Cursed Item Brainstorming

[HousePet]

Afflicted classes currently can choose to get the Cursed Aura category, which curses their equipment but gives unique bonuses when you match curses together.
However, I don't think it is working as well as it should be.

Good Points:
Flavourful. More Curse for moar Power. Curses randomly assigned to items, so its a little out of your control.
Interesting effects.
Matching Curses is sort of a minigame.

Bad Points:
Taking it starts as a penalty and doesn't give a benefit without significant investment in two talents.
Clunky category: It is better to invest the second talent before the first talent. Also contains two talents that don't seem very connected to the others.
Many of the bonuses are of dubious worth.
Matching Curses is sort of a tedious minigame and finding a great item with the wrong curse is annoying.

Since I'm trying to sort out the rest of the Afflicted stuff, this should be looked into as well, but I'm not sure how to proceed.
I have a vague idea of making Cursed items a bigger part of the game, for all classes not just Afflicted.
Specific artifacts and some egos would be 'Cursed'. These items would then either give a specific curse and its Dark Gift bonus as per normal (but without talent point investment), and more cursed items equipped increased the power of all your Curses. Or we could go with a Shadow Power like system, where the Cursed items would have a positive effect and a negative effect, which both scaled with the total Curse Power from your equipped items.
Afflicted classes would either get an extra benefit from Cursed items or would be able to decrease the penalty from Cursed items. They would also have a chance to Curse any artifact they touch, and possibly a quest that allows them to remove the curse from an item.

Thoughts? Spill your brain here.

[Tyren]

Ruined earth combines extremely well with spine of the world, merge, feed power. These debuffs ignore all saves. Effectively reduce damage mod by 50% in a large area for 11 turns and activate spine of the world every turn for the duration which negates most of the downside. Shut down your enemy and reduce another one's damage mod by 65%. Ruined earth appears on a gloves ego (-38% damage). With charm mastery you can activate gloves, talent, gloves (ruined earth for 27 turns). The combo is a better "Unstoppable" on insane but the opposing spine of the world can make it slightly worse. Nerf the synergy with the doomed class.

The defiling touch and dark gifts are unreliable point sinks. At level 1 dark gifts do almost nothing unless you have the curse "madness". The curses need more proactive upsides and significant downsides. Make all curses more like "madness" and less like "corpses".

[Delmuir]

Perhaps curses should include a small quest that releases the curses into the world. For Afflicted, it happens when you pick up the first item that allows you to unleash your curse. For every other player, it's a short random quest.

At the end of the quest, you have the option to release the curses into the world, which curses a lot of equipment. Why would you do this? Most probably wouldn't but there's a reason to do it.

Cursed equipment should come in three forms:

1. The same unique artifacts that already exists in the game but can randomly appear as "cursed" versions. They're the same items but now they can't be removed without destroying the item and suffering one of 5 random and permanent effects:
-2 to a random stat.
-4 random save
-10 max life
-1% global speed
-2% random status effect cap. This can make it impossible to be immune to a status effect

Which effect you'll suffer is made apparent on the gear itself.


2. Cursed egos... these appear on Random Artifacts and rares. These come with notable benefits but serious negatives and there should be 4 specific types of cursed egos.

The curses should have combinations that work together. They still have big negative effects but they can work in unison with one curse bonus mitigating the negative of another curse. Occasionally, a benefit can work so well with a specific build (crit multiplier on Corruptor for example) that it's acceptable to use a cursed item on its own.

I'm not wedded to any of these (or any of these ideas at all, to be honest) but here are my proposals for cursed egos:

- "of decrepitude..." -30% heal mod, -10 constitution, and 10% experience penalty. Bonus: +0.5 any/all racial categories and +20% combat speed.
-"of villainy..." -0.10 all class talents and -10 all saves. Bonus: +12 constitution, willpower and +15% all critical chance.
-"of malice..." -10% global speed, -15% all resistance caps. Bonus: +35% crit multiplier, +50 cold damage on melee strike, heals 20% whenever you use a rune.
-"of psychosis..." -20% confusion resistance, no save against mind damage, -15% max mana, stamina, and psi.. Bonus: +35 flat damage reduction, and +10% resist all, and +100 negative life.


3. Items cursed by-way of Defiling Touch from Cursed Aura. These negative effects don't go away.

Then we have Cursed Aura, which I think should work this way:

Cursed Aura

Skill #1:

This is the new skill... it eliminates the negative effects of cursed egos, one type per level.

At level 5, it allows you to removed "cursed" artifacts without damaging them or suffering the negative consequence.

#2 Ruined Earth:

I happen to like this skill but my proposal is that the damage reduction is cut by 5% for YOU ONLY, for every piece of cursed equipment that you're wearing. Thus, it can dramatically weaken the enemy but not only slightly weaken you.

3 Defiling Touch:

This skill should essentially work the same way as it does now except that added scaling no longer reduces the negative effects. Just have to suffer.

#4 Dark Gifts:

Works the same.

As noted, these are just some ideas for a full concept but I'm not particularly wedded to any of them nor will I claim that they're especially well thought out so please, save the nit-picking and just use these as a jumping off point to ideas that you like better. No sense in investing in criticizing my rough-draft.

Anyway, I hope this inspires a little.

[bpat]

Cursed Aura is only useful for Ruined Earth and Cursed Sentry; going past 1/1/1-5/5 is a waste. Curse of Shrouds is underwhelming and the rest are completely useless, really they should all be reworked or replaced. Here are some suggestions.

-Make two-handed weapons give two Curse levels instead of just one.

-Merge Defiling Touch and Dark Gifts into one talent. Ten generics is a massive investment, that's over a fifth of your generic points! Reducing it to five points will make it less of a go-big-or-go-home type thing.

-Add new talent in the second slot called Amplify Curses, which adds 1/1/2/2/3 levels to your highest curse and 0/1/1/2/2 levels to your second highest for 5 turns. Non-instant and 20 cooldown. Numbers are just an idea, I didn't really think these through too well.

-Change all the curses and make them less useless lol. Bigger downsides and much bigger upsides would be good. Don't really have any ideas right now but really all the curses need to either be seriously changed or completely replaced.

[HousePet]

Just to be clear, this is not about Ruined Earth or Cursed Sentry. I should have titled the thread Cursed Items.

Delmuir: Cursed equipment #1 seems like it is just going to create annoyance with no benefit. Not intending to nitpick, but unless someone can think of a reason why anyone would want a permanent penalty attached with using an item which is likely of temporary use, I think we can discard this one (hopefully without being permanently cursed ).

#2 and #3 are good, but I expect we can't really get away with doing both.

[Delmuir]

Delmuir: Cursed equipment #1 seems like it is just going to create annoyance with no benefit. Not intending to nitpick, but unless someone can think of a reason why anyone would want a permanent penalty attached with using an item which is likely of temporary use, I think we can discard this one (hopefully without being permanently cursed ).

You aren't hurting my feelings, ha ha. The only thing that annoys me is tendency for some to not consider the issue and concepts but instead to nit-pick about some tiny, utterly inconsequential point while ignoring everything else. It's irksome.

As to your point... I didn't have a good reason for it, to be honest. I was just throwing out all of my cursed-item ideas.

Don't think we can do both #2 and #3? I don't see why but honestly, I haven't really thought of it. I was just trying to get stuff out there for everyone to chew on. It's brainstorming.

[HousePet]

Well we could do 2 and 3, but I'm concerned that it might get messy as they both overlap and this could cause confusion.

Anyway, let's continue storming.

[bpat]

Permanent penalties in any form are usually a horrible, horrible thing in games like this, I completely agree with HousePet on #1. For #2, Cursed egos is a cool idea but they will be very hard to do right. In response to #3, I want to state again that spending many points on Curses isn't realistic for something so unreliable so the category shouldn't be something you'd want to 5/5/5/5.

[Delmuir]

Permanent penalties in any form are usually a horrible, horrible thing in games like this, I completely agree with HousePet on #1. For #2, Cursed egos is a cool idea but they will be very hard to do right. In response to #3, I want to state again that spending many points on Curses isn't realistic for something so unreliable so the category shouldn't be something you'd want to 5/5/5/5.

I happen to like Cursed Aura tree. The primary weakness, to me at least, is the curse of madness. Nightmare is kind of weak and annoying (creates a mess on screen) but not actively troublesome. Corpses is also "meh." Madness, to me, ruins the tree.

Ruined Earth is also pretty good and doesn't require 5/5.

Cursed Sentry is pretty useful but I never have the generics to spend on it, and that's the problem.

It's a huge point investment given that you might be saddled with curse of madness.

The tree can got 5/5/0/0 or 1/1/1/5 or 1/1/5/5 or 5/5/1-5/0/ or 5/5/1-5/5/.

It'd be totally worth it... except for that damn curse of madness.

If Housepet can manage to completely reinvent the tree, that'd be awesome. If not, just fixing curse of madness would be enough for me.

[bpat]

I don't know how you came to that conclusion but there is no way that Defiling Touch and Dark Gifts are worth anything past 1/5 even if you could magically make all your items have whatever curse you want (in other words all Shrouds lol because the rest are bad, maybe 4 in Nightmares since it's better than the rest). 5/5 in Defiling Touch and Dark Gifts has a massive opportunity cost of eight generic points that could be better spent pretty much anywhere else.

[HousePet]

Making the system value for points is easy enough.
Merging Defiling Touch with Dark Gifts is the obvious solution to the cost, but that leaves us with potentially 3 filler talents.
At that point do we even want a category?
Should Ruined Earth and Cursed Sentry be tied to having Cursed Items?
Should Cursed Items be an optional sidegrade for Afflicted classes, an inherent part of the metaclass or something that affects everyone? (though moreso for the Afflicted metaclass and with them getting some sort of extra benefit from them?)
I'm leaning towards Cursed Items for all, but maybe I'm just inherently evil.

[Sheila]

Cursed Aura is only useful for Ruined Earth and Cursed Sentry; going past 1/1/1-5/5 is a waste. Curse of Shrouds is underwhelming and the rest are completely useless, really they should all be reworked or replaced. Here are some suggestions.

-Make two-handed weapons give two Curse levels instead of just one.

-Merge Defiling Touch and Dark Gifts into one talent. Ten generics is a massive investment, that's over a fifth of your generic points! Reducing it to five points will make it less of a go-big-or-go-home type thing.

-Add new talent in the second slot called Amplify Curses, which adds 1/1/2/2/3 levels to your highest curse and 0/1/1/2/2 levels to your second highest for 5 turns. Non-instant and 20 cooldown. Numbers are just an idea, I didn't really think these through too well.

-Change all the curses and make them less useless lol. Bigger downsides and much bigger upsides would be good. Don't really have any ideas right now but really all the curses need to either be seriously changed or completely replaced.

I pretty much agree with all of these and had similar ideas. Numbers on Amplify Curses does maybe need a check so it doesn't become yet-another-5 pointer talent, tree needs less of those, perhaps higher baseline curse levels with lowered cooldowns on skill levels?
Curses do need a lot of improving as they give really weak benefits, and the opportunity cost of applying an extra layer of RNG on your equipment is already big enough, I think people underestimate how much of a downside this is, same reason antimagic is generally not considered great. I don't want to spend 10 generics on top of that as well.

The only reason to even take Cursed Aura currently is Ruined Earth and Cursed Sentry. Ruined Earth levels any combat to manageable levels regardless of its penalty which will tend to be in your favor if used correctly, because player decision-making is better than AI in most cases. Cursed Sentry is one of the best summons in the game and we don't need to make afflicted weaker, so I don't see why either of these would go under any circumstances.

Universally cursed items feels like further diluting an overly-diluted item pool to me, game has enough items and artifacts already, and I see no reason to do this to potentially benefit 2 out of 31 classes (adventurer not included). Permanent debuffs are not a good idea since it just screws you over for no real reason.

Also, let's stop putting negative healmod in anything, the stat is very strong and useful in any difficulty, negative anything here hurts a lot and currently offers no real advantage . It's a great way to make sure the item or skill is never used unless forced, especially as afflicted since already have a hefty healmod penalty to begin with (hi ruthless grip!). If it's absolutely necessary to use this on anything, make it minor (10%?) and give a big, big benefit in exchange. Pretty much nothing in the game is better than 30% healmod, except maybe global, but you don't just give 30% global away.

[HousePet]

And in case I wasn't clear about this point: (Gee am I clear about anything?)

Any curses applied to fixed arts would include positive and negative bonuses. So its sort of like getting an alternate corrupted version.
I have no intention of adding any detrimental only effects via item curses.

[Delmuir]

I think the bigger issue with the Cursed Aura tree is that it isn't very good on Doomed.

Shrouds is easy to max on Cursed and ridiculously good given the movement bonuses. You can basically run around with a constant 40% damage reduction and movement bonuses. How that's considered "underwhelming" is beyond me.

The tree just isn't very good on Doomed though, and that's where I'd start.

Extending curses beyond the Afflicted classes, to me at least, is inadvisable. It removes one of their more unique aspects.

Creating Cursed egos is something I'm 100% in favor of though. As for diluting gear... I think that's a bigger issue. Too many egos are just minor tweaks on the same few basic things and as such, most gear is fairly similar, and pretty "meh."

I'd like to see more specialization but that's not really for this thread.

So, how does one fix the Cursed Aura tree?

Let's assume that you integrate Dark Gifts and Defiling Touch... fine. I've never liked how it scales to 10 but, outside of ID, you'll never get there. What else?

Ruined Earth seems fine to me... it's thematic of the negative/positive aspect of curses as it reduces both your damage and enemies. I say keep it.

Cursed Sentry has never made any sense to me. That leaves you with two new skills.

How about this:

1. Keep 5 curse types and have one be automatic, regardless of gear. You have it merely from gaining the tree. I'd make this one Misfortune as it's the most generally useful and thematically makes sense for being cursed. This curse would scale with each curse that you activate... in other words, 1 point in all four curses would be enough to max this curse.

2. Have each of the four talent categories focus on 1 type of curse. The first point produces the negative effect and each point thereafter produces a positive bonus. This would allow you to focus on one type of curse, or all four, if you like.

Yes, you'd suffer a negative effect on all three others IF you only wanted the 4th skill so make it worthwhile.

3. Each point in a curse would increase the types of gear that can suffer a curse and the bonuses.

4. Make Ruined Earth and Cursed Sentinel go away and instead add them to the game as "Cursed egos." They're merely skills that only show up on gear with a small penalty.

5. Fix the curses themselves and make them provide bonuses that are tailored to play-style such that a player is unlikely to take all four, but still could.

[nsrr]

I like the Curse Power idea, especially. Each curse could essentially work like an ego, and instead of scaling up based on the number of items with that particular curse it would scale based on your Curse Power. The first two talents in Cursed Aura could be taken out and the first replaced with a talent that grants you X Curse Power for each piece of cursed gear you are wearing (maybe 0.25 - 1.0?). The second talent could be replaced by a talent that grants some bonus based on the curse you have the most of, with a different bonus from each. Some ideas for these: hate regen, heal mod, flat damage reduction, status resistance... really anything. This could possibly function as a sustain. Combined, these would both reduce the randomness by allowing Curse Power to affect all curses, and still grant some benefit by stackng one particular if you desire. It would also make investment in the tree less of an all or nothing deal.

The curses themselves would need some tweaking, of course.