Display Afflicted curses on gear in the shop, etc.

[Delmuir]

I have an issue with Cursed Aura and shops, namely that the curse isn't displayed until you purchase it, which is mighty irritating, especially when it comes up as a suboptimal curse. This makes the early game especially tricky.

Additionally, Cursed in particular suffer from a problem of running out of their resource against tough bosses without minions to kill. The alternate boss in the maze and the Weirdling Beat are the most consistent to me as one is unlikely to have much +hate on crit gear, or high physical crit.

Not merely running out but suffering from a near-permanent deficiency for the remainder of the fight. This is crippling and, as far as I know, the only class in which this is a realistic possibility.

Sometimes, even late-game, this can prove troublesome, especially against your Dark Maze clone, Atamathon, and the Fire Elemental to name a few. I've never beaten Atamathon with a curse in part for just this reason.

I have two solutions:

Increase +hate bonus on strike to Stalk level 3. This is unlikely to be relevant against most enemies but would really, really helpful against single bosses or especially tough uniques or elites. I would suggest that said bonus should scale with talent level and Willpower, from +0.5 early in the game all the way to about +6 or more when pumped up.

If this idea is undesirable, see next section.

Lastly, Curse of Madness.

The 3rd skill is inexplicable to me... it runs counter to Relentless and one of the key goals in any play through, namely avoiding being confused if at all possible. More so, you have to hit something in melee in order for it to pass on. It's a terrible bonus.

I have two options, see above: any time you're attacked with ANY mental affect, you gain a bonus to hate, regardless of whether or not the status affect actually sticks or not.

The other option is this: Any time you're afflicted by any mental affect, you gain a bonus to defense.

The 4th skill in Madness... this skill is horrible. At level 5, the first level in which the damage amount necessary to trigger the skill is acceptably low, the confusion penalty is -20%!!!! Brutal. For what? 1 reduced cool down.

Surely something better can be done.

My suggestion is that for the same damage requirement except that instead of a reduced cool down, any damage you deal on the next turn has the chance to cause confusion, whether from being attacked or attacking. Any damage has % to cause confusion.

Those are my suggestions.

[0player]

The gear isn't cursed until you touch it, that's why it doesn't display in the shop.
Shokeepers probably wouldn't be happy if you ran amok defiling their equipment.

[Delmuir]

The gear isn't cursed until you touch it, that's why it doesn't display in the shop.
Shokeepers probably wouldn't be happy if you ran amok defiling their equipment.

Yes, let's defer to arbitrary realism to the detriment of gameplay. That's sensible.

Here's a solution: The Cursed can sense what curse will manifest on an item and thus, the item itself won't yet be cursed but the player will know.

See? Easy.

[cttw]

Easy is not always best.

[Delmuir]

Easy is not always best.

And sometimes it is. The question is whether or not it IS in this case. Rather than addressing the underlying question, the response seems to be to sidestep it with some arbitrary rationalization.

That rarely produces good outcomes.

More so, the "easy" referred to creating an in-game rationalization and not the proposed solution itself. That's another question entirely.

Beyond that, what of the issue of running, quasi-permanently, out of resources as a Cursed? It just happened again against a particularly nasty unique.

This is a problem that confronts no other class to my knowledge, especially early on. Surely a solution can be found.

[Micbran]

But the whole thing about curses is that they are 100% RNG. Having you see them in shop would ruin the point.

And I too wish madness level 4 was a good as the rest, or more specifically, nightmare 4.

[nsrr]

Explaining how a Cursed could sense the curses on vendor items is easy. But I think the point that others were trying to get across is that, mechanically, items have no curse until the player picks them up. Most stores are stocked following the same rules as drops, so it would require some deep changes to accomish. That doesn't mean it's impossible, though. There are other problems though... the Lost Merchant is generally the go-to for late game gear. So even if you could see all of the other merchants' gear with curses, you still wouldn't know what curse you'll end up with on those randarts.
Personally, I think the whole system is weak to the point of uselessness and always avoid it. It should be reworked fro. The ground up so that the negative effects are not as bad and the bonuses require fewer prices.
I agree about Hate, though, there's got to be a solution for that.

[HousePet]

I'm working on a solution to hate.

[Delmuir]

I'm working on a solution to hate.

Excellent.

As for the items... fine. Ultimately the problem would be minor if the Madness curse was different. That penalty to confusion is brutal, especially as it levels up.

I still think that Stalk is a great place for a simple tweak.

That madness curse... ugh.

[HousePet]

That madness curse... ugh.

Does it drive you mad?

[Hatome]

I'm working on a solution to hate.

Understanding.

[Delmuir]

That madness curse... ugh.

Does it drive you mad?

Yeah, and it'd be FINE if the bonuses were worthwhile but they're nowhere close to that. At level 5, it can have -20% to confusion resistance, which is punitive considering the feeble bonus.

I don't mind penalties, even harsh ones. I like the choice it demands, but the benefits have to be worthwhile. This is especially true considering the randomness of the bonuses and the essentially finite amount of equipment that one can acquire in the game.

It's no inconceivable to run a game in which you struggle to find confusion resist and then have the Madness curse show up on all of the best equipment.

I get that it adds to tactical decision-making and that one might have to swap out a wild infusion and so on... I get all of the rationalization and justifications. It's still bad though. It's bad. It's bad, bad, bad.

Not as bad as the hate issue though... there has to be some way to generate hate for a Cursed other than killing or taking massive amounts of damage. That singular boss issue is just brutal.

As I noted, I've never been able to defeat Atamathon because of it but more than a few other bosses and uniques have left me in an unwinnable situation. Normally I can just return at a higher level but there are a few situations in which that isn't viable, as I noted.

I still like just adding to the hate-generation to the 3rd tier Stalk skill. To me, that solves all of your problems without changing the balance of the game. The level 1 and 2 bonuses seem fine but I'd like to see tier 4 just bump it up a little more... and I'd like to see it scale instead of being a flat-rate.

Whatever solution though... thanks in advance.

[HousePet]

You can heck out what I've done so far in this thread: http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=46231

I'm not happy with it yet, but to be fair, I'm rarely happy with my own work.

[Delmuir]

You can heck out what I've done so far in this thread: http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=46231

I'm not happy with it yet, but to be fair, I'm rarely happy with my own work.

To be honest, I didn't think Cursed needed a rework. I actually think it's one of the better classes in the game, I just think that it just needs a minor tweak, namely generating hate against a single enemy and the unnatural, the madness curse is terrible, and Fears and Predator simply aren't good enough versus nearly any alternative. Heck, I'd take the conditioning generic over Predator any day.

Having said that, you ought to know that I'm fond of the low-life mechanic, I just don't think you've made it worthwhile and I'm not sure it's appropriate to the class.

I reserve judgement on your new hate mechanic as it's a work in progress. It seems to have some appeal but I fear that it might be awkward with gameplay. The mechanic has to reflect the style of play and I'm not sure what style of play this is supposed to encourage.

[HousePet]

I wanted to try something a bit different just to be sure we aren't confusing familiarity with 'good'.
Its interesting that people will say a class is above average and then say that half of the stuff it has is not worth taking. (and very weird that people say you are ruining the class if you take out Rampage, a locked category with one three goodish talents.)
A class that only has two great categories (one of them locked), a broken resource and some dubious generic talents sounds like something that needs an overhaul to me.
But anyway, the final product will be a hybrid between the reworked version and the original.