Brain Freeze

Brain Freeze
Brain Freeze (3 ranks) Your Frost damage spells with chilling effects have a 5n% chance to cause your next Fireball spell to be instant cast and cost no mana.
Requirements
Class	Mage
Properties
Affects	Chill effects
Related buff
Magic Fireball! Your next Fireball spell is instant and costs no mana. Duration: 15 seconds

Brain Freeze is a Mage talent in the Frost tree. It makes the Frost Mage's spells which cause chill effects (such as [Cone of Cold] and [Frostbolt]) have a chance to grant them an instant-cast [Fireball] at zero mana cost.

Rank table

Rank	Chance to buff
1	5%
2	10%
3	15%

Uses

PvE

This talent is often part of deep Frost Mage PvE builds. Despite that Fireball being untalented in an average Frost build, its instant cast time puts it on par with [Frostbolt] (a Frost mage's main nuke spell) in terms of raid DPS, actually increasing it very slightly. Where this talent shines, however, is in mana-efficiency, allowing Frostbolt-level DPS to be dealt at no mana cost.

The Frost tree, however, is already the most mana-efficient stand-alone tree between the three Mage talent trees without this talent. Its small DPS increase is surpassed by that of outside talents in Arcane or Fire (such as Ignite and [Focus Magic]), so that it's often not part of streamlined single-target damage dedicated Frost builds.

In the end, whether or not taking this talent is up to the player's opinion of whether Brain Freeze's soloing and PvP convenience or an extra few percent of raid DPS are worth more.

PvP

This talent allows for great mobility in PvP, giving the Frost Mage even stronger burst potential. It is recommended that the instant Fireball be saved for a non-Frozen target, as Ice Lance isn't usable to great effect on those. The chills on [Frostbolt], [Ice Armor], [Cone of Cold] and [Blizzard] (through [Improved Blizzard]) can trigger it.

Note

The buff given by this, although displayed as "Brain Freeze" on the tooltip, is actually named "Fireball!", which means any addons that display when you gain a specific aura will not pick this up unless you enter "Fireball!" as the aura's name. This is also the case with a /cancelaura command.