Incinerate & Infernal Flame

The 0.3’s change to how Incinerate works - the requirement of spending mana to fuel the channel makes the skill unplayable with mana converted to Infernal Flame as an Infernalist. While it makes sense it won’t work, it feels anti-thematic with Infernalist being THE Fire and Ignite themed ascendancy (there are more problems with it, such as Fire spells having the lowest base critical strike chance, coupled with crit bonus ascendancy it makes the Fire ascendancy actually prioritize Cold spells, and Ignite ascendancy not giving any power to actual Fire skills inflicting ignites, making it once again so much better for Cold skills like Comet, but that’s another design topic; developer’s inability to predict use cases some people might think).

Anyways, this skill sygnalises a potential bigger problem with future skills. Infernal Flame, Blood Magic, and whatever Mana conversions are yet to come, are solutions to Mana sustain but they don’t come without downsides. It makes no sense to restrict their access to skills which ARE NOT EVEN MANA-THEMED. If GGG introduces stuff like Manabond or has buffs or supports like Archmage, Sigil or Zenith, these make sense thematically. Having random channelled skills get hard-coded Mana requirements is unwanted, poor design and hurts the build diversity.

If developers want a „Fuel” combo mechanic, this should either be charged with „# of stacks per skill use” or if they want both fast and slow spenders to function „# of stacks per skill use time” (so for example 1 slow ability with 2 seconds of use time generates the same number of Fuel as 2 seconds of spam casting a quick ability).

I encourage everyone to point out thematic, systematic and design inconsistencies. EA is the best time for that since everything devs learn now, will impact the future design of the post-launch product. Remember that devs work hard and cannot find all of the issues themselves, so if you’re trying out some niche interaction you think would make sense to work bit it doesn’t even though not bugged - make sure to post about it.