Please fix Curse Immunity

I've repeatedly seen people enthusiastically propose a build that focuses on curses. Every time the feedback from veterans is not to do it. "Between Curse Immunity on Rares/as a Map Mod and the 60% reduced Curse effectiveness on Act/Map bosses, there are too many situations where Curses will let you down," they say.

There is only one other game mechanic where some significant portion of enemies are completely immune: Rare monsters are immune to Chance to Flee from the support gem of that name. Almost no one cares about Chance to Flee.

Please stop preventing people from using a fun part of your game.

Proposed Fix
Change Curse Immunity to "Can be Affected By One Fewer Curse" (or "Curse Resistant" or whatever name works best for this new mechanic). Someone who dabbles with a single Curse will be mildly inconvenienced. The Occultist who went all out and can stack 7 Curses will be forced to leave out the least relevant Curse. Someone who is heavily dependent on a single Curse might be willing to invest in Whispers of Doom or a Doedre's Damning to ensure it can still take effect. That sounds like an interesting build choice.

This change would even allow for scaling levels of Curse Immunity. Maybe Act/Map Bosses have "Can be Affected by Two Fewer Curses" instead of 60% reduced Curse effect and Doedre, whose specialty is Curses, could have "Can Be Affected by Three Fewer Curses."

That's it, one change and Curses become interesting again.

Has been discused here and on reddit and ggg is aware of this . If they didnt make any changes is because they didnt thought was necessary

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Caldoni wrote:

"If someone has not yet done a particular thing, they never will."

Thanks! That's the kind of can do spirit the world needs to solve its problems.

Alternatively, "Fix Curse Immunity" is on a sticky note in the "Things We'd Love to Fix but Haven't Figured Out a Good Solution Yet" area of the big board and this suggestion will be the solution or spark a thought that turns into the solution. Or it might be in the "Things to Prioritize for the Next Patch" area and some recent feedback will be the thing to get it prioritized ahead of the "Make the People Who Will Never Spend Money on our Game No Matter What We Do Happy" sticky note.

Curse immunity is just as bad as stun immunity and less bad than Blood Magic. It just affects more people.

Personally, I think it is fine. If you have such a specialized character, you gotta pay the additional cost - which is to say, roll over curse immune maps. The only problem is vaaling maps.

EDIT: "Can be affected by one fewer curse" pretty much... well, doesn't affect heavily curse-invested characters at all.

It would have to be more like "curses have 40/60/80% less effect on monsters" (white/yellow/red maps, not "reduced"). Or 40% less effect + one/two/three less curses (white/yellow/red maps)

people want to get rid of curse immunity not because of what curses do to monsters - but because of the charge generation via Assassins/Poachers/Warlords mark. it is simply ruining their automated charge generation

and it is a good thing

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Char1983 wrote:

"Can be affected by one fewer curse" pretty much... well, doesn't affect heavily curse-invested characters at all.

Yes. If you've spent some number of skill points (at least 4), four out of six possible ascendancy points, 4 item slots, and a pretty big chunk of change (for the corrupted amulet) to be the best curser around, why should you have content where you can't use that at all and content required for progression where you can barely use it?

Compare to someone using Incinerate or Fireball. Kaom's area in Act 4 kind of sucks for them because so many things have fire resistance. But there are ways they can try to mitigate that (sacrifice some other stuff for more fire penetration or fire to X conversion, etc.) and proceed at a slightly slower, more cautious pace than in other areas. The curser gets to Malachai and just gets stuck because their stuff they were relying on to stay alive and kill things barely works and the investment they've made in cursing means they have limited ways to change things up. With every possible curse effectiveness node and jewel, you can manage 84% curse effectiveness vs. Act/Map bosses. Our Incinerate friend can get 71% fire penetration with one curse (at 40% effect), one support gem, one item, and skill/ascendancy nodes they already want. (15% skill tree, 37% gem, 17% from Flammability at 40% effectiveness, 2% from sanbar sceptre). Malachai has a maximum Fire Resistance of 45% in Merciless. The Incinerator is at 92% effectiveness with a single skill gem!

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sidtherat wrote:

ruining their automated charge generation is a good thing

I think that's probably true, but the solution to that is to reduce or eliminate the chance of generating the charge on those three specific curses, not make curses in general a bad choice.

Completely agree, especially in the light of the Occultist.
-1 curse might cause some people to feel forced into getting +1 curse amulets or similar, but it's not the worst idea. I also like the obviously technically easy to implement -curse effectiveness scenario. Just get rid of the generic -curse effectiveness for rares/bosses and introduce an equivalent mod.

Well, there is already curse effectiveness on mobs and Increased Curse Effect as skill nodes.

So why not replace Curse Immunity with 100% Curse Effectiveness, and have character Increased Curse Effectiveness work against that, just like elemental resistance works now? So, with some investment you can somewhat counter 100% curse resistance, but most characters won't.

What I'd like to see:

Instead of curse-immune, have curse resistance (though maybe keep it as a red-tier map mod since they're supposed to be rerolled a bunch anyway).

Then, instead of curses increasing their base values as you level up, have the base values static but you gain curse effectiveness as you level. Also make curse effectiveness more common and with larger values on the tree. Curse on hit and Blasphemy give reduced curse effectiveness.

The goal should be, if you run into a "curse resistant" rare mob or a yellow curse resistance map mod with no curse investment, your curse would be almost non-effective. If you put some investment into curses, they would be like level one curses in terms of effectiveness. If you invest fully, they would be like level 10 or 15 curses.

I think you can still make a curse-centric build that can work against curse immunity rares - just kill the rest of the monsters normally, and have a trick or two up your sleeve to fight those. (Even if it's just bear trap + run away ;) )

Every build has something which counters it well, your build should be robust enough to deal with those things.

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I agree that curse immune maps are a bit boring for curse characters though. There are some neat ideas here in this thread for making it less boring but still difficult.