Spells: Crit, Incinerate or...?

As I'm pondering some new spellcaster builds, I'm feeling a bit frustrated. Specifically, I want to deal damage with spells that are neither Incinerate (which I don't like the playstyle of) nor rely on critical strikes (because of the specific areas of the tree that I go into).

Looking over some build guides here in the forum, it seems that every spellcaster build out there doing decent damage needs to go crit. I mean self-cast builds here - you know, casting a Shock Nova or Freezing Pulse or whatever to kill mobs. Without crit, the damage just won't be there no matter what. Is that true, or are there spells/combinations which can work outside of that at the moment?

You can absolutely be noncrit and deal good damage. If you look at hardcore caster builds, you'll find that many of them are noncrit. Arc, EK, Flame Totem, Arctic Breath and Flameblast are the classic choices that are often built noncrit, but you can make most spells work as long as they have good base damage.

It's worth noting in particular that Iron Will can often provide an enormous amount of damage to a noncrit caster staying out of the Witch area of the tree.

Iron will spell casters r good too. If also paired with RF, than they get very good and way more survivability as most of the crit builds.

The problem is lightning spells need shock to really kick ass and cold spells tend to have high crit chance so they end up somewhat underpowered if you go non-crit with them.

I'm usually playing these 1m events as a self-found semi-tank caster, and going self-found makes crit a somewhat sketchy concept so I'm ignoring it. So far I've used Firestorm, Ball Lightning, Tendrils, Flameblast and Shockwave totem, all of them performed well enough for me, dunno what kind of performance are you expecting?

I'll probably try glacial cascade in next event.

Crit is just the easiest way to get that extra bit of damage scaling most spells want. The other popular choices are RF, Iron Will, or both. Any spell with good base damage is really good with these spells. Even if you're adverse to Incinerate, Flame Surge, Storm Call, and Freezing Pulse all have great base damage.

Firestorm/Icestorm can compete with Incinerate as a single target option when built non-crit. Other than that... Incinerate is just the single non-crit spell to go with. Well, if you care about clear speed/survivability/build efficiency at all.

Thank you for your answers!

I'm relieved to hear that non-crit still has a range of viable spells. I don't expect crazy damage either. But take Flameblast, for instance. I am theorycrafting a build which has 300% increased damage from tree and 200% from gear. According to my calculations, a maximum stages lvl19 Flameblast in a five-link (Faster Casting - Iron Will - Fire Pen - Increased AoE/Chance to Ignite) would then still only give me 20k DPS (plus penetration). I don't get much more calculated damage for spells like Arc or Storm Call even when incrasing base damage with Heralds or Added xxx Damage. That's quite a bit below what crit spell builds can do.

So the question becomes: how heavy do I need to invest into damage increases from tree and gear in order to deal decent damage with non-crit spells?

There many here who can answer better than me, but I'll tell you what I did. When 2.0 hit I had two characters in the 80s that were gathering dust. One was a Lv 88 former incinerate Scion that I respeced into a Lightning Tendrils build for s**ts and giggles. Just because no one seems to use this spell. I thought of it as a joke at first but she turned out to be pretty tanky. To keep her alive I also gave her very high block...high 50s normally and maxed with Rumis. I've almost got her to lv 92 and she's very, very strong...6000 HP, 1700 ES. Rarely dies even on crazy maps.

To get around having no crit, I'm using Herald of Thunder to drop two curses - Warlord's Mark (self explanatory) and Conductivity combined with a high level Lightning Penetration gem (cursed Stone of Laz with +1 curse mandatory here). With just a 5L she melts foes pretty well...and I have next to no increased spell damage on my tree. I'm also using a high level Iron Will gem which really boosts her DPS since she high strength (500 or so, could be higher)...as well as Doon Cuebiyari which has a high level Flame Totem in it some nice support gems and dishes out some decent damage. And of course leap slam with Fortify (can't leave home without that).

The only crappy part...LT is pretty wicked with crit...but I went for survivability instead of making a glass cannon. So consider using curses and penetration gems if don't want crit...just my 2 Chaos anyway. ;)