#8 - May 26, 2009, 8:20 p.m.
Everyone is going to have their own definitions. That's fine.
All damage specs need burst to some extent. You need to be able to increase your damage for short periods of time to say burn someone down before their healer can get to them. In the absence of burst, the only real way to finish a match is to keep the healer completely CC'd or drained. Heals are pretty big even in Arenas (arguably too big), so if you can't kill a healer who is low, you can expect them to be back at full health shortly.
Bad burst (which is the way the term normally gets used) is what happens when burst becomes your whole strategy. "Who cares about crowd control or countering anything? Let's just pick a guy and focus on him until he's dead, which will probably take around 4 GCDs, and then we'll probably have won the match." We don't think that's a fun way to play. There is no decision making beyond the initial "Let's kill him." The victim has almost nothing they can do to get out of it. Someone dies and the match is over in 20 seconds.
Now it's a very imprecise term and it's clear from reading these forums for awhile that some players will define "too much burst" as....
1) Two players ganged up on me and I couldn't handle them alone.
2) I was crowd controlled and died while crowd controlled.
3) I went one-on-one against someone, and they did more damage to me without crowd control and I died.
4) While our healer was occupied, they managed to kill me. I should be able to survive a lot longer without healing.
5) I couldn't heal myself while multiple opponents interrupted my heals.
6) At some point, the match became very fast-paced. A 1 sec GCD melee was beating on me and using stuff and before I could really react, I was dead.
Incidentally, we think that last point happens a lot. When a mage has you in Frost Nova and starts casting, you can pretty much figure out what is about to happen. When a rogue or warrior or DK or paladin are up close and unloading on you, you don't necessarily realize what cooldowns and trinkets are being popped unless you can scrutinize the combat log... which of course you can't. Good players just learn from playing many matches what other classes are likely to do during that window. Less articulate players aren't entirely sure what happened and just write it off as "burst was so high that I died before I could react."
I'm not judging those players or saying it's all fine -- merely pointing out an observation we had today.