. Incinerate: With these changes made to incinerate, it has basically become unusable because there is little to no value in running it for the amount of risk you take on when using it. Incinerate used to reward mages high dmg for taking on the risk of going in melee range of players to hit the ability, but with these changes incinerate is now doing less damage than fireball and pillar of fire and still has a higher risk potential than those to abilities combined. Rather than a nerf, incinerate needed a buff last patch, its main problem at the time was its cast time being so long and very predictable making it very easy to dodge. Although these changes done to incinerate have given it a shorter cast time, it has been significantly nerfed in all other aspects. Firstly the fact that incinerate doesn’t hit twice anymore has seen a significant dmg decrease, it went from hitting 5-6k all the way down to 2-3k even with the various buffs to the weapon perk dmg and base dmg. On top of the changes to crit, incinerate is very unlikely to crit and only then you would see a maybe 3.2-3.6k hit whereas abilities such as fireball and pillar of fire are seeing numbers like that, and numbers that are even higher, now incinerate doesn’t reward the player for risking their life by going into melee range of players where melee weapons dominate the fire staff in all aspects and instead does less damage than abilities such as fireball and pillar of fire which you can cast safely from a distance and still do more damage. Thirdly, the fact that you can animation cancel an incinerate like how you can a burn out makes it very detrimental to the player if they miss, as soon as you use the ability, you are locked in place for roughly 2-3 seconds and if you’re fighting ranged players, they can get 1-2 free light attacks on your character. In the last patch when you could animation cancel it made a good ability to use against melee’s to release some pressure but against ranged, unless they had no stamina or were stunned, 9 times out of 10 you weren’t gonna hit them. This is why many people asked for the cast time to be buffed, this ability should’ve seen a slight buff in dmg to numbers like 4-5k since mages are most of the time running a light equip load and are essentially entering a melee players domain by bringing themselves into melee range of the person which no other ability except for flame thrower to hit but flame throwers value lies in its ability to apply pressure and continuedly do consistent dmg while having the ability to maneuver around the enemy player which incinerate does not. Additionally, if a mage does not predict where the enemy player will dodge too if they’re out of stamina, if they’re stunned, or even if the enemy player presses their shift key at the right time to dodge the ability, that mage is left standing there for 2-3 seconds leaving them vulnerable to ranged attacks. This is very detrimental to the player, especially in duels where you’re not allowed to heal back up with potions, personally, I don’t think this really needs to be nerfed since it’ll act as a good trade-off for a high dmg ability, incinerates main problem atm is its lack of dmg for risky and how much risk potential there is when using it. All incinerate really needs a buff to its dmg to reward the player for its high-risk potential.
Edit: I am now hitting 1k incinerates on some players, incinerate has officially become the worst ability in the game…
Another Edit: It doesn’t even push melee players away anymore letting them do up to 3 light attacks on me when I do 1.4k dmg to them, please buff incinerate.
I’m aware that this is extremely wording so here is another forum post that I made which is much more streamlined and contains for info Nerfed An Ability That Needed A Buff... Nice Going AGS (Incinerate)
