Fellowship‘s first season wipe came with two new heroes, including the new healer, Aeona the Timeweaver. Aeona is a popular pick right now, with healer queues averaging around 25 minutes in Contender on wipe day, and is marked as an “overpopulated queue” across all difficulties. 👏
It’s not hard to see why she’s so popular; her design is sleek and her kit is extremely satisfying to use. Let’s check her out together! 😎
Who is Aeona?
Aeona is a chronomancer, a person who can use time magic and bend time to their will. In her in-game biography, she is described as a former eternal being whose divinity was removed for defying the other gods and giving mortals free will. Her ethos of defying the gods continues on in her mortal life through her time weaving.
Aeona’s Gameplay Identity
When it comes to gameplay, Aeona seems to combine the best of two World of Warcraft healer classes: Discipline Priest and Brewmaster Monk.
While other healers have a damage mitigation cooldown, Aeona’s damage mitigation is built-in and always active. Aeona’s unique passive aura, Aura of Deferred Fate, converts half of the incoming damage taken by those affected by this aura into Stagger. This allows players time to react to damage, spreading it out over time rather than taking the damage all at once. She has two abilities that can cleanse a portion of the Stagger, enabling her to defy the odds and keep her allies alive in even the most dire of situations. This is the Brewmaster Monk side of her kit. 🙏
Currently, the other healers in the roster need to decide between using a healing ability or a damaging one, but with Aeona, it’s different. Aeona’s Aura of Deferred Fate passive also allows any damage she deals to be converted into healing for the ally with the lowest health affected by the aura. This is the Discipline Priest side to her kit. 🛐
Fulfilling the Healer Fantasy
On launch, Aeona was a true powerhouse. She made all content trivial with her passive by preventing one-shot mechanics from instantly killing players in her party. Given her backstory as a former goddess, it felt right to make her so powerful.
However, since her release, she has received two hotfixes tuning her power down.
Despite the nerfs, Aeona is still a strong pick. The most satisfying feeling when playing Aeona is getting massive Stagger cleanses. Pairing these cleanses, along with the fact that doing damage isn’t taking away from healing, makes Aeona extremely fun to play. However, Aeona players still need to balance between targeting enemies for damage and allies for healing. She is extremely powerful when Aeona’s resources are available to her, but can struggle if they aren’t well managed.
Along with her passive, group-wide mitigation, Aeona brings a potent CC in the form of an AoE silence. This silence can save a bad pull and ease the burden if a kick is missed. Due to how potent and powerful this utility is, the cooldown is substantial to compensate. The cooldown for this ability is a whooping 5-minutes. For comparison, Tariq’s powerful AoE Fear ability has a 2-minute cooldown.
How Does the Fellowship Community See Aeona?
As a result of Aeona’s inclusion to the roster, the queue times for the healer role have been greatly increased. According to information shared by Hamish Bode within the official Fellowship Discord server, Day 1 queues were heavily skewed. Below are the graphs that break down the distribution of the roles within each challenge league.
Historically, the healer queues in Fellowship have generally been longer than the queues for DPS and tanks. However, since the beginning of Season 2, queue times have been much longer. This is likely to ease over time, but the effect is expected to remain for a while longer. 👀
For more information about Aeona, check out our guide exclusively here on Icy Veins.
