Incinerate

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Dracobane wrote:
Poor incinerate. I tried to make it work, but it's one of the worst skills in the game. It's damage is fine (final stage is good). But, everything else makes this both the most boring skill and the worst to use.

Suggestions:
-Widen the hit box. I can't tell you the amount of times I think I'm hitting something to find out it's not. Which is related to the next one...
-Allow user to mouse over mobs while channeling!!!
-Range needs to double or maybe give it a searing bond effect hitting those standing near you.

Why would you use incinerate over scorching ray? Reduce incinerate damage or it's casting speed, but please make it exciting or friendly to use. Right now it feels more like trying to take a piss on enemies.

You can get a screen wide incinerate if you want. Use GMP + Faster Proj, with quill rain and rearguard (heck with that much aoe investment you'll probably offscreen). Problem then is that the damage really is bad since quill rain doesn't offer any damage (and weapons are very important for damage) and you're dropping two damage links for utility. So you can already get what you want. The damage *is* fine for pack clearing, but it already isn't competitive with scorching ray or any other meta skill so I'm going to disagree entirely with reducing incinerates damage, for any reason whatsoever, in fact I believe it needs to be buffed to justify the mana cost investment.

For the record, I'm not against incinerates aoe being higher, and if it had a little bit less randomness on total length you could get rid of those weird moments where you hit with half of your casts and not with the other on the edge, which is part of Dracobane's confusion.

I haven't used self cast incinerate for awhile (the change to channeling killed it for me, so I run totems now), but if you can't mouse over mobs while channeling it seems a little awkward, granted if you have time to mouse over mobs in todays meta you're probably not dealing enough damage. I still think you shouldn't have to drop your stacks immediately on releasing the button.
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greggz666 wrote:
anyone know if 3.0 incinerate will be ok with totem since it required an Hits to go to stage 3 ?

Huh? Incinerate totems work just fine now, why wouldn't they work in 3.0? I must be missing something about the beta since incinerate isn't a popular skill.
This skill is a sore point for me every time I return to PoE. It was my first love, my favourite skill for such a long time. It was the first skill I killed normal Atziri with. The first skill that I really found a playstyle I loved. Was EB AA MoM Maxblock Incinerate a bit OP? Yeah. Did this skill deserve to get thrown on the garbage pile? No.

So what really killed Incinerate? Not only was it repeatedly nerfed but also the things around it which made it good got nerfed or changed. I think this is a problem in balancing in general in PoE sometimes where a whole confluence of individually fine balance changes happen which together make a massive cumulative effect that doesn't just nerf something but totally slaughters it.

* Shotgunning was removed. Obviously a big damage nerf, Incin did receive some damage to compensate but not enough that this wasn't a damage nerf.

* Spell echo was removed from this skill. DPS and ramp-up-time nerf.

* EB was changed. What does this mean for Incinerate? Well Incinerate has an absolutely absurd mana cost to upkeep once it starts getting linked and hugely lowering the available mana pool and this regen already creates a large problem with sustaining the skill.

* Blocking on the tree was nerfed in general (with good reason). Incinerate needs to stand still and cast, usually at point blank range because we need slower projectiles to get our damage where it needs to be. Requiring much higher investment to be able to reliably not get interrupted obviously makes the skill less strong because you lose out on other stuff on the tree.

* Channelling tag. This prevents us from using Cybil's Paw. Which pretty much kills the only thing that unique was good for.

* Later on chaos conversion got nerfed a few times and recently poison just got weakened severely, this seemed like the last way to really bring Incinerate's damage back up.

What would I like to happen to Incinerate? Well I'd like for my favourite skill to be usable again.
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Poobah wrote:

* Shotgunning was removed. Obviously a big damage nerf, Incin did receive some damage to compensate but not enough that this wasn't a damage nerf.

The base damage was improved significantly to the point where the only time it was a damage nerf was at point blank, it was a significant buff to pack clearing. To this day it still does more damage than it did during the shotgunning era.
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Poobah wrote:

* Spell echo was removed from this skill. DPS and ramp-up-time nerf.

Regrettable, and was also was a mana cost increase to self casting.
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Poobah wrote:

* EB was changed. What does this mean for Incinerate? Well Incinerate has an absolutely absurd mana cost to upkeep once it starts getting linked and hugely lowering the available mana pool and this regen already creates a large problem with sustaining the skill.

And during that same era they released Elreon rings, which made EB unnecessary anyway. With such a low base cost it isn't very hard to sustain on elreon instead. By the way, I used to self cast it on blood magic just fine. I run totems now though so the mana cost is kind of trivial.
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Poobah wrote:

* Blocking on the tree was nerfed in general (with good reason). Incinerate needs to stand still and cast, usually at point blank range because we need slower projectiles to get our damage where it needs to be. Requiring much higher investment to be able to reliably not get interrupted obviously makes the skill less strong because you lose out on other stuff on the tree.

Eh? You basically wanted stun immunity to prevent damage stacks being lost, you didn't really *need* block, and I never used it. On the note of slower projectiles, they have added supports that work with incinerate to add just as much if not more dps (elemental focus, immolate, controlled destruction). The only reason you would consider using slower projectiles is if you needed a green socket (which would be swapping faster projectiles out probably, which I don't use). I never bought into using slower projectiles even for that though since mobs move and adds extra ramp up time.
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Poobah wrote:

* Later on chaos conversion got nerfed a few times and recently poison just got weakened severely, this seemed like the last way to really bring Incinerate's damage back up.

You really should try it as a base fire spell. You don't need chaos or poison damage. Incinerate scales pretty well on just fire damage alone. Cast speed is, naturally, better but also more mana costly.
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Poobah wrote:

What would I like to happen to Incinerate? Well I'd like for my favourite skill to be usable again.

It is usable. My incinerate totems do about 100k dps a totem before curses and flasks. With flasks, curses, and using scorching ray as a debuff, I can knock it close to 150k a totem. It just isn't meta (Note, these numbers do involve using a 6 link, so you can knock off a good 20k or so per link you don't have, potentially more if the link you drop is fire penetration).
This is how i think about balanced skill:
-it is good for self-cast build
-it is good for totem build
-dont require more than 1-2 uniques to work /similar to RF needs/
-its viable with different items and build paths /similar to RF how we get Phoenix Shield and then use Doon's sceptre or Doryani's sceptre or whatever we want as weapon and whatever we want for rest gears and can make berserker RF, jugg RF, scion RF etc/.
Here i see some of you try to convince incinerate is not dead just because there is 1 totem build up with that skill, but i cant see anymore the sweet self-cast builds that used block chance or normal wands or one of the sceptres i wrote above. Its just awful atm to cover those 4 points i think ggg should follow.
Slow down for a minute to enjoy the beauty around us.
This is how i think about balanced skill:
-it is good for self-cast build
-it is good for totem build
-dont require more than 1-2 uniques to work /similar to RF needs/
-its viable with different items and build paths /similar to RF how we get Phoenix Shield and then use Doon's sceptre or Doryani's sceptre or whatever we want as weapon and whatever we want for rest gears and can make berserker RF, jugg RF, scion RF etc/.
Here i see some of you try to convince incinerate is not dead just because there is 1 totem build up with that skill, but i cant see anymore the sweet self-cast builds that used block chance or normal wands or one of the sceptres i wrote above. Its just awful atm to cover those 4 points i think ggg should follow.
Slow down for a minute to enjoy the beauty around us.
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canilaz_ wrote:
This is how i think about balanced skill:
-it is good for self-cast build
-it is good for totem build
-dont require more than 1-2 uniques to work /similar to RF needs/
-its viable with different items and build paths /similar to RF how we get Phoenix Shield and then use Doon's sceptre or Doryani's sceptre or whatever we want as weapon and whatever we want for rest gears and can make berserker RF, jugg RF, scion RF etc/.
Here i see some of you try to convince incinerate is not dead just because there is 1 totem build up with that skill, but i cant see anymore the sweet self-cast builds that used block chance or normal wands or one of the sceptres i wrote above. Its just awful atm to cover those 4 points i think ggg should follow.

I think you misunderstand. I'm a firm believer that you can make any skill work, but that doesn't mean that I believe incinerate is in a good place -- so when people hearken back to the glory days of incinerate and then claim that the skill is unusable it annoys me, I still use incinerate just fine. I swapped to totems specifically because I thought incinerate was not in a good place. The lack of spell echo makes the spell extremely costly, and the channeling change made the skill very difficult to use because you stop channeling even if you briefly release the button (meaning you can't do quick turn arounds like you used to, or look at mobs underneath without losing all your damage). Not to mention using the utility supports goes against the current meta of using only damage supports (think of scorching ray, there aren't even any utility supports for it).

What I think needs to be addressed I already posted in this thread as well, namely these two things:

1. The skill needs the ability to stutter step. Since the damage ramps up over time, stutter stepping means you're giving up all your damage. This is fine if you melt the mob in a second or two, but not so fine if you're constantly dodging.

2. The mana cost needs to be justified by the damage. Since incinerate is not a top tier skill and it has an extremely high mana cost this is out of balance. I suggested returning the old damage multipliers.
War for atlas screenshot, there is a picture of incinerate. Is that volley support, or incinerate getting some sort of threshold jewel similar to the old parallel split arrow? lol
Since more and more skills simly get fixed by threshold jewels ~~
Add a threshold jewel that gives more projectiles, less mana costs, more proj speed. any combination of those three will work okayish. i would prefer proj speed and projectiles.

Or rework it to give it more projectiles while leveling up, up to a total of 4/5.
Damage is actually pretty low selfcast, unless you go either low life or RF. This is actually quite a big issue imho.

On a serious node, save incinerate, at its current stage there is no reason whatsoever to use it. You need proj speed, fix mana and add projectiles. which comes at the cost of a lot of damage. Instead you could go with scorching ray, get more damage, better clear, less issues with proximity shields/reflect hassles at the cost of lost leech alone.
New league, no real changes for incinerate. Soooo....
Bump.
All about self-cast incinerate 3.2

The problem:

Incinerate does not fire flames when the caster is located at entrances, nor the flames do go through entrances when firing from outside of the room, which mean, you must jump into the room clammed with a pack of blue mobs. Narrow corridors have the same problem, which is a huge problem.

I hope GGG understand what I meant. This problem must be fixed.


Leveling:

I leveled with this skill and found it is very difficult to kill the Brine King. Would you please test it as a non-unwavering stance self caster? I am sure you will struggle even how much damage nodes you take. Simply the damage is not sufficient with 4L.

At Kitava act 10, the damage is very good when coupled with some of unique items, it was easy.

So I think, mid quest area level damage should be buffed a bit.


White Map levels:

At early map levels, the damage is good with 5L for area clearing yet not being a fast clearing skill as the nature (but not slow either for this levels) even though the area and damage is both good. Not good at all for bosses, kiting, charging up and low leeching amount is the worst combination. Also not sure if I can get enough defenses for Yellow maps for HC purposes. I totally understand GGG can't allow players to have good damage simply stacking cast speed, spell damage and fire damage, but fire skills without crit nor burning should have a solid damage since fire is on the last in order of conversion and can't use heralds etc.

Last edited by TrichocereusSP on Mar 6, 2018, 9:56:21 AM

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