This section covers some of the more detailed and nuanced talent interactions for Devastation Evoker, including the spec’s major damaging cooldown, Dragonrage.
Dragonrage
Dragonrage is Devastation Evoker’s major offensive two minute cooldown. When activated, Dragonrage casts one Pyre per enemy in a 25 yard range, up to a maximum of three.
Any active Charged Blast stacks apply to all such Pyre casts before resetting.
Over its duration, Dragonrage guarantees that Essence Burst activates on all casts of Living Flame and Azure Strike.
Animosity encourages you to hold your Empower abilities and use them during Dragonrage to extend its duration.
Titanic Wrath has clear and direct synergy with Dragonrage, further encouraging you to activate and spend Essence Burst.
Tyranny ensures full Mastery: Giantkiller value for the duration of Dragonrage, and is a highly valuable talent node, allowing Devastation to continue to deal relevant burst damage later in an encounter, particularly with a late Bloodlust.
Tip the Scales is also on a two minute cooldown, and is typically used to instantly cast a maximum rank Empower spell inside Dragonrage to minimise downtime. Eternity Surge is often cast at Rank 1 (one to two targets), and is typically only cast at maximum rank in high target count AoE situations. Fire Breath is generally cast at Rank 1 or Rank 2 to maximize DoT uptime, but can be cast at maximum rank for burst damage, or when supported by Everburning Flame‘s DoT extension mechanic.
Leaping Flames
Leaping Flames causes Living Flame to hit additional targets after casting Fire Breath based on its Empower level. These additional Living Flame casts can damage additional targets, or heal nearby allies, preferring targets to match the original cast whenever possible.
Each instance of Living Flame damage or effective healing has an independent chance to activate Essence Burst, and it is possible to earn two stacks of Essence Burst from a single cast of Living Flame.
Each instance of Living Flame damage or effective healing also seems to have an independent chance to activate Snapfire.
Effective healing from Living Flame contributes to the damage bonus afforded by Scarlet Adaptation.
The damage bonus from Scarlet Adaptation also affects all instances of Living Flame produced by Leaping Flames.
The various interactions between Living Flame, Scarlet Adaptation, and Evoker healing reinforce Ancient Flame as a solid talent choice, encouraging the use of Emerald Blossom and Verdant Embrace as filler globals without observing a significant loss to damage.
Charged Blast
Each instance of Blue spell damage adds one stack of Charged Blast (max 20), increasing the damage of your next Pyre cast by 5% per stack.
Each individual tick of Disintegrate grants one stack (four total), and both Azure Strike and Eternity Surge can generate multiple stacks per cast based on the number of enemies hit, including Eternity Surge casts activated by Scintillation.
The Charged Blast stacks are fully consumed any time a Pyre is cast, including when Pyre is cast by Dragonrage.
The Charged Blast effect is applied to all instances of Pyre cast by Dragonrage (max 3), making this interaction particularly potent against stacked enemies in AoE.
With respect to Volatility, any Charged Blast effect applied to the original Pyre does not apply to subsequent instances of Pyre generated.
Volatility
Volatility causes Pyre to have a chance to repeat its cast, causing a new Pyre projectile to erupt from the initial primary target towards a second target hit by the initial Pyre AoE. This effect can repeat indefinitely, causing Pyre to continue to repeat onto a random eligible target hit by the previous projectile, as long as two or more targets remain alive and within range. This talent has no effect when Pyre is cast on a single target.
The single most important thing to note about Volatility is that Pyre projectiles caused by Volatility are never affected by talent interactions such as Charged Blast, Titanic Wrath, or Iridescence, and do not inherit such buffs from the original Pyre cast under any circumstances. The projectile created by Volatility is a unique instance of Pyre that is completely unaffected by such interactions.
The following calculations describe the Expected Value of the damage increase provided by Volatility in terms of the base value of Pyre.
While Volatility has few talent interactions, it does have a couple of noteworthy ones. Each Pyre cast during the initial cast of Dragonrage has an independent chance to activate Volatility, with the caveat that of course these Pyre casts do not inherit stacks of Charged Blast as previously explained.
Each instance of Pyre caused by Volatility also interacts with Causality, causing Pyre casts to further reduce the cooldown of Eternity Surge and Fire Breath through a high variance but highly impressive synergy. This coupled with Pyre‘s instant cast time allows for significantly longer Dragonrage duration extension via Animosity than would be feasible in a typical single target rotation, particularly when supported with external Haste like Power Infusion.
Iridescence
For 10 seconds after casting an Empower spell, the damage of your next two spells of the same colour is increased by 15%.
- Casting Fire Breath activates this effect for Living Flame, Pyre, and Dragonrage.
- Casting Eternity Surge activates this effect for Azure Strike, Disintegrate, and Unravel.
Casting Living Flame consumes one stack of Iridescence and buffs all additional damaging instances of Living Flame produced by Leaping Flames, also improving the value of Iridescence in cleave situations.
Casting Dragonrage consumes one stack of Iridescence and buffs all instances of Pyre cast (max 3). While this can be a strong interaction against stacked enemies in AoE, this does require you to cast Fire Breath before Dragonrage, which may be anti-synergistic and inadvisable due to Animosity.
With respect to Volatility, any Iridescence bonus damage applied to the original Pyre does not apply to subsequent instances of Pyre generated, nor will the additional instances consume any remaining stacks of Iridescence.
Casting Disintegrate consumes one stack of Iridescence per cast, but Eternity Surge casts activated by Scintillation do not consume a stack of Iridescence, nor do they receive the additional damage.
Eternity Surge casts from Scintillation do not activate Iridescence.