I believe the classes need to be balanced. I also believe we need to give Blizzard REAL information. The blanket whining in every thread is pretty much worthless, as is calling every skill pointless without any real testing. People want Sorc balanced, but they haven’t given Blizzard any real information to work with.
People confuse Incinerate with Disintegrate. The only similarity they have is being a channel. Incinerate is a burn multiplier, not a skill you just channel on everything until you run out of mana.
Aspect of Conflagration is important. The codex version is the same as if the Capstone was working and everything had 5 unique burns. 20% to all your burning damage while channeling, including incinerate damage itself, regardless of whether Incinerate is hitting it or not.
Since incinerate is a burn itself, so it also procs the Fire Wall enchant. Incinerate is also far larger and easier to direct against groups of enemies, so proccing even more fire walls is easy.
As for the mana cost itself, you only need a bit of reduction from gear. Fire passive gives you 15% off when standing still, which you have to do anyway. If something dies by burning, it’s 30% more mana per second with another passive, or 3 mana per second. iirc, I am at 18 mana per second, while base regen is 10 per second, so I am only really losing 8 mana per second of channeling.
I use “Assimilation Aspect” which gives 8% chance to dodge, when I dodge I get 6 mana (5-10). I’m at 10% dodge with it and I facetank, so it helps.
But then again, I also toss out a couple fire walls and fire bolts (Level 5 is a 53% burn over 8 seconds) to round things up before I channel.
I will be honest though. WT4 has reduced my mana regen significantly. I can’t face tank as much and basic enemies aren’t burning to death as fast, so my mana regen is choking. I expect it to get back up to normal when I upgrade to Ancestral.