Punishment

Could love to see a complete overhaul in this skill gem. Been talking to some friends about possible changes and would love to see something in the lines of Armour Penetration. This point of Path of Exile there's abundant ways to penetrate and weaken Elemental resist. There's ascendancy classes to reduce/penetrate Chaos resist. Is there any specific reason there isn't any curses, support gems, or ascendancy class lines for Armour penetration or weakening? If there's no direct reasoning why Armour pen isn't available maybe consider changing or adding some form of it onto Punishment, would greatly increase the use of this curse.

The only change I would like to see for this gem is for it to work like the support cast when damage taken. The buff is a major DPS boost for physical and physical conversion builds. The downfall is that you have to be hit by melee attacks.

This curse already has the negative of needing to put yourself in harms way to gain its damage bonuses. I don't think it needs to be further hamstrung. The gem could read:

"Player receives more X% melee damage and X% increased attack speed for X seconds after taking X amount of damage".

"

Vipermagi wrote:

Totems use your offensive stats - giving them Damage/Attack Speed won't work.
Totems have their own defensive stats, however.

These two combined are the reason for Totems having a maximum of zero Power and Frenzy Charges, but a maximum of three Endurance Charges. :)

So if I get the punishment buff/or charges, my Totems will benefit from it?

Great damage boost on paper, but really hard to proc in practice. I'm playing Lacerate Slayer, usually jump right into enemies, but Punishment still procs very rarely. Usually monsters are either ranged or stunned/dead before they hit me.
And even if they do, it's just 4 seconds buff - not enough to use on another pack.

I guess it's great against non hexproof tough melee enemies and that's it. I think, I'm going to swap it for Enfeeble or something.

yeah this is just so clunky to use. the buff is super short, the proc rate is terrible even as a low-range melee build (cleave), i'm not sure it's ever worth using. maybe if you're taunting all the enemies all the time, but even then you're probably just better off using vuln or another more reliable damage curse.

I think it is actually more viable against bosses for that reason.

You can get buff from getting hit by a cursed ad and get a regular power "curse" effect against a boss

Obviously it sucks just as much against bosses with no additional monsters, but there are so many bosses that just don't ever melee you anyways, so it hardly matters.

It's sort of like prolif I guess.

I think getting maybe like 8-15% more dmg for like 1.5 seconds is about as terrible as most uninvested curses on bosses anyways, where they have like 9% reduced resist or take 9% increased physical damage, or do 8% less damage.