Before you attack, I don’t want Solar Beam straight buffed or anything necessarily. I do have a few issues with how it works that I’d like to air out though.
- The cooldown is pretty long. I get why, as the effect is unique and powerful, but the cooldown seems balance around ideal conditions and not around the most common use case, which is as a sort of pseudo-kick/counterspell
- There’s no spell school lockout like the above spells, so you have to CC the opponent in addition to using it in order to really ensure they can’t cast, at least in theory (more on this in a sec). For balance druids that means you can’t really do any damage to them while they’re silenced, so it’s kind of a silence for its’ own sake, at least from a solo/open world pvp perspective. I guess there’s deep roots though.
- Mobs don’t seem to remain silenced for the whole duration of Solar Beam. If you silence a mob and then run into melee range so it doesn’t move toward you they can still cast spells even if they’re standing in the beam the whole time. They also don’t become re-silenced if you Typhoon them back into the beam. As a PvE/soloing spell it has about as much interrupt utility as Typhoon
Solar Beam is a really interesting spell and I love it in some PvP situations (beam/root on a healer can be really devastating) but I feel strongly that the best-case scenario for the spell is rare enough that some of the concessions we make to have it hurt its’ utility elsewhere. I think a fairly harmless change would be actually literally silence mobs while they stand in the beam. From a PvE perspective the AoE component doesn’t do a lot in day-to-day use and it does have the longest cooldown of any Counterspell-style spell in the game I think?