[2.0] Incinerate Totems - IW/RF - 20k TT - 275k effective DPS on 1 EX Budget - Atziri Viable

Hey there,
great build! Since I prefer ES builds, do you think a CI version would work aswell?
I only play HC leagues, so the life regen would be applied to ES and used defensively, since you can't run RF anyway on a CI char. Loss of damage from RF would be compensated by using a Soul Mantle. CI/ZO builds are very powerful late-game due to the high amount of ES (and thus, regen) you can get. Definitely not as cheap or as beginner-friendly as yours, but may be safer endgame.

Here's my tree:

I would never recommend es builds with totems. Without insta leech or life flasks you will end up dying a lot in cheesy ways

Have you ever played a CI/ZO regen-based char tho? We are talking in excess of 1000ES per second endgame + Vaal Discipline for being basically damage-immune in hairy situations.
I don't see how this would mean dying a lot without really really bad positioning on the player's part.
Thanks for your opinion though - and it looks like incienrate is finally getting nerfed hard in 2.1 anyways, so this might not be the best time to start this build.

I'm a noob (played 1 week) and after seeing the build in action, I was very interested in incinerate totems. However I saw they were getting a nerf, and flametotem getting some early game power shifted into it's lategame (I mostly only care about lategame anyway.) Sadly I really liked the style of Incinerate totems over flame totems from the videos I saw, just the broad AoE of incinerate and the range were what really appealed to me to begin with to make me want to try it out.

My question is will these upcoming nerfs and buffs make Incinerate a poor choice in general, and will those changes be the final straw to make flame totem just the unanimously agreed upon better option?

A side question, are there other popular builds revolving around dropping a totem that casts long range aoe spells for you while you can focus on kiting away from enemies and staying alive? I suffer from frequent lag spikes and am looking for some builds where I can mostly clear out rooms quickly and efficiently, but also safely, and totems appeared to offer that, so I'm very interested in finding the strongest options to suit that style of play...

also wondering, wether it would be better to simply return to flame totem again ?

"Incinerate is no longer affected by Spell Echo, as was intended in 2.0.0. Incinerate now only adds 50% more damage for each stage, down from 100% more damage. Incinerate's damage has been increased by 15% at level 1 and reduced by approximately 8% at level 20."

Yea... definately going back to flame totem again.

"

Meraxas wrote:

"Incinerate is no longer affected by Spell Echo, as was intended in 2.0.0. Incinerate now only adds 50% more damage for each stage, down from 100% more damage. Incinerate's damage has been increased by 15% at level 1 and reduced by approximately 8% at level 20."

Yea... definately going back to flame totem again.

Could you explain better? What is the best choice to do? Thanks so much!

This build is not dead yet!!!!!

While the damage is definately going to drop a little bit, i should be able to still get it to over 250k effective dps. However, this is going to require an astrementis and repentance gloves (luckily repentance gloves are fairly cheap in the temp league).

On a 1ex budget build you will still be able to reach 200k+ effective dps. Still pretty respectable dps on a similar budget.

I still need to do some testing to see how i can squeeze out the most dps, ill hopefully be able to update the original post within the next week