Wingleader Tips and Tricks
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Some of these articles were released earlier than others, and may be out of date now.
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On the Midnight Patch 12.1 PTR, the latest change to Wingleader, a single Hero Talent in the Scalecommander tree, is perhaps one of the most consequential changes to Augmentation Evoker since the release of Midnight, and has massive implications for the spec's gameplay in both raid encounters and Mythic+.
For the uninitiated, allow me to quickly explain how Wingleader works in AoE on Live servers:
How does Wingleader work?
Cast Fire Breath and Upheaval. Each cast generates a stack of Mass Eruption.
Cast Mass Eruption at two different targets. This applies 6 seconds of Bombardments to each target. Every 2 seconds, each individual Bombardments debuff activates, each reducing the cooldown of Breath of Eons by 3 seconds.
Cast Eruption as many times as possible. Every cast of Eruption triggers Extended Battle, extending all active Bombardments by 1 second, and reduces the cooldown of Upheaval with Accretion.
Eventually cast Breath of Eons, which creates a new Duplicate, provides Fury of the Aspects from Plot the Future, and cheaper Eruptions from Imminent Destruction.
This gameplay loop is pivotal to how Scalecommander plays in AoE, and in terms of rotational goals, is second only to maintaining Ebon Might for as long as possible. With that in mind, let's take a look at this week's developers' notes, provide some additional context, and consider some of the biggest implications of these changes.
What makes gameplay "unintuitive"?
Developers’ notes: Wingleader’s cooldown reduction mechanic strongly incentivized spreading Bombardment applications across multiple targets. We feel that this gameplay is unintuitive in isolation, and additionally creates unhealthy behaviors such as Disintegrate clipping and Mass Disintegrate/Eruption pooling.
Spreading Bombardments onto multiple targets ultimately achieves two things: it accelerates the damage dealt from the Bombardments effect itself, and more importantly results in extra value through Extended Battle.
I've seen many strong reactions to the use of "unintuitive" in the developers' explanation; I'd like to tackle this point directly and highlight that "unintuitive" should not be confused with "counterintuitive." While tab-targeting to spread DoTs or other debuffs is not unique to Augmentation, consider a new player approaching the spec for the first time. They may correctly note that Bombardments does in fact stack its duration when applied to a single target, and very well may conclude that there's no reason to worry about losing value. It's also certainly not immediately obvious that Extended Battle extends all active Bombardments on all enemies. Simply put, until a player reads these various talents, pieces together these interactions, and has their own "Aha!" moment, I wouldn't expect this gameplay loop to come immediately or naturally. I think that's where this "unintuitive" idea comes from—you're not being asked to do something that doesn't make sense, it's just not something that you're likely to accidentally stumble upon as a new or inexperienced player.
More experienced players will begin to notice Fire Breath and Upheaval's cooldowns occasionally drift apart, and might try to avoid casting Eruption until two stacks of Mass Eruption are available in order to cast them together—this is the concept that we describe as resource "pooling". I actually believe this aspect of Augmentation gameplay is rather intuitive once you understand the underlying mechanics, but it definitely adds another small layer of complexity on top of the previously explained mechanics.
Where these interactions perhaps begins to cross the line into "unhealthy" territory is when we consider top-level Mythic+ gameplay in Midnight Season 1. Playing in a coordinated group, skilled Augmentation players can make make use of the "downtime" where the tank is gathering packs of enemies to essentially begin collecting stacks of Mass Eruption before combat begins. Instead of two active Bombardments debuffs, players are now able to have three or even four Bombardments rolling on different enemies, each one extended by Extended Battle, and each one providing 3 seconds of Breath of Eons cooldown reduction each time they activate. We're now talking massive amounts of cooldown reduction allowing for multiple casts of Breath of Eons in a single pull, and this in turn causes a snowball effect as the Augmentation player spawns more Duplicates and has even more resources to spend. While this additional layer of gameplay undoubtedly separates the most skilled players from the rest of the pack, it's not entirely surprising that the development team was not in love with this particular element of skill expression, and decided that some form of change was warranted.
What is the goal of these changes?
This redesign is intended to retain the multitarget focus of the talent, while addressing those issues. We are increasing some of Scalecommander’s sources of area damage to compensate for the lessened cooldown reduction the new Wingleader will provide, and will be keeping a close eye on Devastation and Augmentation’s performance over the course of PTR to make additional adjustments as needed.
If the goal here is to simply reduce the value of spreading Bombardments and actively playing around these interactions, I think these changes do achieve that outcome to some extent. However, rather puzzlingly this redesign does not eliminate most of these interactions, and spreading Bombardments will still remain "correct" rotationally in order to maximize the direct damage from the Bombardments effect—it just so happens that this aspect was previously completely overshadowed by the interaction with Wingleader. Resource "pooling" will also still provide value when performed correctly, again in the form of direct damage from Bombardments. All said, the reward from playing around managing stacks of Mass Eruption is heavily diminished, and players will likely avoid jumping through unnecessary hoops, especially if it comes at the cost of damage elsewhere.
"Lessened cooldown reduction" might also be a bit of an understatement in this context—napkin math estimates indicate we're losing close to 70% of existing average cooldown reduction in AoE, and up to 80% in single-target situations. The key takeaway here is that the development team is clearly aware that this is a massive change, and we can certainly expect further changes and additional damage tuning for Season 2 if ultimately warranted.
How does this redesign work?
Wingleader has been redesigned – Mass Disintegrate/Mass Eruption reduces the remaining cooldown of Deep Breath/Breath of Eons by 0.5 seconds/1 second for each target struck
Command Squadron’s Pyre damage increased by 40%.
Maneuverability’s damage over time increased by 40%.
Instead of Bombardments generating up to 3 seconds of cooldown reduction every two seconds, Mass Eruption will now instead directly provide up to 4 seconds of cooldown reduction once per cast. In comparison, on Live servers it's not uncommon to see a single Bombardments debuff extended by 4 to 10 seconds, providing anywhere from 15 to 24 seconds of cooldown reduction for a given cast of Mass Eruption. In the equivalent single-target situation, we're instead going from 5 to 8 seconds of cooldown reduction, down to just 1 second.
The upshot of all this is: with this change, we will be casting Breath of Eons much less frequently. This directly impacts damage done by Breath of Eons and Duplicate, but also has a significant impact to the feel of Scalecommander as we lose both casting speed from Plot the Future and resources from Imminent Destruction. Scalecommander naturally generates fewer resources than Chronowarden, which can lead to long stretches of casting filler without pay-off, especially if one is unlucky in generating Essence Burst. In theory, a talent like Diverted Power could help alleviate this issue, which coincidentally is a choice node with Extended Battle. Unfortunately Diverted Power is remarkably undertuned, with a chance to activate that is far too low to provide a noticeable impact, and likely remains overshadowed by Extended Battle even with these latest changes.
While the overall impact of the Wingleader change is not as easy to estimate numerically, the last two changes are much simpler. Command Squadron and Maneuverability (Melt Armor) together currently make up roughly 5% of Augmentation Evoker's damage in a Mythic+ dungeon, and slightly less in a typical raid encounter. Command Squadron is a funny Hero Talent—it deals damage slowly over 2 seconds, and you can actually cancel Breath of Eons before it's finished dealing all of its damage. The stronger this effect is in practice, the more incentivized players become to track this specific effect and avoid cancelling Breath of Eons until it's finished. We actually played around maximizing this effect in Season 3 of The War Within, and I don't recall many players finding that aspect to be especially enjoyable. That said, while buffing these effects definitely adds back some baseline damage to the Scalecommander kit, these buffs are offset by simply casting Breath of Eons less frequently, and the total damage most certainly does not compensate for the loss of cooldown reduction from Wingleader.
What does it all mean?
When it comes to these changes, although it's a fair concern, I am not immediately worried about the major loss of damage in AoE—whether or not Augmentation is ultimately to remain a "meta" spec in Mythic+, we should expect to see additional changes and considerable numerical tuning before the start of Season 2. Instead, my biggest concern comes down to the gameplay feel of our Augmentation Hero Talents. Bombardments is the engine behind Scalecommander in AoE; it's a unique mechanic to Scalecommander, and ultimately makes Scalecommander feel distinctly different than Chronowarden in the same content. The reward for making use of Bombardments is getting to cast more Breath of Eons, which is a fantastic button that improves your damage, casting speed, and resource economy. Without that engine, what you're left with is a short moment of glory followed by a lengthy period of fickle downtime where you are largely at the mercy of random Essence Burst generation until you're eventually able to start up again.
Aside from small, largely superficial differences, I fear we've also reached a point where there are almost no meaningful differences in gameplay between Chronowarden and Scalecommander. If that is ultimately where we land in Season 2, I think that's a bit of a shame. Since their introduction in The War Within, Hero Talents have always had enormous potential to introduce exciting variation in gameplay, adjust rotational goals, and keep specs feeling fresh and interesting. I truly hope that with these changes, which were clearly and deliberately aimed at reining in the most extreme gameplay outcomes, we don't instead see an adverse effect in the form of pushing the average player away from enjoying Scalecommander gameplay to the fullest.
