A Diablo 4 Burning Instinct bug is confusing players who are trying to build a powerful fire sorcerer. Hovering over the node makes a tooltip appear that says you have a 0% current bonus, though that seems to be incorrect. The Burning Instinct legendary node states that your burning damage is supposed to increase by 40% based on your critical strike damage, and then increased by 5% for every 20 intelligence you have. Considering all of this, it’s strange that anyone would end up having a 0% bonus, but that’s what happens. Here is what’s going on with this Burning Instinct glitch in Diablo 4 and if there’s a way to fix the bug.
How to fix Diablo 4 Burning Instinct bug
To fix the Diablo 4 Burning Instinct bug, you need to make sure that you have over 50% critical strike damage, mainly by equipping items with this specific bonus.
Unfortunately, the description of the Burning Instinct node is poorly written, and it doesn’t really tell you how the bonus is really calculated. Burning Instinct does not count the base +50% critical strike damage as part of the formula. Instead, it only impacts bonus critical strike damage above that threshold. So if you don’t equip any items that provide bonuses beyond this base, you’ll find that you have 0% bonus damage no matter how much Intelligence your sorcerer has.
That said, some players still report having problems with the Burning Instinct node, particularly on the official Blizzard forums for Diablo 4. Some state that despite getting a reported bonus above 0% from the node that it doesn’t seem to change any damage with burning.
It also seems that the Sorcerer skill Combustion is also buggy, which has weakened the pyromancy build significantly. Hopefully, Blizzard get finally fix the issues with both skills so that the fire sorcerer becomes viable again as a late-game build.