parallel. Its damage isn't as good as most weapons. It's close, but what it lacks in damage, it makes up for in the buffs in utility, like damage up, ear pugs for monster roars, wind negate to
[08:10] stop push backs, decreasing stamina usage. It can also knock out a monster for even more damage uptime for the group. I know so many people who love this weapon for that reason. It's fun to play with, and it can be tons of fun to
[08:24] play as yourself. This is an MMO staple that WoW has been missing. So, how do we fix it? Well, to start, I think blistering scales has to go. I think that talent in combination with the rest of the blistering scales talents just
[08:39] need a rework. Maybe this is new moves, new damage interactions or something. I think could go there. But, this is definitely too good and one of the main things that's too broken. The other side of this are the black and bronze atments
[08:52] from Draconic Attunements. And while I really like the stance, and I don't actually want to see it go, we do need to change what black atunement grants. One idea that was given to me was maybe making it crit chance, or maybe you make
[09:05] this some other stat like leech. I'm not sure if that really fits the the black dragonfly aesthetic, but something here changing would do a lot of wonders for making it more balanced. Now, the DPS in single target for augmentation is
[09:18] definitely lacking. And while AUG isn't necessarily simple, it could use more damage and features for a player to react to and interact with as a DPS. And hey, we only have one essence spender and it's mostly AoE. What if we made a
[09:34] single to two target bronze magic spender? There's not a lot of offensive bronze magic in the game outside of Breath of Eons and I guess technically Chronoflames. It'd be nice to see a bronze themed damage ability here. So,
[09:46] I'm wondering if maybe that's the play. make some more damage interactions, make little more interesting. Give them some more variance as to what they can do as DPS, let alone buffing others. Yeah, I
[09:58] think AUG is simple when you put all the pieces together, but I do know that for little boring and not everyone enjoys just staring at buff bars. So maybe this is a good way to kind of meet in the middle. The mastery side of augmentation
[10:13] is a little weird. Essentially, your buffs are increased by mastery sometimes your hover is just lasting longer than it would on say preservation or dev. But shifting sands was that when
[10:26] you cast an empowered spell, you would give out a shifting sands buff. So, I have 6% mastery right now. That means when I hit my empowered spell, it picks the closest DPS to me with eb and might and it will give them 6% versatility
[10:40] matching my mastery. This is cool, but ultimately I think really hard to scale. It puts OG in a weird spot for what kind of stats it even wants and what it wants to grab. I think scaling would be a little bit easier if shifting sands was
[10:53] just based off of main stat, maybe a passive in the tree, and instead you increased your buff durations, and maybe gain some personal damage or resource neat to keep mastery a little more balanced, add to the stat variety of
[11:07] augmentation without necessarily giving it some hardcore scaler that I know is difficult to balance. There's no way that mastery isn't hard to balance. And I think this is a good way to tackle it. And remember, even if we get rid of all
[11:20] this utility, augmentation still has a couple of tricks up its sleeve. One of which is its unbelievably cool uh cheap death defy fate. Fatal attacks are diverted to into a nearby timeline, preventing the damage and your death in
[11:33] this one. While this has a 6-minute cool down, what a cool, flavorful cheat death. I like that they have this. And their main big damaging move, upheaval, is a knockup. And what makes this move so cool is the more you charge it up,
[11:47] the bigger the knockup is, and it always sends enemies slightly in to its center. and you have a little bit more crowd control. Knock-ups don't have any diminishing returns. So, the entire team can use all their knockups together, and
[12:01] suddenly doesn't fly into the air. So, I actually think this is the perfect augmentation without them being completely broken. You could be ridiculous and give, say, your healer a
[12:14] little mini blood lust when you yourself get a blood lust with plot the future, but that might be a little too strong. But, I don't know. I'd take I'd take my free little mini blood lust as a healer. But there are other ways to add utility
[12:26] that affect the damage side of things or the healer damage side of things and not necessarily breaking the entire damage profile of the dungeon making OG scale out of control. Again, final note, I want more DPS like OG. I love this trope
[12:41] want more DPS like OG. I love this trope in MMOs. I love dancer and bard and tech and yes, the hunting horn. I love my hunting horn friends. I firmly believe that OG can sit in a fine place like most DPS and still be a part of this
[12:55] super cool DPS archetype that we find in the MMO. I'd like to hear your thoughts, but please try to keep them civil and constructive down below. But that's all so so much for listening to me rant about this one. Another couple of
[13:09] want to watch those, hey, get subscribed. They mean a lot to me. Take subscribed. They mean a lot to me. Take care, friends. I'll see you all soon.