How To Improve As Preservation Evoker — The War Within (11.1.5)

Like your short cooldown spells, it is equally important to use your larger healing cooldowns, such as Tip the Scales, as often as possible, as long as there is healing to be done. Healers regularly make the mistake of "saving" their cooldowns for when they are needed —, a time that often never comes. It is much better to get some benefit from their use than for your cooldowns go unused for minutes at a time while you wait for the perfect opportunity.

If you know you will need one or more of your cooldowns for a specific event sooner than they would be available again, then saving them is acceptable. However, you should identify when this will be before or during an encounter to avoid leaving these powerful abilities unused for too long.

This also includes intermediate cooldowns in Spiritbloom, Verdant Embrace, and Dream Breath. These abilities come up often enough that if you are cycling through them, you will almost always have one available and off cooldown for any real damage event. Do not sit on any of them, hoping for a larger event to occur; use them as you need to make the healing more manageable.

One common mistake that players make regardless of build is not spending enough of their essence. Echo and Emerald Blossom both contribute a very large amount of healing to their respective builds. Often players will sit on max essence without realizing it, massively killing their potential output. You should be aiming to spend as much of your essence as possible and wasting as little as possible over the course of a fight.

When playing an Emerald Blossom focused build, players often make two mistakes. Firstly, they do not spend enough essence, meaning that they are capping out on essence or aren't generating enough Essence Bursts. These builds focus on maximizing your total number of emerald blossom casts, and you want to do everything possible to achieve that. You need to be spending all of your essence while also casting Living Flame to generate more essence bursts. The second mistake is players are not being careful with their targeting. Choosing to heal a ranged dps who is far away means that your emerald blossom will not be healing the max amount of targets. You want to specifically focus your casts on clumps of players. The best way to do this in spread situations is by positioning yourself in a good place, then casting off yourself, or simply choosing melee.

With only a 30-yard range, it is extremely important that you are positioning closer to the boss in order to reach all ranged in melee during spread encounters. Whenever possible, you will also want to stand behind every ranged and melee player in order for Temporal Anomaly to shield as many players as possible. This can seem a bit confusing as you have reasons to be both far away and close to the raid. It is important that you are constantly looking for ways to position better to accomplish these goals, and in many situations, you will need to be willing to constantly move in and out of the boss in order to heal players while still ensuring Temporal Anomaly is hitting as many targets as possible.

The Preservation Evoker kit has very few abilities that are spammable, leading many players to overuse Living Flame for healing. While it is true that there are not many spammable abilities, there are very powerful abilities on short cooldowns that should be used as much as possible to make healing less difficult. If you ever find yourself spamming Living Flame, then chances are you are underutilizing other areas of your kit.