Battlemage working with curses?

Is your auto exertion aura toggled on? You are seeing the BMC war-cry proccing automatically?

Are you seeing any curse icon proccing above the enemies heads? It can be difficult to see if you are killing them instantly.

I'm testing the four link setup (minus enlightenment) you have currently on your Merc Berserker. It is working for me. The punishment icon is greyed out and does not change when it procs, but I can see the curse going on to the enemies. I can see the curse area circle effect proccing as well.

If you can't see that but do see BMC, I guess something is preventing it. As stated, mana cost would be the obvious thing to check, but since that is being ruled out, I'm not sure what it would be. I do not think it would be to do with curse limit, would need to be something that is preventing it from proccing at all.

My mana is at 40 and when fighting it rarely drops below 15, this is with a level 1 punishment which costs 16 mana versus a level 21 punishment which costs 33 mana. BMC is working nicely. With volcanic fissure of snaking there is no way i can see any on screen effect. What i will do is keep an eye out for a helm with a mana reserve suffix and craft an eldritch mana reserve as well.
Get 17% or maybe more mana res. Thanks for the input guys.

Other than mana, I don't have many suggestions. Perhaps it has something to do with VFS not proccing it. I'm not familiar with that skill but it might be there is something to do with the way it interacts with BMC. The skill I used to test it was heavy strike and it worked, so maybe test if it procs on your build with that.

You also have a second auto exertion going that is linked to 3 other warcrys. It might be that is somehow contributing to mana costs. You could try swapping BMC and Punishment with 2 warcries from your weapon and see if changes which warcries are proccing. Weapon is before helmet in trigger order, so maybe that has something to do with it, if they are triggering at the same time and something is preventing both from going. I notice you have 2 additional CWDT trigger set ups as well. Maybe that has something to do with it. I don't notice anything wrong with that or anything that would interact with the warcries if those set ups are not using mana, but it is just another process that is in the mix. In absence of any other causes, i'm not sure what it would be. Other than that, the build looks fairly straight forward.

(Edit: I can see this type of setup being used in the meta so I assume it all works and seems to be something specific to your build. I would suggest going through your skills starting with everything off, including auras and merc, loaded on one at a time. If it doesn't work at any stage, you will be able to narrow down what the cause is. Using a melee skill with more visual clarity may also help for seeing when it is/isn't proccing.)

TBH based on the thread, I think the issue is far simpler: OP wasn't looking to see if the curse was activating on enemies and was instead looking at the toolbar.

If the curse is greyed out and cannot be manually used, then it is triggering with battlemage's cry correctly. If it still isn't happening in-game, its a mana issue: when your battlemage times the exertion, you have already spent too much mana even maybe for the level 1 curse.

If that isn't true, then it IS working and you just aren't seeing it. You would need to test on a boss that doesn't drop in one hit to verify.

Yep testing on a boss would be a good way to see.