Blizzard's new speciality, Augmentation Evoker, continues to stir up the game's meta in strange and interesting ways. It functions as a support DPS, with most of its damage coming from buffs to allies.

It is super-powerful and almost a necessity in high-level content. However, it has caused fights in lower level groups due to the quirks of the DPS meter and the inevitable baggage of a pickup group community accustomed to personal performance being paramount.

This bumpy introduction is followed by a bizarre experiment documented by WoWhead. Jereico, a guide writer, evoker specialist, and streamer, had devised a strategy that would cause hotfixes: put two Death Knights into a raid and melt faces with 22 augmented evoker cheerleaders. Technically, it's not even an exploit, just a fatal flaw in the design of the class.

WoWHead's Suishei explains in his complete breakdown of the strat: "Each Augmentation Evoker is multiplied by adding an Evoker to the [burst phase]. On its own, the ability is powerful, but not noteworthy. However, when stacked together, the damage can be outrageous.

This is because the bonuses from Ebon Might, Shifting Sands, and Prescience (which buff Intelligence, Versatility, and Critical, respectively) create a multiplicative damage swell. chance to do 15% of its damage again.

This all folds into Breath of Eons, which keeps a tally of damage done to the target by allies for 10 seconds and gives 15% of that damage as a critical hit. if you only have one Augmentation Evoker, this is obviously not a big deal. This is obviously not a big problem if you only have one Augmentation Evoker. The problem is scaling.

In this case, the ally enjoys a large multiplier boost of 22 to base damage, 15% of which is occasionally fed back into the loop. This can accumulate a ridiculous amount of pain during its own burst window, pushing DPS to 10 million or more.

To make matters worse, that huge burst of damage is echoed by 22 players simultaneously at 15% in a 10 second period. Add it all up and you get the following in-your-face dissolution of Kazzara the Hellforged, the first boss of the Aberrus raid in World of Warcraft: dragon flight

View this fight in Warcraft Logs, sorted by duration Sorting them in order, we see even more clearly: after taking down Augmentation Zerg in a blistering 24 seconds, the next kill speed is 1 minute 44 seconds, with most experienced raiders taking down Heroic Kazzara in around 2 minutes.

In the full video, this combo chews through the entire raid on Heroic difficulty, slaughtering most bosses in less than half the time. The only thing that stops this deathball is a transition that makes the boss immune or highly resistant to damage, otherwise it is a massacre.

This was obviously not intended, and we believe a patch has already been created. Nevertheless, it is not as simple as stopping stacking altogether. It would simply replace one design problem with another and put a cap on the amount of augmented evokers that can be brought into a raid; whether WoW's new style of support DPS play can overcome that budding problem remains to be seen, but the community has other I look forward to seeing what else the community can accomplish.