I don’t know what you have planned, but I’m not in love with what we have currently.
In phase four, we had an interesting balefire bolt rotation. 24 seconds of ramping up damage, and thirty seconds of weaker damage. A heating up phase, and a cooldown phase. Frost and arcane as damage options didn’t exist.
Our current frost and fire builds are clunky and un-fun, I don’t think I need to go into details as to why, and arcane still doesn’t really have a damage build.
So here’s my idea. If you think balefire is too strong, let’s compromise. It increases damage by 15%, lowering spirit by 15%. That means you get to cast six spells, and you die on the seventh. This is your heating up phase of DPS. When you score a critical hit with a frost spell, you lose a stack of balefire. This is the cooling part.
So you get this rotation where you’re trying to edge out max stacks of balefire, to get the increased damage, but doing so risks death. If you crit with balefire at six stacks, you neither gain nor lose a stack, and you don’t die. So do you take that risk, or play it safe?
This also encourages you to run fingers of frost, as you’re casting frost spells to cooldown. When fingers procs, you cast balefire bolts. If you’re at six stacks, maybe you cast a frostfire bolt to cooldown; but since you don’t know if it crits or not while it’s traveling, do you queue up the balefire?
It’s not a complicated rotation, but it requires paying attention, rewards risky play, risks death if you mess it up, but feels rewarding. You can play it safe and still do good damage, or you can push to the limits.
It works with the ZG set, with extra fingers of frost procs. It works with the tier 1 six-piece set (which gives 20% more finger’s of frost procs btw). It works with any spec, whether you like arcane power or combustion or shatter. It works with frozen orb, or with overheat.
And as far as set bonuses go, I’d love the new DPS set to be arcane focused next phase. Give us new options. And then make the previous set bonuses not linked to core-forged AQ items, but learnable as runes or something to preserve the other dps rotations.
And lastly, if you need to make a set bonus that increases spellfrost bolt damage by 65% to make it even a consideration? Maybe just increase the base damage by 65%.
