Preservation Evoker Spark Guide

The Spark of Ingenuity is a rare crafting material that we get one of every 2 weeks. Most of the strongest crafted gear requires these which means we’ll only be able to craft 1-2 pieces of high end gear at the start of the season.  That seemingly puts quite a bit of pressure on us to make sure we craft the right item since crafting the wrong one can’t be rectified for two weeks.

Some crafted items have special effects called “Embellishments”. These are extra effects on top of an items regular stats but we’re limited to two of them. Embellishments come in two different types:

• Effects that are built into the item itself like Elemental Lariat and Venom-Steeped Stompers. These are only available on the specific piece.
• Reagents that add an effect to an epic crafted item during creation like Potion Absorption Inhibitor. You can add these to almost any slot, however they can’t be added to items with existing effects. You couldn’t store say, a Potion Absorption Inhibitor on your Elemental Lariat.

Notable Preservation Embellishments

Elemental Lariat

Note that you can also set the stats you want on it manually.

Expected Throughput: 1.2-1.5%

Elemental Lariat is maybe a little more complicated than it needed to be. The short version is that one of your gems will empower a couple of times a minute and give you a specific secondary based on the “element” of the gem. Stat procs are nice and the uptime on the neck is fairly good. It’s an unexceptional but solid choice that’s valuable in all content types.

The long version, and I promise you can skip this if you like, is that each gem has an element associated with it. Frost gems include the Versatility gem + any Hybrid gems that have Versatility as their minor stat. Here’s a quick chart:

Lariat recently got a slight nerf that reduced its power by 5% and prevented multiple elements being active at the same time. Assuming they implement this change correctly it’s a very minor nerf to it.

Venom-Steeped Stompers

Expected Throughput: 1-1.2%

Venom-Steeped Stompers are quite a bit easier to understand than Elemental Lariat. We’ll get a couple of procs a minute that’ll give us a ton of our best stat (or at least, the stat we have the most of) and reduce our least common stat by a smaller amount. We’re a good fit for an item like this since our best stat (Mastery) is significantly more valuable that our weakest stat. Unfortunately though it just doesn’t compare that well to Elemental Lariat. There’s a small chance we craft these on a later week but for now we have better selections.

Potion Absorption Inhibitor

Expected Throughput: 0-3%

This is a unique bonus that’ll extend a potion of our choosing by 50%. There’s really only one synergy we’re interested in here and that’s it’s effect on the Potion of Chilled Clarity. Potion of Chilled Clarity reduces our mana costs by 100% while active and the purported downside (+40% cast time) doesn’t actually apply to instant cast or empowered spells. That means the embellishment buys us another 7.5 seconds of free casts a few times a fight. This has the highest possible contribution on paper, however it does have a few conditions to be good.

• It’s useless in Mythic+ so you have to be raid focused to justify it.
• You need to be popping two Chilled Clarity potions per fight. These are about 1.3k gold per pop right now.
• You need to be doing sufficiently difficult content that you can blast out healing for 15 seconds and still get use out of another 7.5 afterwards.

There’s undoubtedly potential here, but it’s likely to be something you can grab in two weeks time when we have a better feel for Evoker mana consumption and what kind of fights we’re dealing with.

Magazine of Healing Darts

Expected Throughput: 1%

Magazine of Healing Darts fires darts at a random target a few times a minute. The first target it hits will get a medium sized heal. You’re unlikely to ever slot these because Elemental Lariat and Venom-Steeped Stompers are just clearly better and are also effective in all content types.

“Honorable” Mention: Blue Silken Lining

Blue Silken Lining could be good on paper if you were ever able to keep it at a very high uptime. We also tend to be quite high on health due to a ton of self-healing effects (in order to use our Mastery). 90% is a tough threshold though and we’d prefer it not turn off when raid damage is at its highest.

Making a Choice

In addition to the Embellishments above we can also spend a Spark on the Alacritous Alchemist Stone. This doesn’t count toward our Embellishment limit but will cost us one of our Sparks so short-term it’ll need to be included in the comparison. Here are our options, of which we’ll pick two:

• Elemental Lariat with Crit / Mastery.
  • Advantages: Gives a neck you can triple socket right away. No other necks with great stat allocations. Solid in all content types.
• Primal Molten Spellblade (or other 1H weapon) with Potion Absorption Inhibitor.
  • Advantages: Highest potential throughput. Weapon is your most important slot so having a 400 item level+ one right away is very appealing.
  • Disadvantages: Weapon is a contested slot and you’d prefer to have the Evoker-only weapon from raid. Embellishment does nothing in Mythic+. Potions are very expensive right now and you can only gain an advantage from it if you are using two per fight.
• Alacritous Alchemist Stone.
  • Advantages: It might take you a while to get the two best raid trinkets, and the other competition is quite weak. High potential throughput.
  • Disadvantages: No advantage on some fight timers. Requires you to spend a ton on potions to get maximum benefit. Middling in Mythic+.
• Venom-Steeped Stompers.
  • Advantages: Good in all content types.
  • Disadvantages: Less raw throughput than the options above. Secondary stat allocation is kind of poor.

For raiders, most will want to go with Lariat + Alacritous Alchemist Stone. You’ll then need to prioritize farming a weapon as soon as possible. High end raiders who don’t mind taking a risk could opt for Primal Molten Blade + either of Lariat and the Alchemist Stone. This is a much more expensive option with worse carry over to other content types but on paper at least it also has the highest potential. Those who don’t intend on finishing progression inside the first two weeks can afford to grab Potion Absorption Inhibitor as their third option if it proves strong. Ultimately the difference between the top few choices for Evoker is not that significant and while this choice feels big, it’s not really.

If you don’t intend on raiding at all then your choices are quite a bit worse. Elemental Lariat and Venom-Steeped Stompers are a “fine” combination. You could also opt to prioritize an engineering tinker but I won’t be recommending that here since it might depend heavily on the needs of your group. If you raid at all then you’re better off making your choice based on the paragraph above.

Quickfire Questions

• I also have a bunch of Titan Training Matrixes. What should I spend those on? These are much more flexible and you don’t have to worry about wasting them. You can use them to upgrade your weakest slots to ~382. A ring is a really great idea for most.
• Doesn’t Toxic Patch double the effect of Venom-Steeped Stompers? It does, at the cost of your second Embellishment slot. So you get double the stat gain (and loss) for double the investment.
• Can I recraft an item and add an Embellishment effect to it? You’re supposed to be able to but this functionality is extremely buggy right now. Try and avoid the need for it until a fix comes through.