They have nerfed so many builds that were not even OP into levels close to unusability and I just don’t get it

Oiled Ground + Incinerate is busted. You can try it out right now. Slap Elemental Focus on Oil Grenade or Oil Barage, then get to igniting. The oiled ground propagates Incinerate’s compounding ignite, so you don’t have to constantly use fuel. Also the ignite goes everywhere. Probably gettined patched eventually, so get it while it’s hot. Search Jungroan Oil Grenade if you want a video.

Feel your pain. Also got excited when saw all those channeling nodes since I was playing incinerator last league. But fuel killed it for me, decided not even to try. Thank you for sharing your experience.

Incinerate is in a weird place. I played it in 0.2 pathfinder when you could just use it whenever you wanted and it was alot of fun. Hopefully they get it right sometime in the near future

I think the problem is with me not wanting to combine elements and a lot of skills. I know that GGG want mage to be master of elements, they dont want players to focus on just one. But I have always preferred sort of focusing on just one and feel like the avatar of that element if it makes any sense 😁

Pretty much almost everyone feels it.
They completely butchered it for some niche 1% of the builds to the point of being practically unusable outside endgame with 200div worth of gear. What was a clunky but potentially interesting spell now became easily worst 3.
And not only that, fuel/heat mechanic generally feels awful to play around, especially with absolute lack of supports/passives that could at least adjust it.

Yeah, the implementation is definitely clunky and not at all the same design quality as other abilities. Why is the fuel meter a white pencil line being drawn inside the icon? Why does the ability fire at the direction your character is facing vs where your cursor is pointing (like every other ability)? Why is fuel solely based on mana spent? I slotted an efficiency support gem and essence drain went from 10-15 casts to charge incinerate up to 20-25. Sometimes I find myself sitting there awkwardly charging incinerate spamming spells into the air just so it will be ready for the boss fight I’m about to walk into. Could have naturally recharged over time and/or recharged from damage dealt, skills used, etc. But nope just flat mana spent so every mana efficiency boost in the game makes incinerate worse to use. Luckily I’m a chronomancer so incinerate is mostly just for bosses or I probably would have completely dumped it. Sad how GGG could have made it such a cool ability but it seems like they just flat out don’t want you to use it.

Edit: Also anything that slows your casts down on other abilities is going to make incinerate worse like considered casting since you’re using less mana. I just don’t see why you don’t get some charge for damage dealt, some charge for skills used, some charge for mana spent, even health sacrificed.

Too many skills have this kind of limitation that makes the game really boring to me. I’ll just skip it until 1.0 I guess. Every mace build I tried feels like a crap to play with. The only mace skill that felt good was molten blast while dual wielding and this build was killed by the cooldown in the Nova Projectiles max tier wich was aiming for LA Deadeye and killed some other builds as well. Even adding 120% Cooldown Recovery it stills 3,5s wich kills the build.

Most other spells also have infusions which are also feel awful to use. They have cooldowns so you can maybe infuse 1 out of 10 casts of the spell so what’s the point. End result is players mostly just ignore infusions completely. Eg. most spark/comet players just play them without infusions.