How Is Augmentation Doing in the Midnight Beta?

[00:02] augmentation evoker in the midnight beta. This is mostly a good news update. There's a lot of really positive things to bring to all of your attention about how the spec is performing in the beta. This is mostly mythic plusoriented.

[00:15] However, if you raid on AUG, I'm sure you're going to get a good amount out of this video. I don't want to waste too much of your time. So, real quick, we're come from the war within that people might have missed. the Apex talents, the

[00:29] critique that I have that would make OG feel a lot better. Real quick, hey, this lot to me if you got subscribed. effort videos where I just talk at the camera and I have some gameplay on

[00:43] these just cuz it's a little bit easier to get videos out like this. And my second channel is about to get very experimental. So, I figured I would want to post this kind of content here. So, I hope you enjoy it and let's dive right

[00:56] into it. Okay, real quick before I talk damage numbers. This is a beta. The We're not going to know the final balance until basically the week of Mythic Plus opening at midnight. So, try not to overthink this stuff too much.

[01:08] That being said, I tested a lot of stat weights. Let's just get this one out of Commander play the same. As in, if you run high mastery, high crit on Chrono It'll feel smooth as butter. It's all about playing with your allies. If you

[01:22] commander, crit haste, some versatility in later seasons. Bada bing, bada boom, blow up the enemies. I'm so happy to report that the play styles are not only viable, but seem to be operating relatively close to each other, give or

[01:35] take player damage, it's very hard to tell how much you're buffing people with your mastery. In the beta, when everyone's damage is all over the place, they're still learning specs for the first time. Maybe they're playing fire

[01:47] or they don't have the correct stats. It's just it's a bit of a mess. So, you kind of have to go off of the functionality, but from what I can tell, It'll be very similar to the way it feels right now in The War Within for

[02:00] both play styles, which is fantastic. Now, next up on our list to talk about is Chrono Scale Commander in terms of their new talents. Chrono Warden, they kept it very safe. You get 30 seconds off your tip the scales. Temporal burst

[02:13] grants you an essence burst every 6 seconds. Uh, your preions last 15% longer. Chron flames now does more damage and healing uh based on like the Pression's cool down is reduced by 2 seconds and it grants 1% additional

[02:28] critical strike chance. So it does mean you can get up to 8% when it doubles on double time which is pretty cool. So chron players um rejoice. It's more good news for you. Scale commander players, I'm very sad to report I didn't pay

[02:41] enough attention as to command squadron. I don't know if my squad was landing with me and firing pyers or if they only fired py in the air. You also get mass eruption strikes another target and essence abilities deal 15% additional

[02:54] damage. They kept it very safe on scale commander but in my opinion that's wrong about either of the play styles. They both felt unique and very cool. There were however a lot of changes to the talent tree. Some of which are just

[03:08] is set up. So, you might want to go over to the talent calculator over on WoW Head and play around with a few things, but there's a lot of nice quality of life changes like ignition rush. Essence burst reduced the cast time of eruption

[03:21] by 20% or 40% and increases his damage by 20%. It's a pretty loaded talent and possibility has moved where it used to be. And modes of possibility did get updated. And if you missed it, the modes now chase people. That was a the war

[03:35] within change, I'm pretty sure. One of my favorite changes here, regenerative kitan now says blistering scales no longer loses charges and deals 20% more damage. This is such a blessing. This means you could just put the blistering

[03:48] round starts, when the dungeon starts, and it's just doing its job. Fantastic. You kind of get this ball of fire over your head when you receive the buff and then uh that player starts doing these like living flames out of the top of

[04:03] their head after they do an attack. It's very cool. I love the new Inferno's less of just an invisible stat. It's actually like doing something cool. I really like this. One of the biggest changes to me and really helps me out is

[04:17] Molten Embers. It used to be that your black damage was increased based on having a fire breath on the target. The empower level of your fire breath would increase how much damage they take. That is no longer the case. It is now just

[04:29] 25% all of the time. This does have a really neat interaction with our apex part, it means that the flexibility of your fire breath now depends on what you want to use it for. If you want to fit a full fire breath into a breath of eons,

[04:43] to die, you'll want to charge it up. But if there's a pre-existing fire breath on the target from, say, your duplicate, your apex talent, now thankfully, you could go, "Oh, I can full charge this because I have plenty of time to work

[04:57] going to allow for some neat optimizations. It's a lot more flexible and it's simpler as well so that a new player won't be so lost as to how to best play this talent. It makes sense on the tin, which I am a huge fan of. And

[05:11] build diversity potentially in the bottom of the tree for how we want to experimenting to those of you who wish to theory craft as I'm kind of playing did in the war within here just to test its relevance. I'm very happy to report

[05:27] that this kind of very basic setup that I'm running sometimes running plot the future uh is feeling really good on both ChronoBarden and Scale Commander. Now, let's talk about these juicy juicy Apex talents. First of all, duplicate. Breath

[05:42] of Eon summons a version of you from the future to assist you in battle lasting 20 seconds. Your duplicate casts eruption, fire breath, and upheaval. That upheaval does knock up. The fire breath does count from mold numbers and

[05:55] the eruptions still hit the exact same way you expect them to. The fire breath upheaval, I think, is always level three. Don't quote me on that. I just remember the size of the circle being massive. I wonder if the AI is actually

[06:08] making the circle the size it needs to be. That'd be extremely cool. But your duplicate is blasting for you. And 20 seconds is kind of nice, but it's way nicer than 20 seconds. During your Eban might window, you're going to get 100%

[06:20] duplicate. And then up here for two points anytime you extend Eban might, your duplicate is also extended equal to 100% of the amount you extended Eban might by. For Chronowarden players, I

[06:33] a minute and 20 to a minute and 40 seconds of my duplicate. I'm not kidding. It is that much fun. It is that strong. That means you're giving out 100% bonus stats the whole time. You're getting all this extra damage. It feels

[06:47] incredible. Scale Commander on the other hand, yeah, you don't get to extend it quite as long, but you can get some really, really long extensions. And then your Breath of Eons is off cooldown, and they felt actually very comparable. I

[06:59] think I technically got more duplicates off with scale commander, but there's a think their up times are pretty comparable, there's time gets truncated in a dungeon, right? like the time we spend walking from one pull to another

[07:13] or dealing with RP is time for our cooldowns to come off cooldown and time that Chrono warden can't easily extend its duplicate. However, I don't think trying to get more stats out with its duplicate while scale commander is

[07:26] trying to get out more damage with their duplicate and I think that plays well there's this many play style differences between Chronal Warden and Scale Commander is truly a blessing and that you have so much variation to play with

[07:39] as an AUG player. So, it's mostly good news. I don't have a lot of bad things have a talent that says that your glide speed and height is increased by 20%. That talent is bonkers. That's going to feel really good in dungeons. You go

[07:53] flying. But, okay, I do have some critique for Augg. And the critique for And I don't want us to get too mad at Blizzard here because it does involve the damage meters and the damage meters are still a work in progress. So, I'm

[08:06] does need to be addressed. You still don't know how much you're buffing your allies by at all. And it's very, very annoying because since the dawn of time with augmentation, you've always had to look at logs to see just how much damage

[08:19] you're actually doing or helping the party with. Now, you can estimate a really well and you know the dungeons really well, but if you're like me and you pug, you just don't know without checking a log. And in beta, it gets

[08:34] reason this is so important is that Blizzard's moving towards this less add-ons, less UI management stuff. Like all of the features are baked into the game so that anyone who's playing World of Warcraft will have the tools for

[08:48] success and then we can use add-ons to further enhance our experience the way that we might want to. Right now with the base experience for augmentation, logs to understand if you're doing good or not. Because the floating combat

[09:01] text, while it's amazing, I love seeing my stats be given out. The versatility get given out. And of course, the timer extensions on Eb and Might are always that demon hunter did based on what they would have done with or without my Eban

[09:15] might and my shifting sands. That would be really cool data to know. If I could see that, that'd be great. Fate Mirror and Infernal Blessing will show the damage that I'm doing. Blistering scales as well. They'll kind of show the damage

[09:27] that my teammates are doing with those buffs for me. And maybe from a coding perspective, it's impossible for me to know on the fly how much damage that Demon Hunter did extra because of me. But I do know we could show that on the

[09:40] bars. I don't think AUG needs to be on top of a meter ever just because of the nature of it buffing others. you want the other people to be above the AUG in look down at the meters and see how much the AUG is providing visually because

[09:56] getting buffed. They're doing extra damage, but everyone would know the AUG's contributions at a glance. Because in the week where we were kind of broken on the beta, I was in this Algathar and I should have the footage on screen for

[10:09] you right now, unless I lost it. And in this footage, I don't know how good I'm doing. My damage feels a little low. Scale Commander is a little clunky in nailing everything and sometimes it feels like I got it kind of wrong. How

[10:22] much did that impact my damage? Well, I don't know. Uh really hard to tell because it looks like I'm doing tank damage and in some cases worse. And then when you look at the logs, I did the most damage in this run. Like I was top

[10:34] DPS. Okay, now we're in the week where I'm nerfed. Okay, fine. I'm testing my numbers. I'm trying things. I look like I'm doing no damage. I don't look like I'm doing very well. [music] and I'm still keeping up with my teammates and

[10:47] doing okay damage. You just don't know until the run is over and you upload a log. And I think that's a problem. I'd like to compare it to tank and healer for a moment. Other DPS obviously you pop a cool down, you get more procs, you

[10:59] get more damage. You might notice that or feel that. But on a tank, you know when your taunt is running out or your threat is running low because players notice that you're losing threat. the

[11:12] your teammates. And that's not something that you want. So, it's the threat of threat falling off that keeps the tank wanting to blast so that they can maintain the threat so that their team can do damage safely, right? You can

[11:25] feel that interaction. Healers literally heal health bars, right? So, you can tell when someone's dying and you can know what it's like to heal them up and heal people very smoothly versus when it's an emergency and you're panicking.

[11:38] Defensives, you obviously feel right. You can watch your health bar go down slower during a pulsing AoE. You feel the impact. OUG, you feel every part of its skill expression and impact, but the bonus damage that you grant to your

[11:51] allies. You can feel the timers, you can feel the buffs, you can notice that you are giving out these things to people, and that feels good. And the gameplay loop of Aug and the skill expression being about timers, windows, helping

[12:04] people do damage is incredible. And it feels great up until the point where you don't know what your teammates did. But again, the damage meters are not done. So, there's a very real chance here that these things get addressed and we

[12:17] eventually get to see that damage on the meters. And I'm hoping for it because I think that'll be what helps new players know what AUG does and more experienced impact is on the fly without having to do a deep log analysis later. Okay, the

[12:32] final suggestion that I have for OUG is definitely a maybe because I could see this getting abused, but when a DPS dies in your party and you're in a dungeon, you feel useless. I mean, you are no longer giving eb and might to that

[12:46] to your tank or your healer due to changes in the war within. Therefore, your team is doing substantially less damage. Now, I sometimes wonder if this is too harsh on an AUG player and they can't clutch up, as I have definitely

[12:59] watched it happen in my groups before where you lose too much time to a single DPS dying. I think it could be potentially very fun if the AUG is allowed to eb and mite the tank and the healer under the conditions that a DPS

[13:13] has died. Eban might has like a 100 something yard range and it goes through walls. So, it's not like you'll be able to cheese it by just keeping a player out of range. They'd have to be significantly out of range to not get

[13:25] the healer and the tank to do more damage with Evan might or maybe more healing in a scenario where you do lose a player. Could be a nice way to allow for some clutch factor without it being like, "Hey, give the AUG a 20% damage

[13:39] boost when a DPS dies." Like that could potentially have some cheese to it that would be bad for the game or potentially used to abuse a boss or something like that. So something like that could be nice. your shifting sands can already

[13:51] hit a healer or a tank, but it requires a DPS to not be in range or to be dead. But just a food forthought moment because realistically other than that, I don't got a lot of notes for OG. No, like seriously, it's fun. It's fun in

[14:05] underperforming. And in Midnight, it's looking like it's going to play in very fun ways. I like that Chrono Warden feels viable. I like that scale that both of these play styles will be available and how they interact with

[14:19] duplicate will remain truly unique. I'd love to know your thoughts on AUG and whether you've been able to play it yourself or if you're just an onlooker you're an AUG player in the War Within right now and don't have access to the

[14:33] because it happens every single AUG video. Please stop saying it should have a tank spec. Please stop coming here and being like it should just be a normal DPS. Stop it. Aug is its own unique thing now. It's out. If you want a tank

[14:46] spec for evoker, they should make a fourth spec. That'd be cooler, wouldn't have for you all today. Thank you all so, so much for watching. And hey, I will see you all in the next one. Take care, friends.