Incinerate received a lot of love in S4 however there are some bugs plaguing the skill that keep it from being on par with other options.
#1 - Not as much an incinerate issue but an issue for all channelling skills, although it happens most often when playing incinerate. Sometimes when you get interrupted during channelling you’re unable to move or cast any skills except instant ones. So for example you can keep evading, drinking potions, teleport, or use flame shield, but you can’t do anything else for a couple seconds. Using instant actions prolongs the “animation stuck” bug duration and thus you’re sometimes unable to act for more than 5+ seconds if you need to chain instant actions to evade monsters. This is a very well known bug for anyone who plays incinerate, and the biggest source of deaths during pit runs.
#2 - Incinerate does not scale with attack speed. Same issue was fixed for Whirlwind and Lightning storm in Season 5. Why was incinerate omitted? It’s also a channelling skill having the same issue as the other 2. Fixing this would be a huge improvement and make incinerate competitive with other options. Also it would make Flamescar less redundant.
#3 - Incinerate size temper (or now Flamescar affix) does not work with the extra incinerate beams from Flamethrower aspect.
#4 - The Incinerate enchantment Serpent does not benefit from player’s aspects and deals about 1/20th of my incinerate damage. It doesn’t get extra beams from Flamethrower either. It’s bad even for pure Incinerate builds.
Then there is Flamescar. In S4 maximum greater affix triple MW +incinerate Flamescar with bis focus ended up being 40-50% weaker than a legendary staff with the flamethrower aspect. The S5 buffs are not significant, and the wand should still be at least 30% worse than a staff.
This could be partially fixed with Incinerate being able to benefit from attack speed, which currently does nothing for the skill.
Flamescar’s unique power deals a negligible amount of direct fire damage while the entire Incinerate build only focuses on burning damage over time, so it doesn’t scale well. Adding a proc for more direct fire damage does not help. Embers need to do damage over time or change drastically altogether. Compare this with something like Ebonpiercer and you’ll see what a joke Flamescar currently is.
Flamethrower aspect on a 2h staff is just too powerful in comparison.