Chronowarden Revealed! Evoker Hero Talent Breakdown and Developer Interview - The War Within

This is my interview about Chronowarden, the new Hero Talent for Evoker in World of Warcraft - The War Within! In this video I am joined by Jereico, George Velev (Game Producer), and Jade Martin (Lead Combat Designer). OPEN FOR MORE INFO↧↧↧

Have questions? Leave a comment or connect on other platforms:

#evoker #augmentation #preservation #pve

00:00 Introduction
01:27 What are Hero Talents?
01:59 Chronowarden Evoker Hero Talents
02:12 Balance and General Questions
06:27 Themes and Concepts for Hero Talents
09:28 Hero Talents Breakdown
28:00 Closing Thoughts and Outro

[kevinmshields]

Since Hero Talents are being designed with thematic flavor in mind, will Chrono Flame change the color of Living Flame to Bronze? Bronze npcs have a beautiful animation for Sand Blast that would fit thematically, and Living Flame has a very unfortunate fruit punch-flavored Kool Aid color that I'd be okay with replacing.

With that in mind, Bronze npcs also commonly use a channel spell that could replace Disintegrate. With the upcoming increase to mana costs, having this version replenish more mana could be an interesting choice for a node, and having it castable in Visage could be another unique flavorful way Chronowardens can stand out. It doesn't add a button and it would be more appealing than dropping motes.

Please note this is purely anecdotal - dropping motes doesn't seem to be catching on. Even when I've explained their usefulness in groups, they've often been mostly ignored, even when they're directly in front of players. This could be that they're often out of the way, or that I'm often pugging, but if players are aware of their usefulness and still not drawn to them, perhaps they're just not fun. Is there something more appealing we can do with them?

When Bronze magic dropped, it inroduced a fresh, fascinating way to play the game that inspired players imaginations. Using Echoes, Reversions, Rewind and especially Stasis effectively was a fun challenge to learn and especially rewarding when used effectively. For seasons 2 and 3, fervor for Prevokers has died down as the approach has shifted away from interesting interactions to throughput.

This system has the potential to revive what was interesting about Preservation. However, so far the only thing that looks like it makes gameplay more fun and interesting to use (or noticeable outside of logs or modes) is Warp. Instead of adding a HoT to Spiritbloom, what if the extra HoT was added when Spiritbloom hits players that have Echo or Reversion? This could interact well with the extra Essence Bursts from the capstone talent and revive Reversion. What about incorporating a new way to approach Stasis? Rewind?

While devs are understandably focusing on balance my hope is that they're still able realize the potential of Hero Talents to be something truly special for players. It must be difficult but Blizz has been killing it lately. Kudos to them and their hard work, and thank you for the interview.

[DraconicSeedling]

Amazing vid and quite detailed! I've shared this with my Guild as the first part of the Q&A helps all classes.

My biggest hope is that some of these talents for Augmentation will allow for longer a duration on Ebon Might, which would allowing more room for player error and/or movement during encounters. I'm saying this because I've been enjoying the added seconds from the Season#3 set 4-piece and will be very very sad to lose those extensions. Hero Talents feels like a proper place for this ability too.

[dsully]

Thanks for the video! chronowarden looks very powerful

[exhaustedua]

You guys really convinced them to nerf warp, TY 😂

[MrJeremydb]

Thank you for this! And hats off to blizzard, finally getting on feedback early!

[hrobertb]

Does warp replace hover? How far do you warp?

[Anonymoussss]

deva really needs help in the defense department these would of been great talents for devastation as a pvper we really need help on this department

[middlelb]

I think the problem, looking at the trees, is if we're trying to give an equal number of this or that, the this or that given has to be equal. 3 target storm bolt doesn't make Warrior have utility, it just sort of exists.

[arneeman]

I can see at couple potential issues with this tree.

First off, Time Convergence makes you want to use lower-impact cooldowns constantly to maintain 10% intellect buff. Cauterizing flame in particular has a 1 minute cooldown and will reset itself if you don't cleanse anything, so using it purely to maintain the buff would potentially be the play. I think this will feel very clunky in-game.

There is a significant amount of haste in this tree, which is by far the worst stat for most preservation builds. Together with the reduced empower cooldown, I worry this will lead to mana issues (especially with the 10% mana cost increase on many spells planned for 10.2.5). This could force blossom builds in longer raid fights to rely purely on essence burst rather than actually spending essence to cast, which i think is suboptimal.

As a healer you want consistency rather than RNG. I think Instability Matrix in particular can be hard to play around for both m+ and Echo raid builds. If a low roll can reduce the cooldown by 5 seconds rather than 15, this causes some of your main healing spells to randomly not align with incoming damage. I would much rather see a flat decrease here.

[HylinHro]

What kinda Elf is that behind Jade it looks like cross between a Blood Elf and a Night Elf. I went and check the character customizations in the game and couldn't recreate that look.

[TeclisFelmourne]

Would rather warp, would work like fel rush, going the direction you are. Hate when blink yeet me to the ground.
Gonna be intersting that's for sure.

[xxvipxx]

Ty for getting the DR nerfed even BEFORE the PTR 💀

[Girthsquirts]

Pretty cool, just sucks wow is so competitive that it will always suffer from the same thing. Cookie cutter builds. If you want to be viable, you will just copy paste the build you find off google and never look back. So we have the illusion of options, but not really options

[itscthuwu]

Too many people looking for faults instead of just being excited for something that isn't even finalized. At this point blizzard should stop sharing their plans and letting people think their opinions are important to the developers. They're going to design what they want regardless of input, community council kind of proved that they're only looking for appearances.

[Kmaitland]

I wish they were more impactful. I want them to change our rotation. I don't want to play the same spec I've played for the 3rd expansion.