Reading the Color of Your Aura in Battle for Azeroth

Hello again, friends!

I’m dusting off the old blog to talk about the level 60 talent row of Auras for Holy Paladins in Battle for Azeroth. Aura of Sacrifice has changed drastically, Devotion Aura had some minor tweaks, and Aura of Mercy remains pretty much the same, but do these changes mean there is any choice between the three? Unfortunately, probably not. Devotion Aura seems to reign supreme in Battle for Azeroth. Let’s take a closer look at the changes (with lots of graphs!) to see how they compare. Feel free to skip to the end if that sounds too boring.

Devotion Aura

For the most part, Devotion Aura’s function is the same. It’s still a passive damage reduction that is shared between all players within 10 yards, and the Aura Mastery effect is still 20% damage reduction for all allies within 40 yards. The only real difference is that the passive damage reduction was lowered to 10% (from 20%), but it’s no longer split evenly between allies. In Legion, when you were by yourself, you received the full 20% damage reduction. With one ally in 10 yards, you both received 10%. When split between four players, everyone received 5% damage reduction and so on. In Battle for Azeroth, you’ll only have 10% damage reduction when you’re by yourself, but instead of splitting evenly when shared, the shared value scales down at a slower rate.

From the graph, you should see that Devotion Aura in Legion was clearly superior up to about five players within the aura (you plus four allies), but in Battle for Azeroth, the damage reduction will be larger overall once you’re within range of at least five other players (six total) and is increasingly better the more allies there are near you.

The newer version of Devotion Aura’s passive effect outshines the older version by a huge margin when we’re able to stack with the entire raid. Realistically, if we’re standing in melee, we’ll likely only have between five and ten allies within ten yards, but there will definitely be fights in Battle for Azeroth where a large part of the encounter is spent stacked with the whole raid group. In either scenario, the new passive for Devotion Aura is stronger than it was before.

The Aura Mastery effect for Devotion Aura is completely unchanged and will be just as strong at mitigating large raid-wide damage mechanics. We’ll go over the Aura Mastery effect for Devotion Aura when we compare the other auras later in this post.