Don’t forget mouse binds as a possible choice for spells. If you have a gaming mouse, you might have buttons on the mouse that you can use for casting and that frees up fingers for moving on the left hand. When healing, I tend to have mouseover macros on the left/right tilt buttons on the mouse wheel and use modifier keys (shift/alt/ctrl) to add more spells to the tilt switch. On my mage though, I have wheel tilt switches bound to ice floes and blink.
I think using Q and E for spells is very common. You put the strafe movement binds on A and D and always use the mouse to rotate. I haven’t done that, but it makes sense.
I’ve been using my on WeakAuras since WOTLK. Pandaria was the last expansion where I did any advanced raiding on retail, so I can’t prove that anything I say about frost DPS is 100% right. However, when I revised the auras for Dragonflight, it took me quite a while to figure out how Flurry interacts with everything, especially with the two recharge system + brain freezes.
I have an aura set up so that I can see Winter’s Chill charges on the target and also if Flurry is available (there’s another aura for Brain Freeze). So if I’m casting a Frostbolt filler and Flurry is available (and WC isn’t on the target), a small aura pops up and prompts me to combo the Flurry on the Frostbolt. The first Flurry tick makes the previously cast Frostbolt hit a frozen target (this was a bit of a WTF moment for me - either it wasn’t that way in Legion or I had already forgotten in my years away) and then the two ticks after that can be used for Ice Lance. I have Deep Shatter, but I guess the Icy Veins interaction of frozen Ice Lances is more important, so the combo is Frostbolt+Flurry+Ice Lance+Ice Lance.
Now, I’m not a huge fan of the double ice lances, because I suspect that when you have really high haste (or laggy computer maybe), you risk hitting three ice lances instead of two and that’s bound to be horribly bad for DPS. I think that would be an important thing to check on logs. I know I cast an extra Ice Lance every now and then and it doesn’t make me happy at all. I think the rotation would be better if it didn’t have quite this many mandatory instant casts back to back.
With Deep Shatter, it’s probably not horribly bad to cast a Frostbolt onto Winter’s Chill, although it will reduce your IV uptime. However, if you get FoF and you combo an Ice Lance over the Frostbolt that would have otherwise gotten a charge of WC, the Ice Lance will eat the WC (and gain 10% more damage), but the Frostbolt will not hit a frozen target. I kind of wish they would change this, but technically you’re not supposed to be casting that Frostbolt anyway (unless the buff this week somehow changes that, but probably not).
Here’s a question though for the hard core raiders: if the boss is dying pretty soon and you have IV up already and you know it’s easily going to last until the end, could you switch to a more Frostbolt-heavy rotation, if you are specced Deep Shatter? You get more FoF and BF procs and the IV time extension probably doesn’t matter. This is assuming just a single target, so cleave talent interaction.
Maybe I should enable the Blizzard auras and see how they are programmed vs. mine.
