Brain Freeze - Your next Flurry is instant cast, and the final bolt of Flurry applies Winter’s Chill to the target. Winter’s Chill causes your next two Ice Lances within 6 seconds to deal XXX additional damage.
(Note: The additional damage is static and boosted by intellect and versatility, rather than % based.)
Glacial Spike has a 30% increased critical strike chance. (Since Glacial Spike can no longer be Shattered, it needs a buff to be viable.)
This does a lot of things:
Prevents proc munching (using Brain Freeze-empowered Flurry followed by Fingers of Frost-empowered Ice Lance, which wastes the Fingers of Frost proc)
No more fishing for Brain Freeze procs in order to cast Glacial Spike
The additional Ice Lance damage from Winter’s Chill is high enough that no-ice-lance is out of the equation, but since the damage is static there aren’t any scaling issues
No more messing with target distance and being able to get additional Ice Lances onto the Winter’s Chill target, since it’s only the final bolt that applies Winter’s Chill and it only affects two Ice Lances
If blizzard manages to prevent noIL from being the way to go (so my comment is even relevant), then this change would make mage lose one of the shatters provided by brain frozen flurry.
They should just allow Frost to bank more Brain Freeze procs (2) and more FoF procs (3) given how whack-a-proc the spec is.
At the same time, it’s worth noting that being deprived of a proc is painful, so Frostbolt should have a passive where for every cast of it that doesn’t yield a BF/FoF proc, the next Frostbolt has an increased % chance to grant the proc, which stacks independently for both BF and FoF and resets for either when the mage manages to get the proc.
I definitely like the idea of Frost Bolt in addition to the brain freeze mechanic just passively building a stacking chance to proc Brain Freeze as well. Considering how trash Frost Bolt’s damage is and how weak icelance is outside of azerite trait/orb they could just boost the passive chance to 40-50% per frost bolt granting a brain freeze proc personally.
This would however devalue Edonbolt, which I guess they’d have to sort out but I think it makes sense given how Frostbolt is just a wet noodle. I’m still more a fan of a stacking buff for every cast that fails to grant a proc over just a 50% chance of proccing it (which honestly does sound a bit broken and will cause so much munching if the mage can only hold 1 BF at a time).
Being able to hold more procs doesn’t help with proc-munching, doesn’t help with bad luck on procs, and doesn’t prevent no-ice-lance. Brain Freeze’s current issue is it does the same thing as Fingers of Frost in regards to Ice Lance. That’s why I’m suggesting Brain Freeze does something completely different, so you can use both procs at once. This also keeps damage from individual spells from getting crazy out of hand with too many crits, so Frost’s base damage can be increased while still being balanced.
The issue isn’t it doing the same thing as Fingers of Frost. Going back to your original post, where you said
^ why would you do this anyway when you can FoF-Ice Lance > Flurry > Ice Lance again? Using Flurry into a FoF-Ice Lance is just sloppy and a misplay. If you have a FoF proc you should always use before you use your Brain Freeze proc. The Ice Lance wont proc another Brain Freeze, and the Flurry doesn’t proc another Fingers of Frost. Such munching is caused by bad plays/errors on the player’s part, it’s not a spec issue.
No Ice Lance fix is something they’d have to look into, for sure & the nerfs to Glacial Spike might just cause this to happen. But the crux of your argument is basically asking for a change to counter poor player choices, not a spec issue.
Also,
^ You don’t always need a Brain Freeze to cast Spike. It’s DPS-neutral to cast it without BF-Flurry if it’ll land on the target at 5 Incanter’s Flow stacks. It’s also possible to freeze targets with your pet or your Nova (better, actually, since the cleave will also Shatter) in many relevant PvE scenarios: Mythic+, Visions, and some Mythic encounters with adds you can freeze.
As I understand it, the optimal way to use a Brain Freeze proc (outside of Glacial Spike) is Frostbolt - Flurry - non-FoF Ice Lance. You might have no FoF before Frostbolt, but if the Frostbolt procs FoF you have to react in a very short time in order to change from Flurry to Ice Lance. Even with perfect reaction time, this can and does often lead to a continuous cycle of Frostbolt + FoF Ice Lance, where you don’t ever get to cast Flurry because you keep procing FoF until Brain Freeze expires or you get another (wasted) Brain Freeze proc. Being able to hold two charges of Brain Freeze wouldn’t help in this situation because then you’d just have two charges that might expire by the time you are able to cast Frostbolt and not get an FoF proc. It also just doesn’t feel fluid or flexible to me if I have to immediately not cast the Flurry I was expecting to cast and instead cast Ice Lance because I got an FoF proc when I actually didn’t want it.
This is correct because no-ice-lance is a thing. If no-ice-lance weren’t a thing, then it would be correct to Glacial Spike - Flurry - Ice Lance. If no-ice-lance goes away (and I hope it does), then you can often find yourself in a situation where you’re delaying Glacial Spike in order to get rid of FoF procs so you can then have non-FoF Ice Lances after Glacial Spike - Flurry.
In case you can’t tell, I don’t like Flurry. It’s the reason I stopped playing Frost in Legion. As boring and non-interactive as the old Frostfire Bolt Brainfreeze was, at least it looked cool.
BF Flurry will always take precedence over FoF-IL in any scenario where FB will proc FoF. Due to the fact you’ll be shattering the pre-casted spell(which is a missed shatter) along with the munching of the proc. And even more in SL since you’ll basically get a 2 for 1 under the new Winter’s Chill. Honestly, you shouldn’t really have any FoF procs going into the shatter combo unless you are doing the NoIL.
On topic, I’ld much rather have an RNG protection kind of thing, and it for BF, like FIre has. Also a buff to FB when shattering it via Winter’s Chill.