How should incinerate be rebalanced? Vote now

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Vhlad wrote:

re. the post above mine: I cruised through the game to 70 using lightning tendrils in a 3L in a prior 1 month; also did it using flame totem in a 4L. This recent 1 month, many people did it with poison arrow.

flame totem is also op

lightning tendrils is impressive in a 1month
pretty sure though you couldnt melt bosses in a second with tendrils tho

I had tendrils leveling up in some slot and I actually tried it a few times before incinerate and after. it was terrible compared to incinerate. incinerate is in an entirely different league because of the damage ramp-up.

facetanking the toughest leveling content with no defenses and just incinerate is a joke to me. especially since GGG said they felt the game was too easy now AND given the league. imo there is a difference between 'comfortably leveling' and 'facetanking everything without anything (sans malachai) giving you a scare with shitty ass gear

let me reiterate here because I think some are missing the point considering the responses I got from the diseases analogy.

the op builds are not 'bad' because they are efficient or popular. no way. thatd be silly. no build is inherently 'bad'

the op builds are 'bad' because they stand out against other builds in a game that tries to balance things. and yes- that is a firm assumption, because GGG has exhibited continuous fervor about balancing.

a balanced game is like ideal communism- it might be insanely hard (or impossible) to achieve. but you cannot have a 'all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others' situation. that is not good.

so pardon another analogy, but pointing to other op builds is like coming to proverbial Napoleon the pig and asking him why are you 'more equal' than others and him pointing to someone else who is even more abusing and in no way equal to everyone else. that doesn't excuse him.

similarly, because PA is more op than incinerate, doesnt make the latter less of an offender.

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TheAnuhart wrote:

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Actkqk wrote:

lol?
Is the most hilarious thing I've seen lately... Run some maps of level 76 and higher without investing in damage and then come to tell us how it went.

Count them

Harrier because I path through it (actually considering a version that stops short of harrier for points to put into armour).

Pain Attunement because, well of course.

Witch 16% spell node being the lvl 100 ding point, like the point at which playing it stops. Ergo, it isn't used.

Points invested into direct damage: 3

Points invested into direct damage that are required: 1

Maps of 76 and higher? I Can put my hands on a lvl 82 VoD quickly. Was a Zana 82 so no real mods. But this build is specifically made to run any and all mods. I've cleared 82 maps rolled with 80% fire res + EE + Enfeeble dealing purely fire damage with the above 'direct damage' point investment and a level 19 incinerate. I could easily switch to consuming dark but I don't need to, that's how effective incinerate is in "some maps of level 76 and higher without investing in damage" and I'm here, telling you how it went. Lvl 100 solo.

;)

Oh but you do not count, you are not a normal player, you're smart to make a build and it does not indicate that a particular skill is OP. Anyway, I take that, I was wrong, you win, for now...

:P

In any case, the use of auras count as damage :)

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grepman wrote:

let me reiterate here because I think some are missing the point considering the responses I got from the diseases analogy.

the op builds are not 'bad' because they are efficient or popular. no way. thatd be silly. no build is inherently 'bad'

the op builds are 'bad' because they stand out against other builds in a game that tries to balance things. and yes- that is a firm assumption, because GGG has exhibited continuous fervor about balancing.

a balanced game is like ideal communism- it might be insanely hard (or impossible) to achieve. but you cannot have a 'all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others' situation. that is not good.

so pardon another analogy, but pointing to other op builds is like coming to proverbial Napoleon the pig and asking him why are you 'more equal' than others and him pointing to someone else who is even more abusing and in no way equal to everyone else. that doesn't excuse him.

similarly, because PA is more op than incinerate, doesnt make the latter less of an offender.

I disagree mildly.

Most spells have some kind of inherent mechanical quirk that introduces emergent "downsides."
The idea for Flameblast is that you're investing time into channeling. If you misplace the blast you waste dps and are stuck in place for real (unlike Incinerate).
Stormcall has a delay and you run into a lot of issues with placement and overkilling/underkilling mobs, which is immensely frustrating.
Ball Lightning has trouble with fast moving enemies that don't stay in its AOE.
Freezing Pulse has innate falloff.

This design philosophy is obvious since they told Ziggy that the intention behind Tornado Shot was to reward players who consistently and regularly made good shot placements where Split Arrow was supposed to be mindlessly reflexive spam. (In practice, it doesn't work that way. Trash mobs still explode and you don't need good shot placement for anything but the occasional tough rare and bosses.)

Arc is a great example of what I consider "balanced."
It autotargets, good range and quickly clears packs.
It does have genuine drawbacks, and not just token drawbacks, in that it has trouble dealing with large numbers of adds sometimes and has crappy single-target.
Boss fights take longer and require more mechanics but the spell never made me want to throw my keyboard against a wall since it does such a great job the rest of the time zoning mobs away from you.

Then there's Incinerate which functionally doesn't have drawbacks at all. Oh people can name them, but they're trivially easy to min-max. It has zero crit, but crit is so investment heavy that it lends itself well to builds that don't want to sink that many points into it. Channeling more than makes up for that and doesn't really lock you in place all that much because it has very short base animation length. It also pierces naturally, which alone makes Fireball look silly by comparison.

It looks good on paper from a design perspective: Great power the longer you can channel but it doesn't work that way in practice. I really thought Dominus would be much harder because I don't want to facetank his lightning spells in channeling . . . but, I had little trouble getting stage 3 or 4. Which means its average damage wasn't really that bad for a spell with supposed immobility.

So let's say GGG really decides that Incinerate really should be more immobile. People aren't going to see that they want you to actually pay for the power of the channeling damage, just that GGG nerfed the popular skill because it is popular.

If anybody is being intellectually honest: Maybe it's because GGG nerfs popular stuff because the popular stuff is something they considered overtuned on some level.

I wish people would stop being so self-centered and assuming that everything is a malicious conspiracy that is out to get them.

Incinerate is mostly OK ATM.
It's most other spells are too weak for what they do.

Incinerate could feel a slight nerf if needed - for example, requcing quality to +1% proj. speed per 1% and making "repeated" casts dont count towards nuber of casts required to reach next stage.

But overall, you need to buff other spells.

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

Incinerate is mostly OK ATM.
It's most other spells are too weak for what they do.

Incinerate could feel a slight nerf if needed - for example, requcing quality to +1% proj. speed per 1% and making "repeated" casts dont count towards nuber of casts required to reach next stage.

But overall, you need to buff other spells.

People seem to no understand other spells need to be buffed because they are too weak, not that incinerate is too strong.

When GGG did the closed beta they didn't test the new map mods that were added, like chance to avoid aliments or no leech. In addition most people that played in the beta I had to imagine didn't do too much mapping, especially later because frequent resets and the map drops still sucked at that point.

Incinerate isn't overpowered, its just reliable, unlike almost every other spell, it doens't need to crit, ignite, shock or anything. The downside is the inability to scale it aside from cast speed\added damage\tree, also standing still while channeling it.

The greater part about this skill though, is because of its reliability it can be used in builds like iron will, paired with the changes to the game to make traditional casters have almost no defensive options left, people have abandon the whole idea of playing them do do either iron will, melee, COC or bow characters.

GGG forced this change by making mana regen fairly pointless, by not further adjusting the mana cost of spells like ball lightning (while nerfing it from the LIVE version instead of simply reverting the buff they gave it in closed beta)

Honestly the whole beta was mismanaged significantly if GGG had actually worked to balance instead of just nerfing what was popular and introduced map mods that crushed specific casters (like chance to avoid XX) they would have seen that ball lightning did not need nerfed from the live version and that after the changes to EB the mana cost was unsustainable. Instead we have people going incinerate because its a low skill level (point in click) and reliable.