Earlier today, we covered a 20-second Heroic Rashok kill and in this post, our Augmentation Evoker guide writer Saeldur explains how raid stacking works with the new spec.

Our Unholy & Frost Death Knight Guide Writer Bicepspump just organized a Raid with 2 Unholy Death Knights and 22 Augmentation Evokers nearly instantly killing every boss, so we thought we would highlight the Raid and spend some time explaining what happened…

Kazzara Kill Clip

How Augmentation Evoker Works

Augmentation Evokers deal damage primarily with the buffs they place on other Raid members. They have 5 effects that increase the damage of other Raid members: Ebon Might, Shifting Sands, Prescience, Fate Mirror, and Breath of Eons. These multipliers all boost different stats and therefore are multiplicative on the final damage output of the buffed DPS classes.

Ebon Might provides 10% (11% with 4pc) of the Augmentations Intelligence to up to 4 allies, Shifting Sands provides up to around 20% Versatility, Prescience provides 3% Critical Strike Chance and also gives them the ability to proc Fate Mirror which is a 20% chance on every damage event to deal 15% of the damage dealt, and Breath of Eons which is a debuff on the enemy that accumulates 15% of the damage dealt during 10 seconds (increased by Augmentations Mastery, usually ~12.5 seconds) then deals it as a large hit when the debuff expires.

Augmentation Evokers buffs fully stack with other Augmentation Evokers with each increasing the size of each of those five multipliers resulting in adding more Augmentations to have exponential damage scaling with each other.
This means every single Augmentation added that buffs the same two DPS increases the value of every other Augmentation buffing the same DPS!

Each Augmentation Evoker can have up to two Prescience buffs at any time. This is important because Ebon Might prefers to go on allies with Prescience, Shifting Sands prefers to go on allies with Ebon Might, and Breath of Eons only works with allies with Ebon Might. This means your Prescience effectively controls who receives all five of your buffs and this is why you have two DPS carries who receive every buff.

Fate Mirror procs from every Augmentation Evoker contribute to Breath of Eons damage as it is dealt by the buffed DPS player not the Augmentation and it was whitelisted in a recent hotfix to count for Breath of Eons. This is a concern because Breath of Eons itself can trigger Fate Mirror procs which can feed into future Breath of Eons further cascading the damage boost.

This is an example of the stats that Bicepspump had during his Rashok kill demonstrating the insane amount of stats his character has:

Finally, there are currently some issues with the combat log hooks in the game which means Warcraft Logs cannot appropriately attribute the damage being dealt. Currently, pets do not work at all with combat hooks so the Unholy Death Knights got to keep all of the damage their buffed pets were doing massively inflating their logs.

What does this mean for the game?

As it stands the best Raid composition for damage is having as many Augmentation Evokers as possible replacing all other DPS classes except for your two carries, potentially even replacing tanks on some fights because of Blistering Scales being stacked on the DPS players making them strong enough to tank the boss for the short duration each fight will live for.

The only fights that the Raid Bicepspump organized had any issues with were Amalgamation Chamber, Neltharion, and Sarkareth and they only had issues because both fights have damage reductions when they phased stopping them from outright instantly killing the bosses.

Clearly, this is an issue to have in the game as it currently works because as long as it is an option people will abuse it.

How to fix this

If Augmentation Evoker was balanced around stacking them without adjusting how it works mechanically then they would have to be so much weaker when played normally which would make it weak and undesirable for most people that don’t stack insane numbers of Augmentations so this isn’t an option.

The main issue comes from having multiple Ebon Might, Shifting Sands, and Breath of Eons on a DPS so capping this in some form is likely the best way to achieve balance.
You could stop this by limiting the number of Prescience buffs a DPS player can have as normally Ebon Might would not stack without Prescience buffs but this would likely make the specialization feel more awkward to play in Raids if your Prescience refuses to cast or confusing if it goes onto another DPS player than you chose as this is one of the few buffs you have control over.

In my opinion, the best way to get the best of both balance and gameplay feel would be to cap the number of Ebon Might buffs Prescience allows you to have on a single DPS player to 2 or 3 at most. Any further Ebon Might casts would seek out other DPS players without Ebon Might over-buffing the same player.
This helps to hide the limitation in a more natural way without making you feel bad while playing but stops degenerate gameplay with Augmentation being stacked without impacting any other forms of content than Raiding.

Finishing Thoughts

This was a fun Raid to watch live and helped demonstrate a lot of the issues currently plaguing Augmentation Evokers from both a logs perspective and how it functions in a Raid.
What do you think about the Raid and what do you think Blizzard should do about Augmentation Evoker?

If you’d like to watch the entire run yourself then you can watch the VOD or check out Bicepspump on YouTube where he should have highlights of the run coming up later today and has plenty of other Death Knight content if that appeals to you as well!

If you would like to look through the logs of the raid yourself then they are available here.