Brain Freeze Fireballs "work" for raiding?

#0 - July 15, 2009, 4:01 a.m.

Ghostcrawler says...

Q u o t e:
The goal of the Eclipse talent in the first place was to give moonkin a more dynamic rotation that involved the player paying attention and responding to the environment rather than falling into a monotonous rotation. [...] I’ll give a couple of example of caster rotations that “work” in our opinion: Destruction warlocks want to Immolate before they Conflagrate, Frost mages can proc a Brain Freeze and throw out a fast Fireball.

I would merely point out that in this PvE context (PvE because that's where rotations are really relevant), Frost mages are going to ditch Brain Freeze Fireballs in 3.2 for all but the phantom latency-based third Fingers of Frost charge. The same goes with Ice Lance. And both of these done will still produce DPS in the neighborhood of 15-20% below other mage specs.

Thus, I must ask the question: if we're only using Brain Freeze Fireballs and Ice Lance on ghost FoF charges, how is that not monotonous? How does that "work" for casting variety?

Furthermore, is this really the kind of DPS Blizzard was hoping for out of the spec?

Ghostcrawler

#13 - July 15, 2009, 6:52 a.m.

You're using a slightly different definition of "rotation" than we are using.

Do Frost Mages spam nothing but Frost Bolts? Actually, no. They certainly use a lot of them, but the class is designed to do that. They still use other spells and the best mages know when to use those other spells. Even in PvP.

With Balance druids, it's different. They have two nukes, and one really doesn't influence the other much. (You get a little bit of interest in PvP from their being in two different schools.) Most Balance druids worth their salt can look at Starfire or Wrath and know which one to cast and which one to ignore. Eclipse did help that situation somewhat, but it hasn't been as succesful as Brain Freeze, and I'm not sure it can be as long as there are two similar nukes. Brain Freeze works because it entices you to use a spell you otherwise have little interest in casting. But we also don't want to stampede for that solution every time we want to get players to cast a second spell.

I know there will always be some players who say "Lol WoW is easy. There are no decisions. My mod just tells me when to hit the button and I maximize my dps." These are rarely the players with 310% speed mounts however. :)