Incinerate nerfed too hard.

Played incinerate on my main standard character for several years. Had to adapt many times, after various indirect nerfs and buffs, the biggest being the change to AA. Now because GGG decided to buff the cast speed for no reason at all with 2.0, twitch streamers used the skill as an easy levelling tool and everyone copied them. Because GGG balance by metagame and usage statistics, one of my favourite skills gets nerfed way more than it would ever need to. The same happened to arc and flameblast after they were popular for a league.

By comparison, most spells have gained 20-35% damage, while incinerate has lost 8% base (effective to 24.3-32% nerf in comparison) and on top of that 37.5% potential damage (stages reduced to 50%) alongside no longer supporting echo, effectively increasing the mana cost/s by 42.8% and removing a support that grants up to 53% more DPS and 70% more on-hit benefits. Meanwhile incinerate totems which were the current meta are uneffected by the echo change, while self-casting is heavily nerfed.

They only needed to do 1 of the 3 of these things. Meanwhile arc and flameblast after being decimated are now being buffed back up heavily, about 6 months later. The pendulum of balance keeps swinging. The worst part is I didn't even play the last league where everyone was using it cause I was off playing other games, so I never got to experience this supposed broken skill.


Keep in mind I had already adapted to the upcoming changes by getting a consuming dark to combine with my infernal mantle, intending to use poison stacks to increase my damage by 20%, meanwhile had to switch various gear to make up for losing projectile speed, spell damage, resistance and intelligence off my previous wand. I opened up a spot to use wither in cwdt and dumped discipline (EB) to use blasphemy warlords mark so I can switch out life leech to use empower, cause I knew incinerate would lose damage. But not THIS much damage. Nothing I do can bring the damage up to what is lost with one sudden patch.

I will be more than happy with one of these three nerfs happening, accepting if two happen, but all three is ridiculous and will make the skill completely unused for months until inevitably buffed.


For clarification I have 3 main characters in standard out of something like 20 and the other two, an RF and flicker striker, will both be buffed substantially. Meanwhile I'll be playing a fireball witch in the new league. I'll still miss playing my most played character now that it'll deal half the current damage with more mana spent.


EDIT: I've done calculations and my current max DPS of 44K will go to max 20K (replacing spell echo with faster casting) along with mana costs going from 200/s to 260/s. That's 55% damage lost with 30% increased mana cost/s.

To adjust and improve my damage I've equipped the consuming dark (losing range from old wand) and empower instead of LL (losing leech rate and replacing enfeeble with warlords mark) I can reach a total of 25.5K DPS. We don't yet know how much damage controlled destruction can give when levelled so I don't yet know if it would give more than added chaos.

If echo were still usable, mana costs would not increase and my max DPS would be 30.2K.
If the 8% damage nerf were undone, I could reach 27.6K DPS.
if the stages change were undone, I could reach 34K, which is still too much.

Personally if the skill were to be nerfed less hard, then I'd keep the change to stage damage, revert the echo change and 8% damage loss, but untie stage gain from cast speed. Instead gain a stage per second spent casting so that the skill is no longer just a damage hose, but more unique by making the damage buildup and immobilisation matter again. The skill would be allowed to be powerful again if the stage gain weren't as instant as it is now, as I can currently hit stage 3 in 1.1 seconds. This behaviour was only made more broken when 2.0 lowered the cast speed to 200 from 240 which was entirely unnecessary.

well.. given that people were able to farm uber easily with pretty much damage only from gem and supports (with laughable damage investment passive-wise) it was pretty damn obvious what is going to happen

it dealt 4 times the damage of other baseline spells and in most cases was ~free (Elron jewelry) - it will remain free (as it cuts costs 'per cast' not 'per second') and will require some damage investment to be played. just like any other skill!

dont worry, there will be other 'top horse' better by 50% than second best. there always is. and i have already stopped giving ggg a benefit of the doubt: these 'outlier' skills are by design so 'everybody can be a winner'

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sidtherat wrote:

well.. given that people were able to farm uber easily with pretty much damage only from gem and supports (with laughable damage investment passive-wise) it was pretty damn obvious what is going to happen

it dealt 4 times the damage of other baseline spells and in most cases was ~free (Elron jewelry) - it will remain free (as it cuts costs 'per cast' not 'per second') and will require some damage investment to be played. just like any other skill!

dont worry, there will be other 'top horse' better by 50% than second best. there always is. and i have already stopped giving ggg a benefit of the doubt: these 'outlier' skills are by design so 'everybody can be a winner'

Elreon jewelry will only be better now that echo is gone, which annoys me a lot because anyone who wasn't already using elreon rings has a ton more mana spent while those already using them won't feel the change nearly as much. Now to use incinerate you HAVE to use elreon jewelry else the skill will just cost too much mana with too little return.

If no changes are made I'll just switch incinerate out for firestorm, which will still be supported by echo, not require elreon rings and provide pretty much the same playstyle. Meanwhile firstorm will deal 20% more damage with this patch instead of 50% less.

Meh, incinerate is/was ridiculous, it deserved the nerfs. And while losing both Spell Echo and so much of the more damage per stage seems like a lot at once (even though its use of Spell Echo was supposed to be eliminated in 2.0 when flameblast lost its echo ability), it's also getting a rather nice counterbalancing buff from Controlled Destruction. It won't fully make up for the loss of Spell Echo (because spell echo is damn near the strongest support gem in the game, and is only surpassed in power by supports that are much more demanding in build/tactical preparation), but it diminishes the nerf a fair bit.

I was dicking around with magma orb (old version obviously) in a tabula in dried lake tonight. had bunch of different aoe supports, etc. it was level 14 so clearspeed was shit. then I swapped it out for incinerate level 14 just for shits and giggles

level 14 incinerate shat on m.o. so bad it wasnt even funny, WITH SAME AOE supports + echo/fast proj. ie, magma orb with 3 more links was way more inferior in clear speed to a 3 link incinerate. I mean, if that's not telling, what the hell is ? and it gets worse on high levels.

tl;dr: incinerate was evil as it promoted zero investment into damage and gave very good clear speed, and it allowed one to stack defense/life as you wished. this is unacceptable in a game where majority of the baseline skills require investment

The skill was clearly way too strong but the nerfs do seem a bit too harsh. Channeling longer (no Echo) to get a smaller damage bonus will make this skill very immobile, as it was probably originally intended. Not sure if it will see any use outside of supertanky builds that don't mind stanting around a bit to kill stuff. The synergy with Spell Totem is still there though, if the damage makes the cut versus other totem skills.

You had your fun for 3 month or more, now deal with the nerf and hope that it gets a buff at a later date.

don't think it was unjustified though...now you'll be spending points in places that almost all other casters will instead of defense and life.

If you want to make a cheap Superboss farmer, RF Incinerate is still going to be a very good option, I think.

if u think incinerate went bad, try playing in real hardcore- ice spear till maps lvl 80 and experience what is true weakness in wraeclast in full glory:)

Incinerate was indeed overpowered. I never looked too hard into it, but I think not having tiers, or maybe only 1.5 tiers would put it inline with other skills. The most telling was not needing to have righteous fire turned on, and still doing massive damage.

Also I have no idea why spell echo is in the game. When I first used it and replaced faster casting I was amazed at how OP it was.