World of Warcraft: Dragon Flight has been a well-received expansion so far; now the Fractures in Time update delves deeper into some of the mysteries of the Bronze Dragonflight. The heroes, along with their dragon allies, have arrived at the ancestral home of the Dragon Islands, only to discover that trouble has been brewing beneath the surface for 10,000 years. The Fractures in Time patch unfurls a nefarious new plot from the Infinite Dragonflight, but players will have new tools to fight back – including a new and unprecedented player specialization.
Long time World of Warcraft players know that the game works on the holy trinity of tank, healer and damage. Some classes can jump over those archetypes, such as a priest who goes from holy (healing) to shadow (damage) respect. Now there’s a new contender to upend the class dynamic: the Dracthyr Evoker’s Augmentation specialization. The Evoker launched with two specializations: the damage-causing Devastation spec and Preservation for healing. Fractures in Time introduces this new third spec, and it’s designed to help your allies hit harder and kill faster. Are World of Warcraft‘s first dedicated support specification.
“One of the big themes for the class is, you have five magic dragon flights and you want to use them all. For Devastation and Preservation, we focused on red, blue, and green,” senior game designer Graham Berger told Polygon. “We have seen many corrupted black dragons, but not the original form Neltharion used before becoming Deathwing. So the team wanted to look into that now and talked internally about what we could do with Black Dragon magic. We also wanted to explore the Bronze, there’s a lot to play with in time magic.”
Image: Blizzard Entertainment
The possibilities of an Augmentation Evoker are not entirely unprecedented; some healing classes, such as Shaman or Paladin, have played supporting roles in previous iterations of World of Warcraft. Powerful buffs like Bloodlust can make the difference between taking down a boss or going back to the ghost healer. But the Augmentation Evoker takes those high moments of support and integrates them into the moment-to-moment kit of the class.
“It’s for an audience that isn’t specifically served by any of our existing specializations,” says Berger. “We had a lot of questions to answer about it. How do you balance this between so many different ways to play? World of Warcraft, with so many different group sizes? How do you give players feedback on what they are doing well and what impact they are having, when so much of their value comes from what they bring to other players?”
So the Augmentation specialization comes a bit later in the expansion than its two predecessors – it’s just a more complicated beast. It took time to make a version of an Augmentation Evoker that can still solo through content leveling and hold its own in combat. “We enabled Augmentation to play solo by making them quite tanky and survivable. You can apply skills to yourself to give yourself more armor, you have defensive capabilities, and you can still deal damage,” says Berger. But with more than half of the class’s skills focused on strengthening teammates, you’re always stronger with a few friends.
Image: Blizzard Entertainment
Where does a support class go in the tank healer DPS system? Augmentation Evokers will line up as damage dealers. “We did a lot of research on how their skills interact and how many people you buff, to look at the numerical values to make them equal to other DPS,” says Berger. “We didn’t want to break that trinity because it would really disrupt the game. Do dungeons now have to be six players? So it was like, okay, how do we fit them into the existing paradigm and still play differently?
As such, Augmentation Evokers are force multipliers. In a game so heavily based on teamwork, it will be fascinating to see how the new style of play pans out. Will guilds choose this new playstyle for the Race to World First in the game’s raids? Will support as a playstyle take off, and will we ever see future classes with a new take on the concept? After almost 20 years, there are still new ways to play World of Warcraft. The Dracthyr Evoker is one of the most experimental classes we’ve seen yet, and the Fractures in Time update takes that one step further.
Fractures in Time goes live on July 11. The patch includes a new mega-dungeon, Dawn of the Infinite, as well as new Time Rifts opening in the Dragon Isles, and new quests related to the Bronze Dragonflight and the inevitable tragic fate of their aspect, Nozdormu.