Preservation Evoker Healing Guide — The War Within Pre-Patch

Preservation Evokers specialize in stacked environments where they can make full use of their extremely strong AoE heals. With abilities like Dream Breath and Emerald Blossom, they can thrive when their party and raid members are within their small area. Preservation Evoker also brings many forms of utility through a party-wide damage reduction in Zephyr, raid buffs in Time Spiral and Blessing of the Bronze, and even their version of Time Warp through Fury of the Aspects.

Strengths

• Extremely strong stacked healing through Dream Breath and Emerald Blossom.
• Powerful party and raid cooldowns such as Dream Flight, Rewind, and Zephyr.
• High mobility through Hover which allows you to cast some spells while moving, Verdant Embrace which causes you to jump to an ally, and Rescue that allows you to pick up an ally and fly with them to your cursor location.
• Fairly high damage output thanks to Fire Breath as well as many talent options to further increase the damage output such as Scarlet Adaptation and Lifeforce Mender.
• Strong defensives thanks to Obsidian Scales and the ability to have two charges due to Obsidian Bulwark.

Weaknesses

• 30-yard range on most spells, making it difficult to heal spread allies.
• Weak single-target and burst healing.
• No strong emergency buttons to press in dire situations outside of Rewind.
• Empowered spells ( Dream Breath, Spiritbloom, Fire Breath) have long cast times, making it hard to always get the casts off safely.

The most notable changes to Preservation Evoker in the War Within Pre-Patch come from a slightly reworked talent tree, which we will briefly look at below.

• Font of Magic and Power Nexus have been moved to the middle of the tree, replacing Life-Giver's Flame and Lifeforce Mender. Life-Givers Flame and Lifeforce Mender are now located at the end of the tree.
• Lifespark has been added as a new talent located beneath Lifeforce Mender and Life-Giver's Flame. This functions the same as the Dragonflight S1/S4 tier set bonus, giving you a chance to have instant Living Flame casts whenever Reversion heals.
• Spatial Paradox has been added as a choice node in the class talent tree, sharing a spot with Time Spiral. This massively increases the overall utility that Preservation can offer.
• Hero Talent Trees have also been added, which will be discussed in more detail closer to the official expansion release.

If you want to play a Preservation Evoker, but currently do not have one at max level, you can check out our leveling guide for tips on your journey.

Having a great interface is not only important once you reach the max level, but it is also even more important to be successful as a healer. To prevent feeling overwhelmed by reaching the max level and adding a lot of addons at once, we recommend starting with some basic addons while leveling. This will allow you to get comfortable with them, and then it will become a bit easier to add more once you do hit the max level.

Preservation Evoker, like any healer, is all about using your abilities strategically. Rather than a fixed rotation, you will be using your flexible spell kit to adapt and overcome whatever the game throws at you.

Preservation Evoker has two main types of abilities. The first of these are empowered abilities that gain benefits as you channel the ability for longer. Dream Breath and Spiritbloom are your two empowered heals, while Fire Breath is your empowered DPS ability. These abilities you want to cast as frequently as possible, as they are quite powerful when used correctly. The other form of ability uses Essence. Essence is a unique resource to the Evoker class and can be spent on either Emerald Blossom or Echo for healing, and Disintegrate for damage. Which ability you decide to spend your Essence on will be situational and dependent on what type of content you are doing.

If you are an absolute beginner to the spec but would like to learn the basic fundamentals of the class, we recommend looking through the Spell Summary page first, as well as the Easy Mode page linked below.

If you are familiar with Evoker and how it plays, you can jump right into our Talent and Rotation pages.

If you are interested in finding out what gear will put your Preservation Evoker in the best possible position to perform well, we would recommend looking at our gear page. Here you can find information on the best items available for Preservation Evoker.

To be successful, you will want to make sure you have the correct consumables, gems, enchants, and more. On top of this, you will want to check our stats page to help you make the correct decision when choosing what consumables to use.

Being the newest class added to World of Warcraft, there will be, without a doubt, some growing pains for Evoker. The largest of these current issues is a range of only 30 yards. This can make healing uncoordinated raid groups and dungeon groups especially challenging, as you will not be able to heal targets that are spread out as easily as other healers. In some situations, you may find yourself chasing after players who are all running around far away from you. That being said, where Evoker struggles in spread healing, it makes up for in stacked healing. Preservation Evoker excels in environments where party and raid members are stacked and close together, allowing you to gain full value on your strong AoE spells: Dream Breath, Dream Flight, and Emerald Blossom. The class's viability may struggle in spread fights, and players may have a harder time in Mythic+ when their party members are spread, but the class will be exceptionally strong if you can end up staying stacked.

There are three main forms of end-game content. Raiding, Mythic+, and PvP. In each of them, the class plays slightly differently. To perform as well as possible for your preferred form of content before the release of Dragonflight, we recommend reading our dedicated Mythic+ page, which you can find below.

If you feel like you are not performing as well as you should be. You can visit one of our pages below to help find information on common mistakes and frequently asked questions.