Curse on Hit

well, I plan to use Ice Nova / Curse on Hit / Flammability / Elem Weakness.

Basically with one skill that I can spam, I proc elemental equilibrium and double debuff fire...

I'm not running this currently, but for some time while leveling I used Split Arrow + Curse on Hit + Critical Weakness + Elemental Weakness to great effect with Asphyxia's Wrath.

well that gives it a use then, the support applies curse often (and stronger slightly via quality), then the unique spreads it around. add in EE (if AoE attacks) and proliferation for extra joy.

I'm converting 100% of my physical damage to cold with Ice Shot and these:


I'm using Q23 corrupted Curse on Hit, along with Projectile Weakness, Elemental Weakness and Frostbite in Carcass Jack. I can triple curse enemies.


The nice thing is that the mana cost is negligible, so I haven't had to do anything about my mana all game. With Abyssus/Lioneye's Glare, my tooltip DPS is nearly 6k with Wrath.

Normal, Magic and Rare monsters all get pushed into negative resistances (-100 total Cold Res from my 2 curses) and then take 36% more damage from projectile attacks. Then the Quiver sometimes helps push the curses around (incredibly tiny range on that "nearby"...).

Where this build totally falls down is: curse immune monsters, which are nearly unkillable; and bosses, which are very curse resistant. A single Cold Penetration gem would be equally as effective as my entire setup/build.

This is, as far as I can tell, literally as good as it gets to try and get the most out of this support gem. It's tolerable against white monsters. It's decent against blues and yellows - unless they happen to be curse immune. It's nearly useless against any unique monster and anything that's curse immune.

So a build with nothing in mind except utilizing Curse on Hit is tolerable most of the time, and occasionally (once every map or two) 100% useless and incredibly frustrating.

It's not reasonable to build your entire character around a "support" gem. This gem isn't supporting anything. If you use it as a support, it will be useless to you. If you make your entire character around it, your character will occasionally be useless entirely.

It's just a horrible gem. It needs a big upgrade. It needs to boost the spell/attack it's socketed with, and it needs to boost the curses it triggers (by a lot) in order to make it worthwhile.

Enemies can't be curse immune. They just can't. It makes no fucking sense. There are no melee immune enemies, no physical immune enemies, no cold immune enemies. It's just dumb. Flat-out immunities don't belong in the game. Even if enemies are curse resistant, players should be able to pierce that resistance. A player shouldn't invest half their gear slots and a dozen passive skills into making curses more effective/viable and then find they're 100% useless against certain enemies.

Yes, we know that Temporal Chains and Enfeeble will need to be toned down if they have full effect on bosses. So do that.

Make these changes (to the game and to the gem), and I think we would see people actually use this gem. Until that happens, we won't.

This isn't quite about the Curse on Hit gem, but you should probably swap Ice Shot out for Split Arrow or similar in your armor, then dedicate a 4L (or 5-6L, if you've got room in your bow) to your Ice Shot as your dps skill specifically.

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Vipermagi wrote:

At which point you might as well manually cast Frostbite + Proj Weakness, really. You'll lose out on EW, but the added Supports (Cold Pen...) will make up for that.

And there's the rub. There's no reason to use this support gem because it's a piece of trash that wastes your gem slots.

Any improvement to my build (which was an extreme experiment to try and find some use for this dumb gem) starts and ends with "drop curse on hit."

I just wanted to note again, with the next update coming down the pipeline, that one way to rehabilitate Curse on Hit, and to give it a niche use, is to fix its interaction with minions/totems.

And to make it always curse the enemy hit. And for it to make curses more effective.

And to remove curse immunity from the game.

It will take more than just totems to make this viable.

well i'd love to be able to always trigger, but i feel that should be reserved for lv 21 support gem. at least 70% (give or take 5 points) trigger chance at lv 20, which is a nice middle ground vs outright doubling the chance (which still isn't 100%).
the quality effect might be nicer to be boosted but that not that important right now.
curse immune monsters have thier place in the game just like stun immune.