Preservation Evoker Healing Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — Dragonflight 10.2
On this page, you will learn how to optimize the rotation of your Preservation Evoker, depending on the type of damage your group is receiving. We also have advanced sections about cooldowns, procs, etc. in order to minmax your healing output and your mana efficiency. All our content is updated for World of Warcraft — Dragonflight 10.2.
Foreword
Welcome to our Rotation page for Preservation Evokers. On this page, you will find everything you need to know about playing the spec in Raiding and Mythic+ scenarios.
Easy Mode
If the rotations below seem overwhelming to you, you might benefit from visiting our Easy Mode page, which outlines a close-to-optimal rotation in simpler terms.
Rotation / Playstyle for Preservation Evokers
Healing as an Evoker will take a lot of practice no matter which
type of content
you find yourself doing. While other classes have powerful abilities that can
help you the moment a situation turns dire, Evoker lacks these, making
it really
suffer when things get tough. The key to this class is to stay ahead of these
moments by having a plan for every major damage event that your party or raid
will encounter. This will allow you to save your few emergency abilities, such as
Verdant Embrace and
Rewind for the moments you did not
anticipate.
Evoker has a lack of strong single-target spells as well as
emergency buttons,
making it difficult to actively keep individual targets alive during moments of
danger. You must rotate through your cooldown abilities as much
as possible to help ease this pain and make active use of Time Dilation
on anyone in significant danger to help make the situation more manageable.
When casting Dream Breath, you would naturally assume that a higher
empower means more healing, but this is not the case. This ability always does
the same amount of total healing, regardless of empower level. What changes
depending on the empower level is how much of that healing is upfront vs. how
much comes in the form of a HoT. Higher upfront healing can result in more overhealing,
meaning that you will benefit more from the high-duration HoT provided by Rank 1.
Rank 2 is a nice balance between upfront healing and the HoT effect that could
be good situationally.
Spiritbloom Build Rotation
Your goal is to generate as many Echos as possible through both spending
essence and casting
Temporal Anomaly with
Resonating Sphere.
Once you have your
Echos out, you will then consume them with
Spiritbloom.
The overall rotation will look something like this:
- Use
Verdant Embrace before casting
Dream Breath in order to get the bonus healing increase from
Call of Ysera.
- Cast
Dream Breath as frequently as possible and only empower it to Rank 1 (sometimes Rank 2).
- Spend essence on
Echo.
- Cast
Temporal Anomaly from time to time to generate
Echos through
Resonating Sphere
- Consume
Echos with
Spiritbloom.
- Cast
Emerald Blossom when you have a high amount of
Ouroboros stacks.
- Cast
Living Flame to generate
Essence Burst procs.
While this build is very powerful, you will need to time your Spiritblooms
well by casting it as damage is going out. That doesn't mean you should let it
sit off cooldown for 30+ seconds at a time; you still want to maximize casts; just
attempt to line it up with dangerous moments when possible. In some cases, you
may also get better performance from the
Emerald Blossom build, especially
once you get full access to the
Evoker Preservation 10.1 Class Set 4pc, but it is
likely to be dependent on the fight.
Emerald Blossom Build Rotation
The key to the Emerald Blossom build is generating as much
Essence Bursts
as possible. It is important that you are making an effort to cast
Living Flame
as well as
Fire Breath in order to help generate more procs. This will
not only increase your overall output but also help your mana costs.
- Use
Verdant Embrace before casting
Dream Breath in order to get the bonus healing increase from
Call of Ysera.
- Cast
Dream Breath as frequently as possible and only empower it to Rank 1 (sometimes Rank 2).
- Cast
Fire Breath on cooldown to proc
Leaping Flames.
- Use
Spiritbloom on cooldown to proc the
Evoker Preservation 10.2 Class Set 2pc tier bonus.
- Use
Emerald Blossom as damage demands it and prioritize casting it on clumps of allies to prevent it from healing only one ally.
- DPS with
Living Flame to generate
Essence Bursts that you can then spend on
Emerald Blossom.
When using Fire Breath, we want to cast it at max rank in order to
generate the max possible
Living Flames from
Leaping Flames.
It does not matter if you then consume the Living Flames for damage or healing; we
only care about having extra chances to generate
Essence Bursts. It is also
important that you are rotating casts of
Emerald Blossom and
Living Flame.
By rotating casts, you will be able to make use of the
Ancient Flame talent,
giving you quicker casts of Living Flame.
To really minmax the Emerald Blossom rotation, you will ideally
want to rotate between casting
Emerald Blossom and
Living Flame.
By doing this, you will be able to make full use of
Ancient Flame, reducing
the cast time of Living Flame by 40%, allowing you to generate quicker
Essence Bursts.
When facing heavy damage, it may be better to just fully spend essence as soon as you
get it rather than rotating between the two casts.
Cycle of Life will transfer ALL healing. This includes both
Rewind
and
Dream Flight. For that reason, you will want to make sure that you have
an active
Cycle of Life buff before casting either of your cooldowns, that
way you can transfer the healing your cooldowns do to the entire group.
5-Man Healing
5-man healing can be quite difficult as an Evoker. In general, you should be
trying to heal through the hardest moments by rotating casts of Dream Breath
and
Spiritbloom at max rank. Between these two cooldowns, you will want
to ensure your allies have
Reversion on them so they are constantly being
healed. Given there is no rotation you can follow in M+, it is important that
you understand how you can fully use your abilities to their max effectiveness
in Mythic+. Your overall priority will look somewhat like this:
- Cast
Echo to prepare for damage.
- Keep
Reversion on your party members when damage is going out.
- Cast
Dream Breath at either Rank 1 (small passive healing) or max rank (large burst healing) depending on what the situation demands.
- Cast
Spiritbloom at max rank during difficult moments.
- Use
Verdant Embrace to deal with single-target damage.
In order to further understand the Mythic+ rotation, you should also understand
the three main ways that you will be consuming Echo:
Reversion -- This will be your most used ability to consume
Echo. Keeping the passive healing on your will make every pack more manageable, as well as providing the
Grace Period buff.
Verdant Embrace -- Using this ability to consume your
Echo will allow you to do quick burst healing, as well as give you and everyone with the echo buff
Lifebind, which then gives you the option to press
Emerald Communion during very dangerous moments, making your group nearly invincible.
Dream Breath -- Out of all your options for consuming echo, this will be one of the least frequent choices. When facing heavy tank damage, it can be beneficial to apply 2x
Reversions and 2x
Dream Breath, just to ensure that the tanks have as much healing as possible.
For more information on how the class changes both rotationally and talent wise in Mythic+, please visit our dedicated page below:
DPS Rotation
Dealing with damage as a Preservation Evoker is extremely simple. The only major change
comes from Energy Loop and
Disintegrate. With these two talents,
you will be casting
Disintegrate; without these two abilities, you will not be.
Assuming you are taking these talents, your rotation will look like:
- Cast
Fire Breath on cooldown and at max rank.
- Consume the
Leaping Flames buff by casting
Living Flame.
- Cast
Azure Strike on 3+ targets.
- Spend Essence on
Disintegrate.
- Cast
Living Flame.
Using Lifebind
Despite nerfs to the Lifebind talent, it still remains an
exceptionally
strong talent that can be used as a mini-raid cooldown. That being said, it will
require you to be talented in
Temporal Anomaly and
Resonating Sphere.
Of course, it will also require
Lifebind and
Emerald Communion.
To do this combination, you will want to get
Echos on your raid members
by applying it manually and through
Temporal Anomaly. Once these echos
are applied to ideally 12+ allies, you will want to
Verdant Embrace an
ally without an echo buff and then immediately cast
Emerald Communion.
This will cause all the healing done to transfer to your targets with the
lifebind buff, resulting in a massive amount of healing. In many cases, you
can also cast 2
Temporal Anomalys or use
Stasis to get many
echos out and do miniature lifebind ramps that do not include emerald communion
but still do large healing when combined with
Spiritbloom. How often
you can do these miniramps is largely dictated by how much mana you have and
the type of damage patterns.
Using Essence Burst
Essence Burst should be used on the best Essence-spending ability
for your content type and your build. In situations where absolutely no one
could benefit from healing, you can instead choose to use Essence Burst on
Disintegrate. This will increase your damage output by a small margin.
That being said, in many raiding situations, you will want to sit on your
Essence Burst buff for when damage is coming out.
Cooldown Usage for Preservation Evokers
One of the largest differences between a strong healer and a weaker one is how cooldowns are used and managed. Preservation Evoker has many options available through both the spec tree and class tree.
Dream Flight is a powerful cooldown located in the spec tree. With only a two-minute cooldown, you will want to be making use of this ability frequently and you will want to hit as many allies as possible with it. You should aim to use this as soon as damage comes out and, ideally, when the HoT effect will have good value.
Stasis is a very strong ability, allowing you to essentially store three heals for later use. Only on a 1:30 cooldown, this ability should be used often, especially when you consider that once you collect 3 heals, they will stay with you for the next 30 seconds. You should prioritize powerful heals in your stasis such as
Dream Breath,
Spiritbloom, and
Temporal Anomaly. If you need to get three spells into it quickly, it is also acceptable to use a
Emerald Blossom in the stasis just to fill it up quickly, allowing you to return to casting weaker healing spells without them taking up space in your stasis.
Rewind should be used after an extremely heavy damage window. Its healing is determined by how much damage you have taken in the last 5 seconds, meaning the more that your raid or party took, the more it will heal. This cooldown is one of the few true emergency buttons that Preservation Evokers have; you should use it as best you can in truly dire situations.
Tip the Scales is the other emergency button for Preservation Evokers. In most cases, you should save this cooldown for when your party takes damage that you did not anticipate. Once this happens, you can easily press this button followed by
Spiritbloom or
Dream Breath to get a quick but powerful heal off to save your party members or raid's life.
Zephyr causes you and your 4 closet allies to take 20% reduced Area-of-Effect damage for 8 seconds. Given that this only targets your 4 closest allies, it will be easier to use in Mythic+ than raid, but you will still want to make active use of it when you know that you are going to take a large AoE hit in the next few seconds. Not every damage event is considered AoE, so you must have a good understanding of what type of damage you will be taking to ensure you do not waste the effects of the ability.
Emerald Communion is a great way to regenerate mana, and for that reason, you will want to cast it as much as possible. There are some things you can do with
Lifebind, but they require you to talent into some choices that you may not normally. If you do end up talenting into those options, then you will want to pair this cooldown with the full combination every time you can to maximize your healing. Otherwise, using it on cooldown to maximize your mana return will be your best decision.
Where Evoker struggles in consistent healing, it makes up for in
cooldowns.
Every ability listed, as well as Spiritbloom and
Dream Breath
are very powerful in helping you manage difficult and dangerous situations.
The biggest mistake you can ever make on Evoker is not rotating
through these
cooldowns appropriately and trying to save them for too long. Use them as you
feel the need to help ease some of the weaknesses in Evoker's healing
kit.
Changelog
- 06 Nov. 2023: Updated for 10.2.
- 04 Sep. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.1.7
- 08 Aug. 2023: Extra information added for Emerald Blossom rotations.
- 10 Jul. 2023: Updated for Patch 10.1.5.
- 01 May 2023: Updated for Patch 10.1.
- 20 Mar. 2023: Updated for Patch 10.0.7.
- 24 Jan. 2023: Rotation updated for 10.0.5.
- 28 Dec. 2022: Rotation updated to include differences between emerald blossom and reversion builds.
- 11 Dec. 2022: Reviewed for Dragonflight Season 1.
- 28 Nov. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight launch.
- 15 Nov. 2022: Page added.
More Evoker Guides
Guides from Other Classes
This guide has been written by Mytholxgy, who plays healer in Liquid. He is a Templar in the Paladin class discord. You can reach him on Twitter and watch him stream on Twitch.
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