Preservation Evoker Healing Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — Dragonflight 10.2

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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:

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.

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.

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.

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.