Preservation Evoker Guide for Mythic+ [Dragonflight 10.0.2]

Hello friends, this is Growl. In this video, I'm going to teach you everything you need to know to play a Evoker and Mythic Plus dungeons for Dragonflight. Evoker is a new and incredibly fun healer that was released with this expansion. So, I made sure to play a ton during the beta and wait just before release so that the guide is as accurate as it can be. If you are new to the channel, I'm Growl, currently the Healer for Golden Guardians Incarnation. I've been near the top of the NA leaderboards every season in Mythic Plus since BFA, and I've also placed top 5 in MDI and Great Push Global finals. If you're looking for beginner and advanced healer content, I'd appreciate it if you subscribe to the channel. I'm hoping to reach 100,000 subscribers before the end of the year. With that out of the way, let's jump right in. Evoker is a caster healer with a powerful burst AOE healing alongside some very cool situational utility. The basic rotation is quite simple, but utilizing your spell combos and synergies to their maximum effectiveness adds a ton of depth to the class. Your main single target heal is Living Flame, which also doubles as your main DPS button if used on enemies. It isn't super efficient on its own though, so we want to pair it with other abilities when using it to heal. For example, Echo is a signature Evoker ability which can be used to improve our single target healing. You place it on an ally and then the next healing spell you use will also get duplicated to that ally. This can be used in several different ways. You can even place Echo on your entire party and then place a hot on one person, and it will duplicate it to everybody that has that Echo. Our main AOE heal is Spirit Bloom, an empowered spell that will heal more allies the longer it's charged. Empowered spells are a new feature of Evoker. They are essentially a long cast time spell, however, they can be interrupted along the way and you will still get partial benefits of the spell depending on what power level it reaches. This can be used if you suddenly have to get out of the way of a dangerous ability or on purpose if you want. For example, Dream Breath is an AOE heal which does the same amount of healing regardless of how long you empower it. It does a heal over time alongside an upfront heal, and the longer you empower it, the bigger the upfront heal, but the smaller the heal over time. I often like to just do a single empowered level with this spell to get a big heal over time with my Dream Breath, however, I can choose to fully empower it if I need that Instant heal. I'm not going to go too in depth yet until the rotation part of the guide. I just wanted to give you a quick sample on how some of the spells work. First, let's get into character setup and talents for stat priority. Early on, the most important thing you want is just high item level as a healer. The more stats you can get, the better. I would only worry about what stats you're using if you're debating between two pieces of equal item level. I recommend prioritizing crit, then haste, then versatility, and finally mastery. Crit is a great all-around stat as it can also improve the duration of your Versatility. Haste is also quite helpful with Evoker gameplay, however, you'll find that too much haste causes you to run out of Mana quickly. This can be more of a personal preference from healer to healer, so try and find a level of haste that feels comfortable to you while you still don't run out of Mana. Any extra stats we'd prefer to put into versatility as mastery does not help our damage. When it comes to trinkets, you have quite a few options to choose from from the raid. I really liked Brood Keeper's Promise. This trinket adds a ton of passive healing and a small Versatility buff to you and another ally. This should give some much needed survivability to you and your tank, which is very helpful especially early on in gearing. For the second trinket, I was often running just a sort of a DPS trinket like the Eye of Scoval or Furious Rage. Feather Whisk Spring Incarnate is also a great stat stick if you have allies running it as well. I wouldn't say there are any mandatory or super impactful trinkets for Mythic Plus, so don't worry about having to farm something specific. I also want to mention that there isn't an Evoker-specific staff from the raid, as well as a ring that does extra fire damage. Both of these are pretty useful in Mythic Plus and should be used if you can get your hands on them at a high enough item level. Keep in mind these are both only for damage and don't affect your healing in any way. The new talent system is much more open-ended than before, so I'll try my best to supply you with a basic talent build to get started and then let you know some of the things that you can change. I think this is the most well-rounded build that has most of the defensive utility that you need in dungeons to start in the class three. I found it was nice to have a route, but if you are starting off you can save a keybind by putting those two top left into Innate Magic for faster essence regen instead in the bottom left. In this build, I'm taking Oppressive Roar, and overall these aren't useful in every dungeon though and you can choose to go with Protracted Talons. Instead of the slight damage buff on three targets, these are the two main switches I would make with the build if you find yourself with extra points. There are several nodes in the tree that are good; I personally just throw them into the stamina increase or the magic damage taken in the middle of the tree. On the spec side, my main goal was to go for stasis and font of magic. The rest of the points are just distributed into solid nodes that increase your damage and healing. The first major flex part of the tree is Erasure in the bottom right. Honestly, you can take any one of these nodes in the row depending on the situation. Need is good if you aren't feeling like you're getting good value from rewind or energy Loop is good to slightly increase your single target damage and your mana. The other two flex points I would say are Renewing Breath and Power Nexus. Personally, I found these two to be pretty helpful, but if you're looking to experiment with different parts of the tree, these would be the first ones to get removed. I think some additional options include Grace Period in the bottom middle of the tree, Exhilarating Burst in the mid left for more of a healing buff, or even something like Temporal Anomaly if you wanted to experiment with that. Personally, I tried it and didn't like the spell a whole lot; it felt a bit clunky with the cast time and then needing to wait for those echoes to go out and you want them to hit the right people, but it only hits two at a time. Before we move on from talents, I want to cover a few and explain them because they're pretty relevant for your gameplay. Your main DPS combo involves Scarlet Adaptation and Leaping Flames from the class tree. Scarlet Adaptation stores effective healing and adds that as damage to the next living flame that you do. Leaping Flames cause your next living Flames to cleave and split into multiple targets depending on how long you Empower your fire breath. This means you'll get a big living flame build up, then fully charge your flame breath to make it cleave onto multiple enemies. This is how you can easily achieve a large DPS burst to start trash pulls. Over on the Spectre tree, Golden Hour makes your Reversion heal for 15% of the damage taken over the last five seconds. Combine this with Echo on a tank or just someone taking heavy damage to immediately rewind almost a third of their damage taken. Always look to Reversion Targets who take heavy damage if possible, for max value. Lastly are the talents Call of Era and Lifebind. Lifebind adds more value to your Verdant Embrace or VE by transferring healing over the next five seconds. Echo synergizes with Lifebind so that when you Echo it onto multiple targets, you actually gain copies of Lifeline for each target. This means you can put out massive group heals by echoing your Word Embrace right before a big heal like Spirit Bloom or even Emerald Communion. Call of Yace increases the healing of your next living Flame or Dream Breath. So when you use that VE this way, you can follow it up with a big heal. A common combo I'll do when my team starts to get pressured is VE to the lowest target, then throw out that single charge Dream Breath by boosting to it, and then I have those Lifebinds and that Dream Breath out on the whole party. Since we're talking about it anyway, we can get into the specifics of the rotation now. For single target healing, you ideally don't want to use Living Flame unless it's an emergency or if you're trying to save certain spells for a combo. Always just be pressing Reversion nearly on cooldown on party members. The heal is going to add up a lot if you're using it effectively. If someone needs direct healing, your go-to should be Verdant Embrace. You can combine this with Echo if the person needs a bigger heal, or you can Echo somebody else if two people need healing. Echoing a VE is going to do nearly twice the healing as just doing a VE and then doing a Living Flame, so always look for opportunities to Echo when possible. Spirit Bloom can also be used as an emergency heal. It's a pretty big heal that you can use just with one Empower level on one party member. The biggest risk is that your Spirit Bloom then goes on cooldown, so I wouldn't use it much if you know that you're going to need it later on. If your allies are taking a beating, look for anything you can do to try and help them before resorting to Living Flame spam, because honestly that's not going to keep them alive very long. You can even Wing Buffet mobs away from your tank if they're getting hit too hard, or even just standing next to them with Emerald Communion will be a bunch of single target healing. Breath if needed, and honestly even on fire breath if you're comfortable with your healing and just want the extra damage. Rewind is an effective group cooldown if well-timed; it reduces the damage your party took over the last five seconds. Try not to be too greedy with this, just send it early if your party gets hit hard to be sure you're starting to heal up your allies before they get too low. Like Tip the Scales, this is great to use in spots when you need to move a lot and you can't stop to fully cast the Spirit Bloom. Stasis is your shortest and surprisingly most powerful healing cooldown in my opinion. It may feel clunky at first to use, but once you understand its power, you're going to see the light. Stasis replicates the three next spells that you use and then stores them. You have 30 seconds to press your stasis again and it'll resend those same buttons to the same targets. This means you want to store big AOE heels in your stasis, namely your Dream Breath and Spirit Bloom. My usual rotation is pre-stasis, then VE to the lowest target, single Empower a Dream Breath, and then fully Empower a Spirit Bloom. The VE will buff your Dream Breath, it'll put out a huge AOE heal and a hot on everybody. You then have 30 seconds to press that button again to let out that exact same combo. Practice getting the combo down and group healing will never scare you again as long as you're ready for it. As for your DPS rotation, it's pretty simple on AOE. You charge up your flame breath and then let it rip, spam living flame until flame breath is back and rinse repeat. There are a few modifications you may make, but honestly that's like 95 percent of it. First, if you have the Protracted Talons talent in the bottom left of the class tree, you can just press Azure Strike on three or more targets instead of Living Flame, so as long as you don't mind losing the priority damage that's fine. Secondly, if you have the Energy Loop Talon in the bottom right, you can press disintegrate whenever you have the essence available to spend, and it will do slightly more damage. Than living flame without this Talent disintegrate is doing basically the same damage as living flame so that if you ever misuse your living flame passives and overcap your scarlet adaptation you end up actually losing damage pressing it. One thing to note is that disintegrate causes zero Mana, so it's fine to use disintegrate instead of living flame if you're trying to be more Mana efficient. Deep breaths can be used every two minutes on bigger pack as well for a little bit of extra DPS. However, keep in mind it also has a stun component so you may want to save it for times that you need that big AOE stun. I want to go over some of the utility and the cooldown section also. Your draft your ratios are great for disrupting mobs and stopping Cass. Keep in mind these aren't going to work on like Champion mobs or bosses, but are good for small packs of casters. Cauterize is an incredibly strong ability as it can be used to almost remove any status effect versus diseases, poisons, and bleeds. You cannot Echo dispel or cauterize though, so keep that in mind. However, you can stay system, I don't know how useful this will be since it targets the same person again, but well use this knowledge how you want I guess. Hover is a key mobility skill that launches you in a direction you're moving and also allows you to cast certain spells while moving. This is basically limited to only living flame, disintegrate, and temporal anomaly. I find myself using hover more for the movement rather than casting while moving, but it sort of depends on the situation. Oppressive Roar is actually incredibly powerful as it increases the stun duration on all my jobs hit by fifty percent. You can use this by yourself and then just deep breath stun for a little bit longer of a stun, but it's even better comboing with your team when they use stuff like leg sweep or kidney shot with the talent. It also removes any enrage effect just one stack, but it still is absolutely crazy for Raging weeks. I'm not going to go over each ability that a voker has and how it should be used. I just wanted to highlight some of the big ones and I'll let you discover the rest. Lastly, I want to cover a few odds and ends that I didn't get to talk about in the video. First, your tier set reversion has a chance to make your next living flame instant cast and do 20% increased damage. This is more of a reason to spam reversion and Echo reversion to keep those procs coming. Don't forget that you have an interrupt and a bloodlust, both are super super useful in dungeons, especially pugs. Get good at using that Focus Target interrupt macro so that you can concentrate on healing but still be able to notice when that cast goes off that you need to kick. I didn't talk about consumables or enchantments at all in this video. For almost all the healers, I noticed they were just kind of the same, so I decided what I'm going to do is create just one guide video on what enchants and consumables and those sorts of things that you want as a Healer. Well, that covers everything I wanted to say as an intro guide to playing evoker in Mythic plus. I hope this information was helpful to you. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments and I'll try and answer what I can. If I do end up playing evoker in high keys, I'll put out a more advanced guide halfway through the season where I cover more specific Min maxing stuff and how to beat some of the harder bosses, If that's something you're interested in, be sure to subscribe to the channel. Thanks for watching, friends, and happy keying.