3.20 Balance Manifesto: Curses

Wow, these changes are excellent! Definitely a move in the right direction. Curse penalties being removed from bosses is such fantastic news! Thanks and I can't wait to play 3.20.

so occultist nerfed?

what's the point of removing malediction from occultist if they're also losing the extra curse effect?

Hey, we really need exact value of each adjustment.

Such a claim without any exact data makes no sense at all. We don't even know the probable value of a skill and of course cannot compare whether it's a significant buff or a flat adjustment.

What we need:
1,lv1 and lv20 value of each curse
2,will unique and rare monsters influenced by two less action speed/damage mods at the same time?
3.less curse effect value of (awakened) Hextouch, (awakened) Blasphemy
4,will there is no different tiers for curse on hit on rings? how about lagecy?
5,how curse passives becom more available? And the value adjustments?
6,new occultiest acsendency
7,will mark on hit be changed? Now it should be renamed as mark on attacks rather than on hit to avoid misunderstand. Or you should let it work to spell hit to commensurate with his name.

You said everything, and you said nothing.

cool ring

"

We have removed the '15% increased Effect of your Curses' and 'Enemies you Curse have Malediction' stats from the Malediction notable in the Occultist's Ascendancy.

Mmph. I can live with it; losing the +1 curse from Malediction would have been quite inconvenient since my little-engine-that-could build in standard needs a hex and a mark to feel good, and prying loose the skill points to path to Whispers of Doom would have been moderately inconvenient.

Malediction's reduced damage *dealt* was a nice bit of defense though, and I'm gonna miss the fact that it applied to hexproof enemies even if the hex didn't.

"

The 'Your Hexes can affect Hexproof Enemies' stat has been moved from Profane Bloom to the Malediction notable.

Oh. Never mind.

These changes are great... for people who never invested or played with the old systems.

I'm not going to change anyone's mind here but Doom felt like a fun mechanic to play around, especially with the way you could scale impending doom and hexblast damage around it. It felt like an interesting and non-linear way to scale damage that wasn't just "hur dur I take da crit and da damagey thingies". I'm honestly sad to see it go because it was such a fun build identity to play around. The system wasn't successful, because it wasn't supported. Outside of Heist we never got new things to interact with Doom or uniques that really helped out the hex skills. The removal of the 33%-66% less curse effectiveness IS massive, but you're not feeling it nearly as much on the builds that invested into curse effect.

Hexblast was fun and interesting since using doom felt like an interesting risk/reward in a lot of respects. The annoying part was there wasn't enough doom rate to avoid using doomsday since you could get 50-60 doom relatively easily with an amulet and cluster jewels. Now it just feels like I use bane with 3 curses, and hold down hexblast... yay. That's not even getting to the giganerfed part which is you can't use it with blasphemies anymore since it never "removes" curses, or the really annoying part which is the one big damage poison ability we had is gone. No more low tolerance builds without the 2x to 3x multiplier doom was giving in damage.

Now let's talk about how fucked Impending doom is. I don't think you guys did the numbers on your own skill there... Doubling its damage isn't even close to compensating. Even at 30 doom, you had 240% more damage from hits, and that's with zero investment. Impending doom had that as a 1s ripcord with doomsday, but you'd also scale doom to the 50s and have around a 400% damage multiplier so it was fairly worth it. EVEN IF you take into account buffing despair to be more generic and increasing the damage, 100% curse effect and you're still not at doubling the damage again to compensate for losing 200% damage or more depending on your investment.

People have already commented on how dumb the occultist changes are but hey, I'll dogpile too. Malediction was the only reason to even take increased curse limit on occultist 90% of the time. Enfeeble and temp chains SUCK as self-casted skills because you get shotgunned to hell and back before you can cast the god damn things, so you have to use them as a blasphemy to get any benefit out of it. At best you're skipping the whispers of doom cluster except with the curse effect in the wheel you're probably not anyways so the only real desirable stats are malediction and curse effect, which are both getting removed. Hexproof enemies are all but gone at this point, so the hexproof node does relatively fuck all, and it doesn't stop you from using hexblast/impending doom on monsters anyways so it's largely just a convenience thing. Oh, and don't even get me started on how shit profane bloom is at this point. 1-line 2 point ascendency which basically mimics obliteration wand? I'd rather just play a trickster or scion at that point with how useless that node feels.

Overall it's great the boss reduction to curses is going away, should have been done a few years ago when we split hexes and marks but hey... better late than never. Literally every other change here is a downgrade though and I hate it.

I cannot play anything in PoE but melee. Even after 11 years. I've tried many times, but for me the game should be called Path of Melee. So, because I'm a very important man-child, please give melee some love in the next few patches. We desperately need something and the changes to curse on hit mechanics make me nervous about an already emotionally fragile melee getting dunked on.

I loved getting Doom Shrines. :(

Fix melee please; time is running out.

Buff Soul taker
Buff Wings of Entropy
Buff Atziri's Disfavor
Buff Jack the Axe

Sounds interesting! Gonna be alot of occultist experimentation this league?