Its not just a go-to cooldown, you have to know how to keep it going for as long as possible meaning you have to know how to use your abilities and even ignore Frost Strike to be able to get the most out of it. So in a way, yes the core abilities are there to supplement BoS.
Frost Strike has less base damage than Obliterate does, in half basically. Howling Blast looks to do 82% of attack power as frost damage to the initial target. Frost Fever does 440% of attack power over 24 seconds. Cold Heart makes chains of ice do 10% of attack damage as frost damage and stacks up to 20 times so a full stack does 200% of attack power as frost damage.
Breath of Sindragosa does 287.5% of attack damage as Shadowfrost damage every 1 second until you have no runic power left or you cancel the ability.
The problem is mastery in no way does anything for Obliterate except through Inexorable Assault but with it gaining a stack every 8 seconds its not really worth picking up. So really it provides extra frost damage to Obliterate every 8 seconds. However, if this was baked into Obliterate baseline, and did more frost damage say 100% of attack power as frost damage, and they brought down the physical portion to say 80% of attack power then it could scale with the rest of the kit.
Obliterate just doesnt scale aside from with attack power, everything else in the kit scales with attack power as well as mastery. If I remember correctly they got away from the weapon damage stuff to make everything easier to balance, so instead of calculating attack power and weapon damage, its just attack power now. That is how it looks from all of the tooltips that I have read so far.
Right now Obliterate is just a bad ability, and I agree, it shouldnt be. But with everything gaining from attack power, mastery and razorice everything is going to push past it even if it does have the highest base damage outside of a few talents and FF.
Pillar of Frost IS brainless DPS. You click a button and do more damage.
100 Runic Power and pop BoS with ERW. Spam Obliterate. Brainless. I just tried it again now. Spammed Obliterate until I ran out of Runes and then sat there staring off into space until I got enough to use Ice Chains just to keep the effect up for that extra tick. You cannot do anything else but spam Obliterate or else it goes out in 5 ticks. That gravely restricts the flexibility of the player’s rotation, forcing them to frantically double-tap buttons that generate Runic Power so they get some form of DPS out of it. It is completely straight-forward. Hit BoS, click Runic Power generators.
You want to talk high skill cap bursting? Try playing a Windwalker pre-Legion. There’s a reason you never saw them in WoD. They required IQ, acute timing skills, resource management, situational precision, environmental awareness, and an in-depth understanding-arguably a mastery- of the spec’s abilities, effects, and passives. THAT was something that required brain power. The system incorporated in Legion for all classes was hitting one button to burst.
It deals Frost damage and ends when you have less than 16 Runic Power. They changed the effect so you can’t use it with less Runic Power than it costs like you could before.
So by your own admission the core abilities other than Frost strike supplement BoS.
You also cant just pick up BoS and expect it to perform with your same gear as another talent setup / azerite traits you are running.
The talent is just too good, and the longer you can keep it up the better it will do. That means you want things like Runic Attenuation or Horn of Winter since they are more consistent than Murderous Efficiency allowing you to keep it up longer. Frozen Pulse is even good as well even though I absolutely hate that it even has to be in the game because of downtime, works well because you will be using runes as you get them so it will be active more.
I really dont like it at all. I think it takes away from the core gameplay of the Frost Dk, which I think is a much better argument. The core gameplay should be built upon, not take a backseat too something.
Lining up CDs, pooling resources, and having foresight throughout a fight to plan these things is the literal opposite of brainless.
You also don’t just spam Obliterate; that’s not the correct play when managing your resources to maintain BoS for the longest period of time possible. You can and should weave Rime procs, while also knowing when to ignore them. You also don’t want to spam Obliterate if it’s going to overcap Runic, which is very possible right when you initially pop all your CDs, during cleave where Frost Fever can proc you a lot of Runic across several mobs, or when you get favorable procs from Lucid Dreams that briefly flood you with resources. You’re also planning numerous CDs during BoS/PoF uptime, like Cold Heart, Frostwyrm, and Concentrated Flame.
Describing this as brainless is just wrong, and could not be further from the truth. I can’t imagine what’s compelling you to make such a blatantly false argument.
I’m do M+ so I run Focusing Iris. Frostwyrm is also a cookie-cutter talent that I also don’t use. Chains of Ice gets used as a last resort for when I have one Rune left.
I use Rime when I’m out of Runes. I cannot afford to waste the global if I can use it gaining the RP with Obliterate for Chains of Ice.
Unless I’m sitting on 30 adds, that just doesn’t happen. 16 Runic Power per second, out of a 100 bar cap. I deal with groups that max out at 5 maybe 6 Elites. I’ve never in my time using BoS had a problem with overcapping on Runic. It ticks way too fast for that.
“Argument”? I am playing Frost right now. I don’t know why you think you have a logical position with nothing but words against somebody that is testing and repeatedly disproving your claims as you’re writing them.