How should incinerate be rebalanced? Vote now

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If you re-read the quote I was responding to, it was that incinerate isn't good at the top gear end. So I pointed him to some extremely strong high gear level incinerate builds. The point is it's really good on a budget, and really good as you invest. In fact you can't beat it for comparable investment at any price point. That's the definition of OP pretty much. Literally the only way to beat incinerate is to spend more on mirrored gear.

Yes nerfing low life crit builds was the right thing to do and it added variety. That would be obvious to you if you played in high level map rotations.

Not sure if "budget" would be considered OP but that more of opinion. What would you nerf about it? Making it require some more investment to equal out the same in items or something? That inherently doesn't make the item more broken if it's balanced but too cheap. Doesn't require the gutting people are claiming for.

Also nerfing low life crit builds did not add any sort of variety to the game, people still played the same shit (some sort of variant of CoC, Discharge, whatever is meta at the moment) minus low life. Even then "high level map rotations" isn't a large part of the playerbase anyway, other people don't give a rat's ass if your tired of seeing other people in your high-level map rotations using low life.

As long I have the option to go low-life AND anything else I generally want without feeling outclassed completely would make the game the most balanced.

If you decrease the dmg effectiveness - its bricked - noone will use it
If you make spell echo not work with Incinerate - Its bricked - not possible to use it without 3x elreon jewelery.


Incinerate is not a problem. Too many spells are bricked by GGGs nerfs. The fuck happened to arc? Where is fp ?
No matter what they do they will buff CoC .. Increasing disparity between selfcast and coc.

Coc is the problem...

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eragon1111 wrote:

If you decrease the dmg effectiveness - its bricked - noone will use it
If you make spell echo not work with Incinerate - Its bricked - not possible to use it without 3x elreon jewelery.


Incinerate is not a problem. Too many spells are bricked by GGGs nerfs. The fuck happened to arc? Where is fp ?
No matter what they do they will buff CoC .. Increasing disparity between selfcast and coc.

Coc is the problem...

Actually that was something that bothered me seeing they added 1% to the chance to trigger it in 2.0. :/

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RagnarokChu wrote:

Not sure if "budget" would be considered OP but that more of opinion. What would you nerf about it? Making it require some more investment to equal out the same in items or something? That inherently doesn't make the item more broken if it's balanced but too cheap. Doesn't require the gutting people are claiming for.

Yeah one reason incinerate is OP is it because it doesn't require significant investment to reach high damage. As a result people can get huge defense along with huge damage. Lower its base damage by 20-30% and now people have to invest more into damage and can't get as much defense.

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RagnarokChu wrote:

Also nerfing low life crit builds did not add any sort of variety to the game, people still played the same shit (some sort of variant of CoC, Discharge, whatever is meta at the moment) minus low life. Even then "high level map rotations" isn't a large part of the playerbase anyway, other people don't give a rat's ass if your tired of seeing other people in your high-level map rotations using low life.

As long I have the option to go low-life AND anything else I generally want without feeling outclassed completely would make the game the most balanced.

This point doesn't make sense. First you complained about removing LL crit not adding diversity, which I countered with first hand experience. I don't know how to respond about your speculation about people not caring about high level map rotas. LL crit was always expensive, so it was mostly prevalent in high level map rotas. It wouldn't appear much anywhere else. So the people doing those high level map rotas are pretty much the only ones whose opinion on LL crit matters? I feel this response is almost equally stupid as your statements.

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Yeah one reason incinerate is OP is it because it doesn't require significant investment to reach high damage. As a result people can get huge defense along with huge damage. Lower its base damage by 20-30% and now people have to invest more into damage and can't get as much defense.

Almost all builds can get huge defense along with huge damage with any amount of investment, if you just lower the base damage by 20-30% it would do shitty damage by default unless you have high end gear. Which then it does shitty damage with high end gear. Nerfing it by 20-30% base damage would imply that it does 20-30% more damage then it should compared to other abilities.

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This point doesn't make sense. First you complained about removing LL crit not adding diversity, which I countered with first hand experience. I don't know how to respond about your speculation about people not caring about high level map rotas. LL crit was always expensive, so it was mostly prevalent in high level map rotas. It wouldn't appear much anywhere else. So the people doing those high level map rotas are pretty much the only ones whose opinion on LL crit matters? I feel this response is almost equally stupid as your statements.

You didn't counter anything, all you said that there was "more diversity" because people played low life crit less. Did it somehow open up more builds to be played or is there less of an option since other people moved from low life crit to the other builds that where popular and not low life crit? Moving the 100 people to low life crit into the 5 other popular builds (20 each) didn't add diversity. Now you don't have the option at all go to low life crit.

Also you act like YOUR personal experience matters more then other people, low-life crit shouldn't exist because YOU where tired of seeing it in high level maps? You didn't answer the question is there more diversity now because of low life crit. Not less people playing low life crit, the actual amount of viable builds increasing.

You also don't need to play high level map rotations to use a low-life crit build, if I personally want to play low-life crit as a solo player or if I want to play with my friends I should have the option.

leave it add more skill gems

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TheAnuhart wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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Vhlad wrote:

I do not use faster casting

You are doing it wrong. Cast speed is more important to Incinerate than damage increases, because cast speed is also damage increases in move-and-shoot situations.

Simply put, if you believe Incinerate is not always supported by Spell Echo and Faster Casting, your feedback is invalid, leave thread now.

edit: Ran some numbers.

Even if you already have 100% increased cast speed without Faster Casting - which is a lot - another 50% from the support means 38% to 50% more run-and-gun damage. For longer channels it's closer to 32% more damage overall.

If you have a more normal 50% increased cast speed without Faster Casting, it's 55% to 60% more run-and-gun damage and 44% more damage overall.

What a stupid response, Scrotie.

There are reasons some incinerate builds don't use faster casting, the guy even stated the reason.

It's not wrong, it's just a different build to a build that uses faster casting.

Oh look!! No faster casting, because having faster casting wouldn't work, but these builds do, as I and many more can attest.

Typical tooltip warrior fail.

Edit: My PM reply to someone asking about FC in these particular builds.

Spoiler

Faster casting is more dps, but more cost. You can't actually get it to 0 cost with the 3 rare jewels used to reduce a level 21 incinerate, it will still cost 1 mana with 3 * 5% rolls.

You can use a lvl 19 incinerate, faster casting instead of faster proj and use 2 reduced cost jewels, but you will miss the projectile speed. Sure you can have it on wand, but ideally you want it on wand AND use faster proj gem. As for getting proj speed on jewels, you are resigning yourself to having either level 19 incinerate, or having incinerate cost 1 mana, or replacing the spell damage unique jewel with another rare with reduced cost. Then you are going to roll proj speed also, so either no ES on jewels or no damage on jewels or both only if 4 property GG jewels (reduced cost/proj speed/ES/damage).

And you are still going to have a lot less proj speed than the ultimate 40+ on wand + 70 on gem.

Some builds can utilise FC and it's a no-brainer, some can for tooltip dps but not be as good an all round build than if using another support instead.

Telling someone "Simply put, if you believe Incinerate is not always supported by Spell Echo and Faster Casting, your feedback is invalid, leave thread now." is not only rude, but actually quite funny as the party lacking validity in feedback seems to be you. The door.

A pompous finisher as usual.

Still, I will admit I had not considered the Mortal Conviction + Vaal Pact combo. I had considered aura stacking (in the usual mana reservation sense) and in all of those cases the proper play is: you don't need to reserve 100% of your mana, just unreserve a Herald and accept an Incinerate with a small but manageable mana cost, you'll do a heck of a lot more DPS. For example, with the build you linked the Heralds represent about 4% of your damage each, and that's against a monster with 0% to all elemental resistances... against 40% resist-all it's more like 3% per Herald. You get a lot more DPS from accepting a moderate mana cost for Incinerate, still very easily sustainable on just a little mana regen.

However, your build has no mana, and no life regeneration either. I think it is still an option to go Faster Casting anyway and just rely on leech to recoup the costs, but it's a much less comfortable decision, because you'd be absolutely relying on leech for sustainment. Since that impacts which map affixes you can run, I'm inclined to agree with your support gem decisions.

So okay, I'll admit it, I was wrong. If you're running Mortal Conviction and Vaal Pact, or I guess Shavronne's Revelation for ES regen (for which a similar principle would apply), then maybe Faster Casting is a choice rather than an auto-include. But for pretty much everyone else, it is still optimal. A literally zero cost Incinerate is more novelty than power, unless you can add additional mechanics to leverage that power somehow.

TL;DR: Way to find the exception to the rule, Anu.

The discussion here seems to be pretty one-sided. Not surprising given the way the question was asked, but not a good thing imo.

It doesn't follow that incinerate can clear well and have good defense, therefore nerf it. Incinerate, totems, SRS, PA and cyclone are heavily favoured at the moment because they are all in that boat.

Many things can clear as fast or nearly as fast. Cast on crit clears faster than most of those, if not all in the right hands. Don't see many people rushing for 100 with it. Too squishy.

GGG either needs to unpick the bullet hell approach (probably not easy nor perhaps sensible to attempt, what with flasks and defenses all working around it) or tweak dps and defenses further so it's not just these simple few builds which have clear speed and defense in reasonable enough quantities to consistently gain experience. Re-looking at melee splash and mage defenses would be a darn good start.

Incinerate and the others are not the problem. They are the few examples left of builds which actually accomplish what an end-game spec in an ARPG should accomplish - clearing monsters quickly while not dying all the time.

incinerate is clearly op, compared to most other builds

those people who say its NOT, then follow it up with 'buff everything else'; so they agree that incinerate is inherently better than a lot of other options. so their problem is really with the current meta. I mean, you can agree or disagree with the current meta, GGG thinks the content should be challenging and not as fast. incinerate and other op builds make it very non-challenging for most part


Ive never played incinerate until this one month event. I picked it up because - why not ? Ill play mostly solo self found with maybe trading for a couple of items so I needed a super cheap, self-sufficient, gear-independent build.

and let me tell you, it's FUCKING INSANE, at least so far. it's almost as strong as old flameblast (fb was still better cuz of offscreening and burn prolif)

I leveled through merciless during the weekend when all mods besides tempest were on. it was a giant clusterfuck but incinerate melted everything away. one death to cruel malachai slam (bad play on my part) with no real defenses besides lifepool and offense.

at the end of cruel my 4-link blue chest was producing just below 4k dps with LMP and fire penetration.
things were absolutely melting. bosses (well aside from malachai) were melting.

I had to buy two elreon rings due to bad master rng for 1c each. also a cybils paw for like 2c because I wanted some way to get life back. that's it. two elreon rings and any 4L is really all you need to melt everything away for 2+ difficulties without any investment.

there are multiple reasons why its the case, most of them were covered in this thread, but Ill just quickly run through it again:

1. bypassing resource management. elreon rings makes you incinerate free or near free, although incinerate is a very mana-intensive skill otherwise to channel. this frees up any mana management problems and allows you to reserve most/all of your mana for other crap. once in the endgame the elreon rings go away and you can do GR/EB/MOM

2. self-sufficiency. this is always a controversial thing, because there always be skills that arent gear or node depended chosen by racers to level fast. however, incinerate by itself is very strong. it outperforms single target skill like flame surge because of its stages mechanic.


3. damage stacking. the stages mechanism is too powerful, just as stacking damage with flameblast was. there should be a lesson learned for GGG to not make damage stacks like with FB and incinerate. it doesn't work. people get to stacking it really fast and damage is just out of control

4. stemming from #2, a self-sufficient skill will always be more powerful, simply because you can use the rest of nodes for life pool + defenses instead of damage. at least in the new meta. stacking crit was the old meta. incinerate doesnt really need a ton of damage nodes. therefore you can get whatever you feel like -stack block, stack armour if you want, stack evasion. you can run grace or anger and herald+AA (AA synergizes too well with incinerate)

5. super strong for leveling AND in the endgame. the latter I know from second hand experience but the former is easily true from my own. incinerate melted all the beyond mobs so fast it made leveling really fast for me.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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Vhlad wrote:

I do not use faster casting

You are doing it wrong. Cast speed is more important to Incinerate than damage increases, because cast speed is also damage increases in move-and-shoot situations.

Simply put, if you believe Incinerate is not always supported by Spell Echo and Faster Casting, your feedback is invalid, leave thread now.

edit: Ran some numbers.

Even if you already have 100% increased cast speed without Faster Casting - which is a lot - another 50% from the support means 38% to 50% more run-and-gun damage. For longer channels it's closer to 32% more damage overall.

If you have a more normal 50% increased cast speed without Faster Casting, it's 55% to 60% more run-and-gun damage and 44% more damage overall.

^
Absolutely true.
Incinerate has very very fast cast speed that, even echoed, it actually doesn't lock you in place longer than most skills.

The dps ramp issue is not as much an issue as it looks either most of the time since you can juke out attacks/shots before you start deepsing.