Flameshaper offers a change in playstyle over base Preservation and also Chronowarden, adding engulf to our kit and several strong talents that interact with it. Properly setting up before using engulf to maximize the effect of your consumes and using them in the correct situations is the key to maximizing Flameshaper

engulf and consume

The base of the tree revolves around using engulf on a target with a db to cause a big consume healing the whole raid for a very high amount.

Most of your healing during raids will come from consume when playing Flameshaper, so properly setting up to maximizing them is important: The way it works is that consume will always prefer the strongest version of db applied on the engulf target, and will do its AoE heal for a percentage of what that specific db is healing for. This means that enhancing this db with effects like coy, s14p, renewingb and lungs will vastly increase the healing of consume as these effects all multiply each other greatly increasing the total healing.

engulf itself as a single-target heal is not really good, and trying to maximize its healing by stacking healing over time effects is mostly a waste of time. Your main focus when playing Flameshaper should always be to properly use consume with stasis for the biggest damage events.

Throughput Nodes

  • lungs is a strong passive increase to db that will also transfer via echo. The fb increase is also a welcomed increase to our passive damage.
  • travflame is another good passive increase to db but because it only applies once even when echoing engulf, it will only result in a ~30% increase to the base casted db without affecting any echoed dbs. As this effect does not increase the healing over time db does but instead spreads and extends it it can't be used to increase our consume healing.
  • enkindle is fairly useless when playing echo builds due to it replicating 20% of the base echo only which is insignificant. It is however a very good talent for any blossom builds as it a flat 20% increase to all blossom healing that also feeds cycle.
  • buradre is a fairly good quality-of-life node that lets you quick-fire some of the most annoying long cast time spells we have like sb and fb right after utilizing engulf.
  • conduit reads like a good bonus but in practice vast majority of your healing is done on targets that are above 50% HP, which means this won't have much practical effect on your healing.
  • tpres is a small but good increase to our burst generation but does heavily push lf over rev as main generator as it doesn't boost the proc chance on rev casts.
  • Finally, cinders is an incredibly strong effect that in some scenarios is able to do absolutely absurd healing numbers and easily carry any mechanic that revolves around strong single target healing someone who takes heavy damage.

Gameplay

You are looking to play a fairly standard echo build mainly echoing rev or db depending on the specific talent variant you choose, while also making sure each db cast is fully buffed so you can consume when high aoe healing is required. This means preparing coy and fully stacking tc while also tracking which targets have your manually applied db so you can engulf those targets two times back to back to send very powerful consumes into the whole raid.

You want to maximize your sb usage as well but being mindful to always have tc stacked to full before casting any dbs as sending weaker dbs into the group puts you at risk of choosing these dbs as your engulf target and thus reducing the healing of your consume.

Flameshaper also gains the option to store engulf inside stasis. This is a very strong option and your main focus during a fight as every stored engulf can proc its own consume leading to a very high amount of healing. As with all other spells the engulfs released from stasis heal the same target they did when they were stored so you need to make sure that target has a properly buffed db before releasing.

You will always want to store two engulfs on stasis and fill the other spot with db or if not possible with sb.

Conclusions

At the moment, Flameshaper and Chronowarden are close enough together that you could say they are even on a 20-man raid, there is a small gap in flavor of Chronowarden but Flameshaper also scales really well into larger raid sizes and its much easier to execute. It is expected for Flameshaper to outperform Chronowarden on scenarios where there is a lot of people in the group and you don't know exact boss timings and so can't properly ramp as Chronowarden requires. You are free to play the tree you prefer on mythic raids.

For M+, Flameshaper falls short of Chronowarden in almost all the metrics that matter, and besides some cinders cheese i don't expect it to see much play.