Incinerate's new weapon passive is: "Incinerate starts with 4 additional Stages."

This means that, upon tapping Incinerate, you automatically get +19 radius and 300% increased angle (which is its maximum aoe). Furthermore, If you tap and immediately release Incinerate, you will release a "final wave" that does 500% more damage.

Here's how the numbers look for the tap&release playstyle:

Deals 207 - 311 fire damage. Average hit = 259.

At 4 stages, deals 100% more damage with hits. Your first hit will deal 518 damage.

Upon releasing incinerate, your final wave deals 500% more damage with hits (PoB implies that this more damage is multiplicative with the stage multiplier). 259 * 2 * 6 = 3108 damage.

Base incinerate has a cast time of 0.2 seconds. If you can perfectly tap & release incinerate, you can deal (518 + 3108) * (5 casts per second) = 18,130 base damage per second. While playing "tap&release," Incinerate will also have a huge base radius of 44.

For context, compare this to the most meta caster skill, spark. At its base, Spark only deals 1605 damage per second. Even if each spark hit enemies 10 times per cast, it would not beat this baseline Incinerate dps.

Previously, the tap & release incinerate playstyle was not viable - you would have puny aoe if you were playing 1-stack incinerate. This new weapon passive makes it absolutely bonkers.

Example tree for early league: https://pastebin.com/bh5fFDyw. very simple version with level 19 gems and pretty basic gear. At 4 stages you'll be dealing 947k on release and 157k from your initial hit - about 1.1m per tap & release. With a cast rate of 7, and "perfect play" you could get up to 7.7m dps, although in a real world scenario it's probably somewhere around 3-5m dps. still pretty damn good for shit gear. This build could be leveled as jungroan's arma brand recaller and then transitioned. Also note - if incinerate appears as a passive on Shields as well, then you can run normal wand/sceptre/shield instead of 2h.