Incinerate

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tidbit wrote:

just get t1 cast speed on every gear and 20/20 cast speed + echo supports, you can get to stage 8 before being slammed by a choreographed attack and die.

Except that echo support doesn't even work with incinerate now.

Honestly, this skill feels completely redundant. For burn it's outclassed by fireball due to better traverse speed, faster cast, better mobility (no need to channel), significantly better clear thanks to threshold jewel.

I guess both incinerate can be better in hit variant when it comes to bosses but this also comes at the price of being close to the boss and standing still while fireball can be used to snipe from afar

Incinerate combined with spell totem still has some big issues, as pointed out almost two months ago in this thread.

When it begins channeling, it targets the spot an enemy is standing on and continues channeling at that angle until releasing when either the initial enemy dies or maximum stacks are reached. This means that if the enemy moves out of the cone, the totem is stuck channeling until maximum stacks, which can really hurt damage output. It should definitely be able to rotate to continue targeting the enemy, just like other channels like scorching ray function on totems.

This behavior also means that it can take a long time to clear packs due to killing one enemy and releasing a tiny wave, repeating to essentially kill enemies one by one instead of using the full area. It should continue channeling and move to a new enemy when the first one dies.

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lalib wrote:

Can we get clarification on the number of casts required to move from one incinerate stage to the next? I have 9.71 casts per second and it takes almost 2 seconds to reach the 8th incinerate stage. With the increased number of stages, my assumption is that each cast advances to the next stage.

Spoiler

I run your gif at low speed and i saw breaks are on 0.91 seconds and 1.73 seconds. Also i noticed that timer started few ms before actual casting was started. With your cast speed 9.71/sec it seems like Incinerate needs 2 casts to push to the next stage.

I leveled an Inquisitor in Hardcore Incursion Flashback to level 79 using Incinerate. Leveling was not great with it but it worked. It certainly seems to be in a better place than self-cast Flameblast. I was lucky enough to get a Stone of Lazhwar at 15% and used it for a very long time as Incinerate is another skill where you can't get enough cast speed, and I used Incinerate/Faster Casting/Arcane Surge/Controlled Destruction in my four-link. It absolutely crushes single targets with the wave- if they get hit by it. I went Inevitable Judgement and Instruments of Virtue, once ascended. With my Tabula Rasa I used Incinerate/Faster Casting/Arcane Surge/Controlled Destruction/Increased Critical Strikes and Added Lightning Damage -which was surprisingly good even at Incinerate's 30% effectiveness.

I realized the skill has a rather low flat damage amount and assumed that's why Added Lightning/Added Cold were still strong support gems (granted I do have Inevitable Judgement.)The skill already has so much More Damage multiplier that it's starved for flat damage. I think Incinerate would do well on a Blood Magic build with Malachai's Awakening. Up until the end I was using triple heralds but once my gems hit level 18 it started to be too much and opted to drop Herald of Thunder. I was using a scepter with lightning damage to spells, spell crit, crit multi, and increased spell damage. I paid a good bit of chaos for an abyss jewel with chance to hinder with spells on it, since the skill sometimes struggles with very mobile enemies as the wave is quite slow. I would like to have used 28+ crit multi jewels, but I kept opting for ones with life and cast speed instead. I was using Stone Golem + Blood Rage, (those two go hand in hand for a build with no leech) Shield Charge/Faster Attacks/Fortify, CWDT/IC, and Vaal Fireball/Combustion/Added Cold Damage for cleanup.

The skill just doesn't build into crit that well when you need to be very fast and very tanky (not an off-screening/ glass cannon skill by any means.) If I were to do it again I'd just use Elemental Overload like everyone else and not use Righteous Providence or Inevitable Judgement. I would then use the passives from crit instead on Mind over Matter + Mana, Life, and cast speed. I would then probably run just herald of ash as my only reservation and use immolate and combustion/fire penetration instead of added lightning damage and increased critical strikes.

When fully buffed with Instruments of Virtue, Frenzy Charges, Onslaught, and Arcane Surge, I could reach 12.99 casts per second which started to make the skill feel somewhat fluid, but I still felt like I could use a cast speed roll on my scepter, and some shaped gloves with the Faster Casting/Increased Cast Speed roll. Maligaro's Virtuosity were a good pair of gloves, since I needed everything on them, but I destroyed my pair in the temple, and just used rare gloves with an attack speed for shield charge. An Essence of Insanity-crafted glove would be ideal.

The Final Wave is rather slow, but the juice of this build is when it would crit and absolutely melt rares and bosses. Instruments of Virtue is no longer the amazing beast it once was with all the sources of penetration in the game, however (Shroud of the Lightless, Wise Oak, Elementalist, etc.)

Here's my passive tree
https://i.redd.it/goykh73y3ag11.png

Suppose after doing some testing with this, i should clarify a few mechs and quirks for people.


First off, the stages build every two cast intervals, so it takes 16 casts to reach max stages, or 3.2 seconds with no cast speed modifier. Kinda long, i think it would be better if they made it upgrade at every cast with the pace the game's at now.

Second, the sustained hit dps is the same whether you maintain max stages or build to max and immediately release... either way it averages out to 300% of the tooltip hit damage per cast interval. Of course, releasing also causes a strong ignite, so that could certainly be preferable.

Third, the final wave only triggers if you've built up to at least stage 1. Can't just cast it a single time to get a final wave, gotta get to at least to stage 1, which takes two cast intervals. That leads to...

...Fourth, building up to max stages is actually not the best way to deal dps with this skill... actually, the best dps comes from channeling up to stage 1 (so just two casts) and releasing. This results in two hits at 100% damage each (no bonus from stages) followed by a final wave dealing 750% damage (125% damage from stage 1 bonus x 6 from the final wave's 500% more). So 950% of the tooltip hit damage in just two casts (the release instant, it doesn't take any extra time), or 475% damage per cast interval on average.

Releasing after any other stage isn't nearly so strong on average, even releasing upon hitting stage 2 is only 337.5% damage per cast interval. So yeah, if you want dps, you get about 50% more than any other approach by channeling for two casts and releasing... it's annoying and it doesn't have much AoE at that point, but it's strong. Tbh, it seems like a balance oversight.


So yeah, to GGG, if you want my feedback on the skill:

-Lower it to 1 cast interval to advance the stage (though that would compromise the whole 'same dps whether you sustain max stages or build and release' thing), or lower the cast time, manacost, and the base damage/damage effectiveness by the same percent while keeping it at 2 casts per stage. It's not strong enough to justify having *that* long of a buildup time, and it doesn't feel practical with the game's current pacing... channeling skills in general feel a bit clunky with pacing, but this one's an outlier even among channeling skills in that regard.


-Make the final wave only get released if you've built to at least 4 stages or something... getting better dps by channeling to low stages and releasing instead of building the skill up to higher stages is kinda anti-channeling principles.

I'm surprised at myself for not having come to this thread sooner. I'm currently not playing a build with Incinerate but planning one, and specifically I planned to use Spell Totems.

Because the way Incinerate works with the stages and damage multiplier per stage as well as the release isn't entirely clear, I'm currently unable to plan a build for it in detail.

Is there any point when this is planned to be accessible in any sort of official resource? To a point I understand why you might not want to release detailed stats for minions, as helpful as that would be. But this is a spell, and until I know exactly how it works, I can't use it, which is sad, because I enjoy the depth and complexity of this game when it's available to me.

Edit:
Also, you might want to consider reworking the damage mechanic to make channelling to higher stacks more attractive. Specifically, all you need to do is reduce the release damage modifier and increase the stack modifier as well as the speed at which it stacks. There's a helmet enchant adding two stages, that sounds absolutely amazing when you read the text, but turns out to decrease the dps in practice.

So let's do the math here. The average multiplier of max stage incinerate is 3. The average multiplier of building up incinerate to max stacks is 1.875 (sum of all stages 2 + 2.5 + 3 + 3.5 + 4 + 4.5 + 5 + 5.5 [8 stages] = 30 / 16 casts = 1.875). That's a significant decrease in damage for a one time multiplier of 15 (3*5). This means the average multiplier of max stage incinerate is stronger than holding to max stages and then releasing, because it is a solid 3 versus 2.8125 (this one includes the burst multiplier for release). So adding extra stages actually does make sense if you intend to hold down and use incinerate to max burst, which I only see from my totems against bosses, everything else is already dead.

So we know holding down on max stages is actually better than releasing on max burst. But is cycling bursts better than getting to max stages?

Two casts with the base multiplier and a burst of 1.25*5 = 6.25. (2+6.25)/2 = 4.125 multipliers. Yep, your average multiplier on a two cast burst is higher than holding down at max stages. But your AoE doesn't get incremented at all at this level and probably will clear significantly slower because of it. Considering the cast speed of incinerate I doubt a 2 cast burst cycle is very realistic though, a 3-4 cast cycle is more likely, so you likely won't be operating at peak 4.125 multipliers. A 4 cast cycle for reference = (2 + 2.5 + (1.75*5)) / 4 = 3.3125, which is still stronger than holding to max stages, but it gets weaker as you get closer to max stages.

Can we fix this? Well considering that these fast cast cycles don't even get AoE increases and incinerate casts fast enough that you'll be losing damage extremely quickly if you don't release accurately, I'm not sure it is a problem. In fact I think it is probably good the way it is, because it addresses one of the old concerns I had with incinerate, that it had no stutter stepping ability. This gives it that ability quite nicely. And if you don't want to stutter step, you're rewarded with slightly less damage for more AoE, not a bad trade. Now just need to make the totems smarter, or dumber depending on how you look at it -- you do lose damage when totems burst, so them always popping on max stacks is a damage loss even if it is amusing to see it chunk whatever it is hitting.

Edit: Some closing thoughts. Speeding up the cast cycle will not improve this situation even if it makes the skill feel more fluid, it will actually make it worse, since you will lower the amount of time it takes to reach higher multipliers. If the burst damage is truly the problem (which I don't think it is) then you need to push a threshold for the minimum burst until it isn't a problem anymore.

I have done some precise testing with a build aiming to be as slow as possible. Ideally, I would have used Doedre's Malevolence and Shavronne's Revelation to increase the accuracy of my observations by basing them on the mana pool instead of visible animations (50 mana per cast with no regeneration should very clearly indicate actual casts), but alas, I don't have them lying around and they're rather expensive at the moment.

This is the PoB for the build I used to test it:
https://pastebin.com/zLbZi05g

I reflected Temporal Chains at myself, grabbing all the immediately available curse effectiveness, then swapped to Doedre's Tenure. I additionally used Kitava's Thirst and The Anvil to slow down my cast speed. Because I expected to have added chaos damage from Doedre's Malevolence, I picked up Avatar of Fire, but that can be ignored. I did however pick Resolute Technique to avoid having any crits that would dillute the results.

Feel free to repeat the test with optimal conditions (Curse on Hit with quality in Dialla's Malefaction with +1 gems and level 4 Enhance in a red slot and level 20 23q temp chains in a green one along with Doedre's Malevolence and Shavronne's Revelation if you want to go ALL the way).

I then recorded the whole thing and watched it at 1/5th of the speed.

Here are the results:

The wave of release is triggered the moment the player stops channelling, not tied to an actual cast. This means, that the start of the next channel can begin without pause by ordering it before the previous cast animation has ended, still releasing the wave.

The multiplier of the release wave is multiplicative with the stage multiplier. This has been tested before, but my results confirm it. ghoulavenger made a mistake in his calculations multiplying by 5, when it's 500% more, which means (100% + 500%) = 600% as a multiplier.

A release wave only occurs with at least one stack of the Incinerate stage buff.

The stage buff is increased at the start of every second cast. This means that a full progression goes as following:
100% -> 125% -> 125% -> 150% -> 150% -> 175% -> 175% -> 200% -> 200% -> 225% -> 225% -> 250% -> 250% -> 275% -> 275% -> 300%

This means that the fastest possible release results in
100% + 125% + 750% damage in two cast intervals, resulting in 487.5% average damage per cast interval.

A full progression means an average of 312.5% damage per cast interval (200% + 1800% / 16).

Here's a full overview of the damage per stage I quickly put together:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mR8LZYkvzhX3NSb57-O5TkSPf82CEYk2uu3KUkncy_4/edit?usp=sharing

And the conclusions:

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DER_PSYCHOPATH wrote:

ghoulavenger made a mistake in his calculations multiplying by 5, when it's 500% more, which means (100% + 500%) = 600% as a multiplier.

I'm open to the idea that I was wrong (poe mechanics are weird) but multipling by 6 suggests counting the base multiplier twice on the same hit. The first time for the stage (1 + 0.25), and the second time for the release (1 + 5) -- this doesn't jive well with me. For outside forms of more damage though I would agree, that 40% more would be 1.4 instead of 0.4 (which is why I might be wrong, since 40% more and 30% more would be 1.4 * 1.3 and not 1.4 * 0.3 -- this would actually lose damage and not gain it).

Oddly enough even if my mathematics are off, it still holds that bursting is more effective than holding down the button (since you're adding damage and not subtracting it). At max stacks, the change would mean the damage would be equivalent if you counted it as 6 instead of 5. You suggest it goes higher because you think it gets more damage on the 2nd cast and not the 3rd. If you're right, it will be slightly more damage.

Small initial AoE makes this skill less attractive.

Sometimes mobs may kill you first before your AoE touch them.