I decided to repeat alt0172's experiments on cast speed vs. Incinerate ramp-up time.
I recorded Incinerate with and without my Faster Casting (34%) and then counted the frames from the start of the Incinerate animation, to the appearence of the stage 1 buff, stage 2 buff, and stage 3 buff. To help measure the results, we can calculate the expected frames per second per stage based on cast speed.
Note: I recorded at 60 frames per second.
Results
.12 Cast Time: 46 frames recorded, 43 expected
.09 Cast Time: 47 frames recorded, 32 expected
This is more evidence to support the theory that there is some weirdness going on with respect to cast time and Incinerate stage increases. But, this weirdness could be a number of things:
* An internal cooldown on Incinerate stage changes.
* A delay in UI updates that only postpones the stage buff icon, but not Incinerate's damage.
* .09 cast time is less than my typical latency. Perhaps there's some client-server protection that delays the stages as the server has to monitor actions that are occuring faster than your latency.
* An error in the testing method. 60fps may not be enough to detect the razor thin timing of Incinerate.