WoW has defined its holy trinity paradigm so rigidly that support will never work in WoW.

Well, that’s what I would have said a few months ago. The game tried doing hybrid DPS specs, it tried Disc Priest as a shield healer with an overwrought damage to healing mechanism, with varying degrees of success (the current iteration is great, but required making their heals hit substantially harder and moving their DPS in-line with normal healers, who’d have thought?), and there was even the grand experiment of making Protection Warriors DPS in Warlords of Draenor through the Gladiator Stance talent (which was cool and unique and it sucks it doesn’t exist in the current game because I bet it would be fun).

The problem Blizzard always encounters with the idea of support specs is simple – the game is conditioning players to always shoot for the highest DPS, and that often means bringing the highest individual DPS. In the past, Blizzard had this problem with healers too – in Wrath, my guild at the time hated me speccing into Discipline, until Recount was updated with an Absorb tracker, and then, well…suddenly everyone thought I was the best healer in the group. I think this was an object lesson for Blizzard, because the surprising addition of 10.1.5 is a third Evoker spec, Augmentation.

Augmentation is a DPS, and Blizzard is being cautious to not call it strictly a support. It does damage, and when you parse the spec’s damage through damage meters and logs, it looks, talks, and walks like a real DPS. So what’s the difference?

Augmentation takes the Devastation Evoker gameplay and kind of turns it sideways slightly, but it actually isn’t that different. Your core spells are still, largely, the same buttons – Living Flame, Azure Strike, a breath, Disintegrate (sorta…), and the class tree still looks the same (with a few tweaks and changes to account for Augmentation and do some small rebalancing, obviously). What changes is the addition of a new core ability, multiple active talent nodes that add new kit, and a philosophical change.

At its core, Augmentation Evoker does what it says on the can – it augments allies. The core way this is done is through the new core ability Ebon Might, which both provides a flat 10% damage boost to the Evoker but also a 10% primary stat buff to their four nearest allies, with smart logic in the spell designed to prefer damage dealers over tanks or healers. An early talent pick changes Disintegrate into Eruption, a cast-time, no-longer channeled spell that does fixed damage split among enemies in range and extends the Ebon Might effect. You can choose a mix of other active talents, including Breath of Eons, which replaces Deep Breath and does damage while also accumulating damage done by allies to have you deal a portion of it a second time, Upheaval, a new AoE that extends Ebon Might while also offering an Empower spell, increasing the radius for each charge. There are role-specific buffs like Blistering Scales, which you place on an ally and explode when that ally is hit in melee, making it perfect for tanks, and Spatial Paradox, which buffs a healer to be able to move and cast and increases their range by 100%. They also, rejoice errant high DPSers, have a threat reduction that is targeted and can be used on allies!

A key theme of all of this is spells that extend Ebon Might, grant it new effects, and pool damage from the party to be redealt, fractionally, by the Evoker. Couple it with a temporary aura in the Ebon and Bronze Attunement, which grant your nearest 4 allies either increased health or movement speed, and you’ve got a stew!

What makes the Augmentation Evoker unique, and somewhat concerning to veteran WoW players, is simple – on its own, measured strictly on damage dealt by the Augmentation Evoker, it’s…not a great DPS spec. If you look at it through a very narrow lens of the direct damage dealt, it’s not the best DPS. However, this is by design – it specifically is allowed to count and rigged up to count through combat logs all the damage they help others to deal. This means Ebon Might is a big source of damage, not because of the initial hit, but because the 4 allies you have blessed with over 1,000 primary stat each are now giving you credit for the additional damage they are allowed to deal by this effect. In effect, WoW has implemented the FFXIV raider’s favorite (?) metric, rDPS, but just for this one spec and the effects it bestows. In FFXIV, jobs like Bard, Dancer, Reaper, and Scholar get substantial group buffs, which reflect for them as lower personal DPS. When uploading raid logs to FF Logs, that site untangles the log to determine how much those group buffs helped the raid and packs that DPS back in to the originating buffer through a metric called rDPS, or Raid DPS contribution. This allows the FFXIV community to see those jobs through the lens of total contribution and helps them keep favorably in-meta when compared to the “selfish” DPS jobs.

In WoW, of course, because so much of the culture is built on the use of in-game damage meters, the game needed a way to keep Augmentation competitive, or at least demonstrate the value it brings. Because of how WoW just generally is, players weren’t going to accept a pure support spec, so Augmentation is a DPS by title and definition. And thus, Blizzard coded the combat log in game, source of all official truth about DPS, to take those contributions to group DPS from the Augmentation Evoker and feed them back into the Evoker’s counted damage totals. The four ally limit of most of the Augmentation buffs are designed to be useful in all settings – not too powerful in raid, but perfect in a Mythic Plus, where the Augmentation Evoker’s damage scales to be roughly in-line with any other good DPS while they do the same in raid.

It’s a curious conundrum, because now it opens up a new vector to consider – existing buffs that enhance other players. WarcraftLogs made some controversy in Shadowlands by simply noting in logs if a player had been blessed with a Priest’s Power Infusion, because the overall DPS contribution of PI could not be split out, but it was worth noting at the high-end of play when a rank 1 DPSer was receiving extra buffs or not. PI, Windfury, Bloodlust, and more could all stand to be split out in this same way and account for how their specs are fully performing. It leads to interesting questions – how would Windwalker Monk be balanced if their Mystic Touch damage enhancement to physical damage taken by a target was fed back into their performance metrics? How would you handle Havoc DH if the same was done for magic damage buffed through Chaos Brand? How would you balance the DPS of any spec that brings Bloodlust/Heroism/Time Warp/Fury of the Aspects?

So far, Blizzard is very hesitant to walk that line, but I do think that Augmentation is going to force their hand in some ways. Right now, the buff is flat across the board to the 4 allies chosen, but that means there will be some ability to min-max it based on where the Augmentation is physically located in relation to party members. I 100% expect that heavily-optimized groups will push the Augmentation Evoker to stand near the most flavor of the month meta DPS specs, because objectively, a main stat increase to like, a Retribution Paladin, is going to be more impactful than a buff to an Affliction Warlock. This should, hopefully, create a situation where outlier DPS specs are brought more into line, because some amount of the Augmentation Evoker’s community-perceived balance is going to come down to who they are partied with as much as it does the design of the class and spec. Augmentation will be flat-out more performant in an FOTM Mythic Plus group with the highest DPS tank, healer, and two other high DPS damage dealers than they would be in your average group, and that is going to create some amount of friction that will need to be untangled in calls to nerf or buff.

Because of how much more tangled the DPS math is in WoW, community sites like WarcraftLogs (even with the same developer as FFLogs) will not be able to untangle the math for non-Augmentation buffs and I think there’s value to creating an rDPS metric in WoW to account for things like PI and other targeted buffs. However, at the same time, I know that if WoW had an rDPS measure that players could count on, they’d also get extremely shitty about who gets brought to groups because then you could quantify certain buffs and debuffs numerically and it would create even more meta-slavery. So in some ways, I get Blizzard’s hesitation here, and I think Augmentation is an interesting experiment for it, because it will, in some ways, help expose certain other imbalances.

In terms of actual gameplay, I was surprised that for as different as the philosophy and idea are behind Augmentation, it plays…well, a lot like Devastation. Much of the rotation hits the same notes with the same abilities, and you just end up weaving in a couple of Augmentation-specific abilities like Ebon Might and Upheaval. To the extent that the support role requires more thought, Blizzard has tried to limit the need to quickly target swap, recognizing that the GCD and combat flow in WoW are too fast to allow things like how Astrologian in FFXIV plays, where target swapping between the boss and an ally is a way of life. The healer buff you can talent will auto-pick a healer in range if you don’t have one targeted, and the tank buff that causes damage when that tank is hit will target your current enemy target’s target if you don’t have a friendly tank selected (thus, logically, hitting the tank anyways). There has been real thought put into minimizing the sharp edges that such a role could have, while keeping a core focus on DPS and personal performance that, just as it happens, also enhances nearby allies.

So will support as a role be the next frontier in WoW? Eh…probably not. I think that Augmentation will, in the short and medium term, present some headaches and challenges that will keep it alone in that category for a while. I also don’t suspect it will be sharply changed in 11.0, at least not immediately, as the timeline on development meshes with the spec being developed in-tandem with new expansion content and so I imagine it will have that future state in mind as well. I do appreciate that it is a bold experiment in an expansion increasingly full of them, introducing a new spec to a new class in the same minor patch as a new mega-dungeon and two other full class reworks, and I think WoW is at its best when the developers are loose and agile like this, able to chase a bunch of different ways for the game to evolve and better suit players.

What’s more, I like that WoW is getting something in the vein of support, even if it plays pretty much identically to a DPS and is considered and categorized as such. I’m glad that the team is mindful of how DPS performance is measured and has already made explicit that their buffs count for them and coded the game to support it right away so we have no Discipline Priest in Wrath of the Lich King scenarios. I do, kind of, wish that it had been a tank spec, just because I think an Evoker tank would have been really cool and thematically very appropriate, but I think the swerve with a first-ever support spec is kind of neat and trumps that overall. I’m optimistic that it will be fun to play (it was on PTR, for sure) and that, after some balancing on the DPS meta overall, it will settle in to a fun niche where it will be very strong to bring to raids and dungeons, but not so much so that it beats everything else, and in WoW, a support being broadly viable is a bigger hope than I dared hope.