Review of Chronowarden Hero Talents - Time-Space Manipulation & Future Insight

This past week, Blizzard revealed new Hero Talent Trees in a First Look at the new system coming with the The War Within expansion. Our Augmentation guide writer, Jereico, offers an early review of the Chronowarden Hero Talents for Augmentation excited to further manipulate time and space but raising some concerns about doubling down on Prescience and its associated burnout.

Hero Talents Overview

• Chrono Flame

Living Flame is enhanced with Bronze magic, repeating 15% of the damage or healing you dealt to the target in the last 5 sec as Arcane, up to a fixed amount.

• Warp

Hover now warps you through time and space and its cooldown is reduced by 5 seconds. Hover continues to allow Evoker spells to be cast while moving.

• Temporal Burst

Tip the Scales overloads you with temporal energy, increasing your haste, movement speed and cooldown recovery rate by 2%, ramping up to 40% over 20 seconds.

• Reverberations

Spiritbloom heals for an additional 30% over 8 seconds. Upheaval deals 30% additional damage over 8 seconds.

• Interdimensional Phase

Warp reduces damage taken by 30%, starting high and reducing over 2 sec.

• Motes of Acceleration

Warp leaves a trail of Motes of Acceleration. Allies who come in contact with a mote gain 20% increased movement speed for 30 sec.

• Threads of Fate

Casting an Essence ability during Temporal Burst causes a nearby ally to gain a Thread of Fate for 15 sec, granting them a chance to echo their damage or healing spells, dealing 15% of the amount again.

• Primacy

For each damage over time effect from Upheaval or Spiritbloom, gain 3% haste, up to 9%.

• Careful Contemplation

Your Intellect and Stamina and increased by 10%, but your cooldowns are increased by 10%.

• Time Convergence

Abilities with a 45 second or longer cooldown grant 10% intellect for 15 sec. Defensive abilities grant 10% Stamina for 15 sec. Essence spells extend the duration by 1 sec.

• Master of Destiny

Empower spells amplify all your active Threads of Fate, increasing their power by 100% for 8 sec, stacking up to 2 times.

• Golden Opportunity

Prescience has a 25% chance to not incur a cooldown. Echo has a 25% chance not to cost Essence.

• Instability Matrix

Each time you cast an empower spell, unstable time magic reduces its cooldown by up to 15 sec.

• Afterimage

Empower spells send up to 3 Chrono Flames to your targets. Chrono Flames have a small chance to grant you Essence Burst.

Chronowarden Evoker Hero Talent Tree

Last week I had a chance to sit down with fellow Wowhead writer Preheat and interview Jade Martin, Lead Combat Designer, and George Martin, Game Producer, where we covered everything that we could about the new Chronowarden Hero Talent Tree in 30 minutes.

Over the course of our interview, and through the official blog post, we learned quite a bit about what we should expect when it comes to the new Hero Talent system. For example, Blizzard notably reiterated that swapping between Hero Talent Trees will be as easy as swapping talents is now. Additionally, the trees themselves will share a similar structure and number of relative throughput and utility nodes, such that the overall power level is consistent, targeting roughly 25% additional throughput, while also permitting slight differences in gameplay or damage/healing profile.

Given the sheer number of these trees being added to the game, this system is quite ambitious, and yet it's one of the features I am most looking forward to when it comes to the upcoming The War Within expansion. These trees have the potential to allow players to focus on their favorite thematic elements of their class and spec, while adding new interesting twists to existing gameplay.

• Warp

While Chrono Flame might not be especially flashy or high-value for Augmentation, Warp on the other hand may actually be my favorite node in the entire Chronowarden talent tree. In addition to reducing the cooldown on Hover, Warp actually turns Hover into a true "blink-style" ability, which is thematically on-point for the time-space magic wielding Chronowarden, and has incredible playstyle implications.

This was one of the nodes that we kept coming back to discuss the most during the Developer Interview, particularly because there are simply so many possibilities around how the ability will eventually be designed to play and feel. This is one that I'm definitely looking forward to playtesting in-game as soon as possible.

• Interdimensional Phase or Motes of Acceleration

Before you get too comfortable with this one, it's quite likely that the damage reduction on Interdimensional Phase will come down from 30% per our discussion with the developers. The articulated goal behind talents like this is to offer a small side benefit or thematic bonus effect, rather than introducing a new primary play-around function for the spell, and it's quite likely that a 30% damage reduction on Warp would make the spell incredibly powerful for dealing with major hits or "one-shot" mechanics, especially in a high level Mythic+ environment.

As long as it competes with a powerful defensive ability, Motes of Acceleration is unlikely to see play in challenging content outside of niche uses. That said, 30 seconds is actually quite a long time for a buff like this to be active, especially considering the short cooldown on Warp, and could be quite a boon when coupled with naturally slower teammates like Priests or Death Knights. I’m at least quite looking forward to playtesting this one, as its power depends to some extent on how many motes spawn at a time, and how easy the motes are to retrieve.

• Careful Contemplation or Time Convergence

While 10% Intellect and Stamina are certainly strong bonuses, given that these two abilities both represent relatively generic or straightforward benefits, I honestly wouldn’t mind seeing these two options reworked into something different altogether.

For Augmentation, Careful Contemplation can only really be taken alongside Interwoven Threads, and essentially reverses the effect of that talent in order to provide passive Intellect and Stamina. Without Interwoven Threads, there is not enough cooldown reduction in the kit to keep Breath of Eons and Tip the Scales at or below a 2 minute cooldown, which is an important mark to hit in order to avoid desync with most classes' major damage cooldowns.

Time Convergence still isn’t especially clear in terms of which abilities qualify for which effect, and what happens when long cooldowns are used together. Assuming the offensive component is only triggered through typical damage-oriented cooldowns, Augmentation's major damage cooldowns Breath of Eons, Tip the Scales, and Time Skip (when talented) are generally used together in the same short burst window, meaning that unless this effect stacks or extends its duration in some way, potential uptime on this effect is not particularly high.

I do quite like effects that reward active gameplay with buff duration extension, which as a mechanic is quite core to both Augmentation's gameplay loop and also the overall Chronowarden theme. That said, at the moment I still have too many questions about exactly how Time Convergence is meant to function, and I am not particularly excited to play with the longer cooldowns of Careful Contemplation, which currently appears to be the stronger option.

• Temporal Burst

Temporal Burst is in my opinion another shining example of the Hero Talent system's potential, and is another favorite of mine in terms of talents in this tree.

This node takes Tip the Scales, a quite useful but rather mundane cooldown for Augmentation, and gives it a fresh coat of paint as a major cooldown with a noticeable and flavorful effect in line with the Chronowarden time-warping theme.

The ramping cooldown recovery component of Temporal Burst is actually quite easy to misinterpret, but it essentially translates to roughly 4 seconds of cooldown reduction across all spells by the end of the spell's duration. While this is certainly not enough to make any meaningful changes to major cooldown timings, or to suddenly make Careful Contemplation viable without Interwoven Threads, it is still a nice additional benefit of the spell, and is likely to be felt on shorter cooldown spells like Prescience, Fire Breath, and Upheaval, without causing any tremendous issues or desyncs.

• Threads of Fate

On its own, Threads of Fate is a simple support talent that aligns well with Augmentation’s spec fantasy. In fact, it’s quite mechanically similar to Fate Mirror, it's just attached to Tip the Scales, and prefers random nearby DPS allies instead of your chosen Prescience targets.

It's really only once we start to consider the next choice node that we start to run into obvious gameplay issues for Augmentation.

• Master of Destiny or Golden Opportunity

I was quite fortunate to have been able to share my critical feedback on these two talents during the Developer Interview. Ultimately, while flavorful, I believe that these talents likely need to be revisited when it comes to Augmentation and the current Live game.

Master of Destiny simply does not work well with Augmentation’s current rotation and spell priority. While it was clarified that Master of Destiny should buff both active and new instances Threads of Fate over its 8 second duration, the mechanic implicitly asks the player to cast Tip the Scales, cast as many Eruption as possible, cast two Empower spells, and then cycle Eruption and filler as much as possible for the remainder of the duration of Master of Destiny in order to maximize its value. In practice, this directly conflicts with Augmentation's current gameplay and cooldown usage.

• Reverberations

The third column of talents is ultimately fairly straightforward, with Reverberations adding a simple damage over time effect to Upheaval.

Upheaval on Live represents roughly 3% of Augmentation's total damage output in a single target encounter, and perhaps closer to 5% over a typical dungeon, meaning this node simply does not represent a particularly significant damage increase for Augmentation.

• Primacy

As written, Primacy would only ever grant Augmentation one stack of 3% Haste outside of AoE situations. Suppose roughly a 30% uptime on the buff, and we might expect an average of 1% Haste over a given raid encounter.

Again, this is just another talent node that does not seem particularly strong for Augmentation in its current incarnation, but could very well feel meaningful with larger numbers.

• Instability Matrix

Instability Matrix actually has the potential to be quite powerful for Augmentation, although I am definitely looking forward to playtesting this talent in order to learn exactly how the random cooldown reduction works in practice.

This is the sort of talent that certainly has the potential to introduce annoying desync of Empower abilities in the rotation, but in practice this is likely something that can be played around most of the time without issue.

• Afterimage

Finally, in the same way that I felt about Chrono Flame, Afterimage isn't a particularly flashy or transformative effect, but it adds does additional power to our Empower spells, and presumably adds more Bronze-themed projectiles to Augmentation's toolkit in a way that should ultimately feel fairly thematic and purposeful. Of course, additional chances at Essence Burst are always welcome, and generally make the spec more enjoyable to play.

Final Thoughts on Chronowarden, Augmentation, and The War Within

Overall I am actually quite excited about what the upcoming Hero Talent system has to offer, and when it comes to the Chronowarden talent tree as a whole, I am cautiously optimistic. The tree has some real standout winners in the form of Warp and Temporal Burst, but also has a few pain points that should be addressed in order to better align with Augmentation's core gameplay and cooldown usage in the Live game.

Assuming we can look forward to a plethora of Bronze-themed visuals to accompany some of these talents, the time-space fantasy of the Bronze dragonflight is certainly present in this tree, and while some nodes don't quite hit the mark for Augmentation from an impact standpoint, I'm actually quite confident that adjustments can be made in time for launch.

Last of all, while we're on the topic of Augmentation and The War Within, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge the current conversation within the community about how "fun" Augmentation is to play as a spec, particularly in a raid setting.

Augmentation gameplay in raid going forward would almost certainly benefit tremendously from some fundamental gameplay changes, as I've covered previously both in this piece, as well as past editorials. The spec is currently designed in such a way that it is all but required for the player to spend extensive time out of game preparing spreadsheet timers and then executing tightly-controlled Prescience cast sequences in-game in order to optimally swap between buff targets throughout a single given raid encounter. While I have certainly met a couple of players who find this gameplay genuinely satisfying, many seem to quickly develop burnout from the extensive preparation and micro-management, which can leave behind a sour taste despite an otherwise entirely enjoyable gameplay loop.

Last of all, while we're on the topic of Augmentation and The War Within, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge the current conversation within the community about how "fun" Augmentation is to play as a spec, particularly in a raid setting.

Augmentation gameplay in raid going forward would almost certainly benefit tremendously from some fundamental gameplay changes, as I've covered previously both in this piece, as well as past editorials. The spec is currently designed in such a way that it is all but required for the player to spend extensive time out of game preparing spreadsheet timers and then executing tightly-controlled Prescience cast sequences in-game in order to optimally swap between buff targets throughout a single given raid encounter. While I have certainly met a couple of players who find this gameplay genuinely satisfying, many seem to quickly develop burnout from the extensive preparation and micro-management, which can leave behind a sour taste despite an otherwise entirely enjoyable gameplay loop.

From my perspective, the bottom line is this: there is simply too much power in the ability to choose and swap between specific buff targets.

For those hoping that Hero Talents might significantly change up Augmentation's gameplay loop in raid, I'm afraid that is simply not the case here, at least based on the Chronowarden talent tree and our discussion with the development team. While these talents absolutely help to deepen the fantasy of the spec, allowing you to truly lean into the feeling of playing a support Evoker with a focus in Bronze time magic, there is no alternative to be found in these trees to either challenge or alter the existing buff targeting gameplay. If there is any hope to seeing changes to raid gameplay as Augmentation Evoker, it will have to come in the form of an update or minor rework to the spec as a whole in an upcoming content patch.

That said, all things considered I am quite pleased with the team at Blizzard for releasing these Hero talent tree previews as early as they have, and for continuing to seek and incorporate community feedback wherever possible. I certainly believe that the development team has their work cut out for them with this ambitious new system, having to create 39 interesting and reasonably balanced talent trees that each function with two of the game's 39 unique specializations! So pack your bags, sharpen your blades, and get ready for the upcoming War Within Expansion by leveling some new classes you always wanted to try.