Preservation is a spec that relies pretty strongly on the interaction between it's spells to get the most out of them, which means its pretty important to be aware of all the ways the spells buff or improve each other.

ve

The first important interaction to mention is what ve does when you cast it. Im mentioning it first because a lot of the other more complex interactions revolve around two buffs that ve applies on cast.

The first one is coy. When you cast ve on any target you will get the coy buff applied to yourself. This buff enhances your next lf by 100% or your next db by 40%. We don't use Living Flame much for healing but Dream Breath is a powerhouse of a button so it's very important that you always VE before you cast DB. ve has a 18 seconds cooldown and db cooldowns in 30 seconds so you will most of the time have a free VE between DBs and you should always be mindful of not putting VE on cd if you're planning on using Dream Breath soon. The effects of coy aren't transfered to echoed versions of the buffed spell.

The second effect is lb. lb has it's own set of interactions that i will go into more detail below but the main thing that is important to know is that lb is a heal-transfer mechanic that is very strong and allows us to abuse it in several different ways to do an enourmous amount of healing.

It's important to note that the ve needs to land on it's target for lb to apply, if you get interrupted mid-air (like say, by a tornado from the storming affix) your VE won't land, it won't do any healing and won't apply lifebind nor give you CoY.

On top of that, casting ve will make you dash to your target in a straight line, animation locking you, making you eat every single mechanic and puddle in between your original location and your target, and apply these effects when you land on your target. You can always cast VE on yourself to avoid the forced movement. A very important thing for playing Preservation to it's max potential is understanding that ve is a very versatile tool that is our coy activator, our lb aplicator, a momentum-cancelling movement ability and also a decent single target heal, and juggling its cooldown so you always have it up for all of these scenarios when you need them takes a lot of practice.

Echo

echo is probably the most important part of the spec when we talk about knowing how your abilities interact with each other. The best way to think about echo is that it behaves as a different cast of the spell it is echoing, so effects that always apply to the spell also benefit the echoed version but effects that only benefit your next cast of the spell will only work on the first cast.

This is a basic list of all the spells echo interacts with and how it behaves:

  • lf: Casting Living Flame on an ally while echo is active on a friendly target will send an extra Living Flame to each echo. If the target of the original living flame has an echo then they will be hit by 2 Living Flames. Each extra Living Flame has it's own chance to proc burst. If coy is active when casting the original Living Flame, it will be buffed by it but any echoed living flames will not.
  • ve: ve will only make you dash to the main target, echoed VE's will heal the targets with echo but won't make you move to them. All allies healed by VE both original cast and echos are affected by lb.
  • rev: Reversion will apply a second, different version of itself to all targets that have echo when it is cast. This second reversion is a different buff from the first one which means you can have two different reversion buffs up at the same time on the same target. Casting Reversion will apply gh on the original target and everyone who gets an echoed Reversion aswell, if a target has echo active on them and it's also the original target, then they will get 2 gh hits. Having 2 different Reversion buffs on the same person also means you get double the effect of gp, making it a total of 21% healing increase on said target.
  • db: On casting Dream Breath, every allied with echo will also recieve a copy of the whole cast of Dream Breath, both the initial heal and the over time effect based on the rank of the cast. The same as with Reversion, echoed Dream Breath is a different buff than the regular cast which means you can have both heals over time active on the same person at the same time. If you have coy active at the time of cast, the cast will consume the buff but only the original cast of Dream Breath will be buffed by it, the echoed Dream Breaths will not be buffed by coy.
  • sb: Spiritbloom will hit every person that has echo with a single bolt of Spiritbloom regardless of the rank of the original cast. To note here is that despite the Spiritbloom tooltip mentioning that it "splits" to injured allies, the healing of SB is not reduced by the amount of targets it hits, a rank 1 SB will hit 1 person for the full amount, and a rank 3 one will hit 3 different people for the full amount each. Just as with all the other spells the same person can be healed by both the original bolt of the spiritbloom cast and the bolt from echo in the case of having echo and also being a target of the original spell cast.
  • blossom: When an Emerald Blossom pops while echoes are active, each friendly target with an echo will be healed by the amount Blossom does to each singular target, the echoed heal amount is increased by any ouro stacks you might have at the time of the blossom cast. As of 10.1.5, every echo consumed by Blossom will also make a seedling spawn from the healed target and jump to someone else. This seedling does its full amount of healing regardless of the strenght of the echo that spawned it. This seems to not be the case anymore in 10.2.

To note, rescue, caut and nat do not interact with echo in any way.

ta

Theres not many things to mention with TA as it's mostly pretty straight forward, the base spell travels from your location putting a shield on every allied player it hits, the size of the shield gets reduced beyond the first 5 targets hit. The couple of things you need to be aware of is how the choice node interacts with some other parts of our kit:

  • If you are playing reso, as TA travels it will apply a weaker echo to the first 5 targets it hits, this echo is 30% at base and increased by timelord to 45%. ta won't overwrite manually casted echoes and will just pass over people that have stronger echoes and apply it's effect to other players instead.
  • If you have noz, TA will instead reduce the cooldown of all currently on cooldown empower spells, these being sb, db, and fb. If you put a noz ta inside your stasis, releasing your stasis will reduce the cooldowns of the empowers when the TA comes out, if you put several TA's into your stasis, each one will reduce the cooldowns by 5 seconds.

Stasis

stasis also comes with its own set of complex interactions. Like with echo a good way to think of stasis is that it casts the spell again, it doesn't "store" the spellcast because it doesn't save some external bonuses the original spell might have had when you originally casted it, and the release is a fresh cast of the spell with whatever bonuses you have at the time of the release. The spells released from stasis don't come out all together, there is a small delay between each spell.

This are the stasis interactions with most of our spells:

  • sb will cast again at the same rank and on the same target of the original cast, while the extra bolts from higher ranks will pick new targets depending on lowest HP of nearby allies at the time of the release.
  • db will cast at the same rank as the original one in a cone in front of you, if you have the coy buff at the time you release stasis, (say, you pressed VE before releasing your stasis) then DB will consume the buff to increase it's healing, it does not matter if you had the buff when you originally casted the spell to put it in stasis or not. If you include ve and then db inside your stasis, then at the moment of release VE will give you the coy buff, which will then be consumed by the db your stasis releases. VE is somewhat low value compared to other spells you could put into your stasis so ideally you shouldn't do this and should just VE again before releasing stasis.
  • For ta, any TA inside your stasis will be sent in the direction you're looking at at the time of release, because stasis doesn't release all the spells at the same time and there is a small delay between them, if you have multiple ta's inside stasis you can send them in different directions by turning your camera during the release.
  • Any blossom's stored inside stasis will release aimed at the same player as they were on the original cast, it will heal players around them and the seedlings will choose new targets, any ouro stacks that you might have at the time of the original cast won't affect the blossom that is released later. Due to the way cycle works, you might think that throwing 3 blossoms back to back would be really good, however with our current talent tree we can only have 2 capstone talents at the same time, and df is way more powerfull on a blossom build in a raid setting than stasis. As raid blossom builds won't use stasis and echo builds won't have cycle, currently there isn't any scenario where you would want to stasis multiple blossom's.
  • lf, echo and rev work like you would expect, they cast again in the same target as originally casted on, Living Flames have another chance to proc burst and Reversions proc gh. These are really low value spells by themselves and shouldn't be put into your stasis.
  • caut and nat have a special type of interaction with stasis: When you use a dispell on someone that doesn't have a valid debuff to dispell, the dispell doesn't go on cooldown, but it's still saved inside the stasis. This means you can activate stasis and then use caut on 3 different players, it will have no cooldown because you're not actually dispelling anything, and then some seconds after once the targets are actually affected by a debuff you release stasis and send a caut into every one of them, dispelling 3 people at once. This trick is not that usefull for nat as it has a short cd but its really powerfull when you need to dispell bleeds with caut.

The most common stasis combos you will use are:

  • ve > stasis > ta > sb > db
    The most basic combo, you simply put all 3 of your strongest spell into the stasis so that it pumps the highest amount of healing when releasing. we ve before activating the stasis so our db is buffed by coy and we should VE again before releasing the stasis to buff the one inside it.
  • stasis > ta > echo > ta
    This is a little more complex, and includes one echo which goes again the general recomendations for stasis. This is the lb ramp stasis, and it's used to get echo spread to the whole raid. The first TA you release echoes 5 people, you then manually echo 1 person (i will explain this in a bit), the 2nd ta then echoes another 5 people (11 in total now) and fills your stasis, we then instantly release the stasis which sends 2 more ta's into the raid, echoing 5 people each for a total of 21 echoes now.

    The reason you have to put a manual echo in between the TA's, is because any other cast would consume all the echoes you have already up and wouldn't let you stack a high amount of them. We also don't do 3 TA's inside our stasis cause that would mean standing around for ~30 seconds without doing any healing, which isn't really viable.
  • ve > stasis > sb > db > ta
    This is also a ramp stasis, but is one that doesn't require you to stand around doing no healing for ~12 seconds and also packs a good punch of healing being a combination of the previous ones. You do a healing stasis like normal but put the TA at the end, with the idea being once ta is back off cd you can release the stasis and then cast TA to instantly have 10 echoes spread around your raid, after which you can do ~5 more with manual echoes and have coverage of around 15 raid members.

rev

The first and most important thing to know about rev is that it is actually two different heals over time. rev and it's echoed version both can exist on the same player on the same time and each brings it's own set of effects with it

For gh, rev itself will heal via gh and the echoed version will also apply gh healing scaled to the strength of the echo it was used to apply it. A weaker echo from ta would mean less gh healing from the echoed version of rev

gp on the other hand is not scalled to echo strength, and having two revs on the same target means double the gp effect on that player (multiplicative between each other) regardless of if it was applied with a natural echo or a reso echo.

rev also has a chance to proc burst on cast. This means when you use the spell it has a chance to grant you burst once for the natural cast and then once more for each echo active at the time. Similar to how lf behaves when echoed

One interaction that gh specifically has with stagger-like effects like td and Brewmaster monk's stagger is that gh considers damage taken as the whole of the damage instance before it is reduced by stagger, but also takes into account the damage taken from the stagger itself. This means that a a lot of damage taken into stagger will make gh heal for way more than what it seems like it should. In practice this means that rev is a good way to heal people after you td them to protect them from a big hit and also we are incredibly good at healing Brewmasters.

lb

Every time you cast ve on someone your target and all allied targets affected by echo will have lb applied to them for 5 seconds. Lifebind binds the affected players to you, any healing done by you, to you will also heal all the affected players. This also works the other way around in that heals by you to affected players will heal you. Note that lb works between you and the affected players, it doesn't work between the affected players, healing someone that has lb on them won't do anything to other players that have lifebind, only to you.

If you want to heal a large amount of people with lifebind, you apply the buff and then do as much healing as you can to yourself, this is usually done with ec

A few things to note about lb:

  • The ve needs to land on it's target for lb to apply, if you get interrupted mid-air (like say, by a tornado from the storming affix) your VE won't land, it won't do any healing and won't apply lifebind.
  • lb by default transfers 40% of the healing done, if you apply it by echoing a VE, then the strenght of the echo affects the strength of the lifebind. A default echo with no talents its 70%, and so if you echo a ve without any modifiers lb would transfer (40 * 0.7) 28% of the healing recieved. With timelord talented the strength of your naturally casted echoes goes up to 105%, which means lb transfers (40 * 1.05) 42% of the healing. If you apply reso echoes while also having Timelord these echoes will have 45% strength, and so lifebinding with them would transfer (40 * 0.45) 18% of the healing done. In a raid setting lbing with reso echoes it's necessary because its not possible to get enough coverage with just casted echoes, in keys you most of the time want to cover the group with manually casted echoes before lifebinding. Do note that you really only need 3 echoes to get a 5 man lb because you don't need one on yourself and your main ve target also gets lb.
  • lb transfers all healing done by you to you, the two most notable non-intuitive scenarios in which this applies is first that using healing potions or items transfer via lifebind, and you share a percentage of the healing done by the potion or item to everyone lifebound. The second is that any external effect that increases the healing done or recieved by you would in turn increase the healing transfered via lifebind. If you get gs during your lb window and press ec the healing EC would normally do is increased by 60% and thus the healing transfered is also increased by the same amount.
  • Healing done by rb also transfers via lb. This isn't unexpected as the spell it's simply healing you but it's worth mentioning cause some people overlook it, and it's specially powerful considering that the amount of healing rb does is only limited by how much damage you can take while it's up without dying. If you manage to take an absurd amount of damage with Renewing Blaze and lb active without dying, then rb would heal up a big chunk of all that damage and lb would transfer all that healing to everyone else. This means that in theory you can stand in lava to heal the raid, but it doesn't mean that you should do it.

leaping

Casting fb will give you the leap buff, which will make your next lf spawn aditional flames depending on the rank of the Firebreath, each rank adds 1 aditional flame. With font the maximum amount of extra flames Leaping can give is 4, this means that casting lf will hit 5 targets, 1 for the original cast and 4 extras from leaping.

If the Living Flame that consumes the buff is an offensive one, then the extra flames will try to hit unique enemy targets, if you have more extra flames than there are enemies avaliable then the living flames will heal nearby allies. In a single target scenario this means that casting lf with leaping on the one enemy you are fighting will hit that enemy with 1 Living Flame and 4 nearby allies with healing Living Flames. This healing living flames will not consume any echoes you might have out at the time and they also won't consume coy but will benefit from it.

If you cast lf on an ally while leaping is up, then the extra Living Flames will aim towards nearby allies. The main Living Flame will benefit from coy and consume it but the extra Flames will not.

ton

The ton talent will spawn a clone of you when any nearby ally drops below 20% health, the clone will first cast one ve and then as many lfs as it can during the next 8 seconds on that same target

enkindled, lfm and your versatility will increase the strength of the lfs it casts, while flow and haste will reduce their cast time. All of the spells it casts can crit, benefitting from exhil. Plus having coy or lifespark up when the clone is casting lf will increase the healing of the lf without consuming your buff

Notably, the ton clone does not benefit from your mastery

lifespark

Our returning tierset 4 piece bonus for season four, every time rev does healing we have a 2.5% chance of getting one stack of lifespark, making our next lf instant cast and doing extra damage or healing

  • ton benefits from lifespark. Having the buff up while our ton clone is casting lfs will increase their healing without consuming the buff.
  • Consuming leap while having a lifespark charge will increase all the damage and healing those lfs do
  • coy and lifespark stack. Having both buffs up when casting a lf will increase it's healing multiplicatively. They also both interact together with leap: casting lf on a single enemy target while having leap, coy and lifespark up will send all the extra lfs to heal your group buffed by both effects
  • If you echo someone and then heal someone else with a lifespark lf, the echoed lf will not benefit from lifespark

Everything mentioned in this page is also explained in the Preservation Evoker Spell Reference Document and most of the tips and tricks are also covered in the guides, be sure to check out the resources page.

Changelog

  • 2024/04/04:
    • Added Time of Need and Lifespark sections
  • 2024/01/15:
    • Added reversion section
    • Fixed some wording around the Spiritbloom Echo parts to remove specific numbers
  • 2024/01/07:
    • Fixed ve CD
    • Added mention of CoY not echoing to the VE section
    • Moved the TA section to be right after Echo
    • Changed interaction between leap and CoY