Skill Lance?

In Beta, I made a long thread about how Ice Lance would never be useful as mages geared up because the low coefficient made the spell scale too poorly. This was right after the damage coefficient was reduced from 43% to 21% and it seemed to me at the time that the spell would just scale well with gear. I'm a BAD beta tester.

Quite the opposite has happened. While it does at best half the damage of a scorch, the issues is not so much the damage, but the fact that the spell is basically "free" to cast. When kiting with scorch, you have to give up some distance in your kite for the 1.5 second cast. You also expose your fire tree, which if you're fire, is a very tangible cost. The fact that it is strangely more mana efficient than Fireblast is also quite odd. I picture what mage gameplay would have been like with a 43% Ice Lance, and it quite possibly would have been just spamming Skill Lance.

Ice Lance rolls into one a lot of elements of the class. Ice Lance enables us to do damage while moving, when previously we needed to stop to scorch, you can simply run FOREVER spamming Ice Lance. Back in the day to keep players in combat, we often used Counterspell, and not only because of its being off the global cooldown, but Fireblast was not necessarily enough given its 8 second cooldown, Ice Lance makes this a non-issue. It's also a low cost, reasonably mana efficient way of doing damage while our other instants are quite the opposite. It has potentially a powerful debuff that increases damage and frustrates dispelling. It's also a good casting pushback, not quite as strong as missiles, but way more practical to use -- you can often ice lance to delay that poly cast enough to get out of range of the cast because of its long range and the travel time of the lance giving you time to get a few steps after the 1 second pushback.

Why am I writing a love letter to Ice Lance? I'm not. I really had a narrow-minded perspective of the spell when I first played with it nearly a year ago; I thought it was just a damage tool to be used in conjunction with shatter, but I honestly find the damage it provides an afterthought to its other uses, especially when playing non-frost specs who still use Ice Lance heavily. It's no secret that I'm not a huge fan that caster gameplay has shifted entirely away from casting to instant cast spam. While one can certainly argue that Arcane Explosion, Blastwave, Cone of Cold and Fireblast have long been PvP stables for mages and are all instants as well, they are limited by high mana costs and extremely limited range.

My misunderstanding in Beta was also one of greatly overestimating how much gear would scale. I imagined a PvP landscape of players with 1500 damage and similar health to what we see in Season 2, which is way the fuck off. Perhaps the assumptions were idiotic, but when you think of how level 60 blues scaled into their level 60 epic equivalents, it isn't that stupid.

On the balance topic, I believe that WoW does not sufficiently reward risk taking. Fake casting was one of the major factors that separated the weak PvPers from the strong in 1.0, but who needs to fake cast when you can use instants exclusively. The cost of going from casting to using instants for lots of classes is not that high. This logic applies in lots of ways and I'm not really talking exclusively about casting, but I feel slightly that although the goal of the expanded health pools in BC was to reduce one-shotting and thus increase the skill and responsiveness of player versus player combat, most strategies have devolved into various types of rushdowns.