First of all a disclaimer: Cursed can be viable with a bunch of different builds. This is just my take after optimizing for the playstyle I think makes the most sense with its kit as a whole.
Cursed is a stealth bruiser with some slasher villain flavor. It can massively reduce enemy damage through debuffs, resistances and perhaps more importantly loss of vision. This makes it capable of casually walking through the battlefield and bumping everyone to death.
On the flipside, its offensive capabilities arent extraordinary. It can be somewhat lacking in burst damage and specially AoE damage. Cursed has to spend more time fighting than many other classes.
Extended fights make the regeneration from Fungus specially valuable. Not only that, stalling for regeneration can be as easy as taking a single step back to hide behind the miasma. Shielding from runes would prevent some talents such as Rampage and Seethe from activating, therefore the healing from infusions and Anti-magic is preferred.
Cursed also starts with very few generic categories, so most builds will want to pick some additional ones from escorts.
Races
The best race for Cursed is probably Cornac, mainly because Cursed doesnt specially synergize with any other race. Cornac essentially trades a racial tree for an escort category of choice, which gives better options.
For the sake of simplicity this guide assumes in some instances that Cornac is picked, but there are other strong choices such as Thalore and Krog. There is also some synergy with Ghoul but its not a lot.
Stats
Max Strength -> Max Willpower -> Max Cunning -> Leftover points in Constitution.
Strength raises weapon damage while Willpower and Cunning raise mindpower, they are all important for Cursed. Cunning can optionally be raised a bit early game to unlock some talents.
The leftover points can be spent on Constitution as it gives some durability and it can scale the Conditioning escort tree.
Cursed talents already give a lot of accuracy so Dexterity isnt needed.
Magic is useless.
Prodigies
The first prodigy will always be Adept. It provides a ridiculous amount of value and it also allows to max four curses instead of two. There are a few small bugs with easy solutions. After you learn Adept you need to change the level of a passive for Cursed Aura to update, this is solved by raising Dark Gifts to 5 which you'd want to do anyway. You also need to equip your rings again for them to gain a curse.
The second prodigy can be either Flexible Combat or Superpower. Flexible Combat is better overall, but if your build is scuffed then Superpower may possibly provide a quick fix.
Never pick I Can Carry The World, it is worse than the other prodigies regardless of whether you combine it with Superpower or not.
Inscriptions
As mentioned earlier, infusions are preferred over runes because Cursed wants to take some damage. Healing in general also allows to preserve hate by removing the need to rest, Cursed should be constantly on the move.
Early game opt for Healing - physical Wild - mental Wild, later add a second Healing. You can also start with 2 Healings and later add the mental Wild. No Movement infusion may seem dumb but Rampage, Blindside and Reckless Charge can all be used as escapes, staying power is more important.
After Fungus, the setup can be changed to Regeneration - Wild - Wild - Primal. If you didnt find a Primal infusion, you can replace it with Heroism.
If you get a fifth inscription slot, you can add a Heroism if you didnt have one already. Or Healing or Movement if you did. But when should you get a fifth inscription? Lets talk about that.
Category Points
Escorts are RNG, so there is no fixed order. But ranked in order of importance:
- Rampage category
Fourth inscription
Escort category if you are a Cornac, other races have to skip this one. The good categories are Scoundrel, Conditioning and Tinkers. Augmented Mobility is a lot worse than the other three, but serviceable.
Fungus category at level 34. If you skip Antimagic for whatever reason, you can take Chants instead and go 1-1-5-0.
Escort category (again). Non-Cornac races can get one here, for Cornacs it could be the second one.
Fifth inscription, if you missed an escort category.
Fears category, if you are a Cornac who somehow missed both escort categories. A good point spread in Fears is 3-1-1-1 using the last class points.
Fears is ranked so low because it takes too many turns to use. There are also a bunch of enemies that either are immune (undead, horrors) or can cleanse effects (orcs). Escort categories and inscriptions provide comparable benefit while being passive/instant and more consistent. Strictly speaking Fears is not a bad category as it can reduce enemy damage by quite a bit, but there are simply better options.
You can also go for Track if thats your jam, but I wouldnt recommend it unless you are playing on Madness.
Using a category point for Cursed Aura mastery is terrible, never do so.
Talents
Talent order is the next section. Most Cursed talents you'll be able to figure out just by reading them, but here are some details you may have missed.
The opening combo is Blindside>Dominate>Frenzy>Harass Prey>Slash. But you will also be bumping enemies a lot.
Rampage shouldnt be manually activated in most cases as it has a long cooldown and costs a lot of hate. It passively activates for free when you take damage, the manual activation should be saved for when you need to escape or kill something fast.
Slash reaches effective level 3 with Adept so it can wound. Reckless Charge needs space to push enemies aside or it will get blocked, narrow paths can be dangerous for this reason.
Blindside doesnt need line of sight so it can be used to target creatures behind enemies or walls, allied summons can be targetted as well. Blindside will fizzle and fail in spaces where teleportation is forbidden so beware.
Gloom debuffs can be stacked with similar ones. For example, it is possible for an enemy to be "stunned", but also "stunned by the gloom" at the same time.
The miasma from Savage Hunter blocks enemy vision even if you can see through it.
Tenacity's damage reduction is really small so its only purpose is increasing duration. Slam is not learned because at best it is stalling and at worst it is giving enemies a free turn to disable you. Beckon is not learned either (unless you want Surge) because it is only effective when enemies are away, but we will be in melee most of the time.
Out of Cleave, Surge and Repel, Repel has the best effect with the least investment so its a no brainer. Surge can give 100 movespeed at just 1 point but its not worth leveling past that unless you are playing Krog. Cleave doesnt do anything useful.
As for generic talents, you always want to pick Cursed Aura, I'll talk more about the individual curses later. Its crazy to me that even some players who pick Cursed Aura dont go for Cursed Sentry, animating a weapon is REALLY good. It can contribute a lot of damage, apply on-hit effects, block enemies and it is the only way Cursed has to attack from a distance, even from out of vision. Even ignoring how good it is in combat, it can be summoned at any time to attack it until hate is fully replenished. Keep the best melee and ranged weapons you find so that you can animate them.
Ruined Earth on the other hand is a bad talent. It looks like a symmetrical effect but it is in fact more detrimental to you, as you have to spend a turn setting it up. In theory it can be useful if you desperately need to stall, but generally you should avoid those kinds of situations before they happen. Because when you stall you are likely to get hit with some detrimental effect. And when you try to cleanse that effect, you may cleanse Ruined Earth instead, because it is a physical debuff. So yeah, wasting a turn to debuff yourself isnt great.
Seethe may look like a good talent to level at first glance, but Cursed already gets so much damage% from class talents that spending more points in it isnt ideal.
2 points in Heavy Armour to equip shields, 1 point in Light Armour to benefit from robes.
Only 1 point in Combat Accuracy because class talents already provide enough accuracy and defense reduction to reach a 100% hit rate.
2 points in Resolve may seem useless if you have already capped resistances, but it still counters resistance reduction debuffs which is pretty good. Antimagic Shield can be kept permanently active as Cursed doesnt need equilibrium.
Talent Order
This is assuming Cornac so you cant really copy it with other races. It should give you a good idea of the relative importance of different talents regardless.
- Class talents:
1 Stalk, 1 Dominate, 1 Gloom, 1 Predator, 1 Rampage
2 Rampage
1 Slash
1 Frenzy
1 Brutality
2 Savage Hunter
1 Harass Prey
1 Tenacity
3 Shrouded Hunter
1 Repel
5 Shrouded Hunter
2 Mark Prey
2 Predator
2 Dominate
3 Reckless Charge
5 Rampage
1 Sanctuary
4 Blindside
5 Gloom and Weakness (alternate between the two)
5 Sanctuary
5 Savage Hunter
5 Mark Prey
5 Predator
5 Dominate
5 Frenzy
5 Reckless Charge
5 Brutality
Remaining points in Preternatural Senses, Slash or Surge, whatever you like most. It is also possible to take Surge earlier if you want. In the image above I used my personal distribution with 4 Preternatural Senses and 2 Slash.
- Generic talents:
1 Combat Accuracy, 1 Weapons Mastery
2 Heavy Armour Training
1 Dark Gifts
3 Defiling Touch
4 Dark Gifts
5 Defiling Touch
1 Seethe
1 Light Armour Training
5 Cursed Sentry
1 Grim Resolve
1 Thick Skin
And we get to level 20. At this point its possible to take an escort category so there is no single best way to keep going, it depends on what the game gives you. 5th level of Dark Gifts should be taken at level 25 AFTER Adept, other than that simply follow the image at the top of the guide.
Just in case the image is lost at some point, I'll write it here. Scoundrel category should be 2-3-1-2, Conditioning category 1-3-1-0, Antimagic 2-1-1-1, Fungus 1-1-1-1.
Tinker categories are also a great option but they are even more variable. Augmented Mobility category is yet another option which can work as 1-5-1-1.
As for other talents, Thick Skin at 5, Relentless at 5 and Weapons Mastery at 5.
Any spare generics you may end up with can be spent in whatever. Seethe, Wild Growth and Fungal Growth arent terrible.
Equipment
Cursed wants one handed martial weapons such as longswords, waraxes or maces because they scale with Strength and they benefit from the physical damage bonus of Brutality.
Such weapons should be paired with a shield for more hits. Unlike daggers, shields fully scale with Strength and they boost Repel. Block can be useful sometimes to wait for regen, cooldowns, debuffs, glooms, you name it. If you fully block an attack it can be a good idea to follow up with Slash for the strongest possible counterstrike.
And for body armor Cursed wants robes for multiple reasons. Well, robes are generally considered better than heavy armor but that is not the main factor. Hate is affected by fatigue. Cursed doesnt have a single armor bonus but it has some defense bonuses that go well with Light Armour Training. Repel makes armor pointless half the time. And most important of all, Cursed can easily stack a ridiculous amount of % resistances, which makes robes perfect to cap resistances ASAP.
If you find a nice heavy armor in T1 you can use it for a while of course, but robes will likely outscale it before T2. Just in case there is anyone wondering about the Plate of the Blackened Mind, that is mostly designed for Fallen Paladins.
As for the main stats Cursed wants in equipment, they are Strength, Willpower, Cunning, physical power, mindpower, physical critical chance, critical multiplier, life, status immunities, stealth bonuses, on-hit effects, on-hit damage and out of phase (aka after a teleport) bonuses.
Mindpower grants physical power and stealth through talents so it is a double dip in stats that shouldnt be overlooked. Overcoming enemy saves is the icing. Make sure you reach at least 90 by endgame.
On-hit damage is more powerful than it may seem due to the large number of hits Cursed can perform each turn. But dont overestimate it either, for example I read an older guide claiming that you should keep Summertide Phial for the entire game, when you should actually get rid of it around T3 at most. It is just another offensive stat to consider, nothing more.
Out of phase on the other hand IS ridiculously good and the kind of thing you should keep at all costs, specially considering that font of sacrifice only rolls it as an arcane ego. Blindside can keep out of phase permanently up and there is no reason not to spam Blindside off cooldown. Out of phase provides so many resistances that those in equipment can be mostly disregarded, just get the 30% needed to cap them.
A specially important on-hit effect to have 1 instance of is "lower defense and saves", because it allows for glooms, silences and other on-hit effects to land consistently. The other typically good on-hit effects such as slow are also great.
The status immunities to look out for are stun and confusion as usual, also blind and disarm if you can. Mostly a late game thing, early on it is more important to pump durability and enough critical chance to spawn miasma.
Defense, damage% and res pen% are good but not specially so. Defense is nice to avoid on-hit detrimental effects, but enemy accuracy can get really stupid so even with out of phase I dont think it is an arms race worth engaging in, unless you are a Surge Krog or something. Physical damage% is useful for all weapon classes including Cursed, but so much damage% is already granted by talents that the one from equipment will suffer diminishing returns. Res pen% is great endgame but only in small quantities, as Dominate easily caps it.
Some stats you should mostly ignore are armor, accuracy and armor penetration. Armor is entirely unsupported by talents, while the other two stats suffer from the opposite problem, they are boosted by talents to such an extreme that more of them is not needed.
Curses are also an important part of choosing equipment and they deserve their own section.
Curses
The first time you pick up an item you will be asked if you want to unleash your hatred upon it, accept to unlock the Cursed Aura category. Always unlock it.
Its first two talents imbue items with curses which grow in power the more cursed items you have equipped. Despite them being called curses, they actually help your character.
There are 5 types of curses with 4 levels each, and the power level of each type will appear as an individual buff that can be checked. Levels above 4 slightly increase existing bonuses but they dont provide new ones, therefore I recommend getting as many curses as possible to level 4. Before Adept only 2 curses can reach level 4, after Adept this changes to 4 curses.
In order of importance the curses are:
- 1. Nightmares: Get this curse to 4 as soon as you can because it is a massive help early game, and keep it maxed for the entire game.
2. Shrouds: Really good to cap resistances ASAP, max it early alongside Nightmares. Lategame it is an additional safety net that pads any turns you dont spend out of phase. It can also counter common resistance reductions such as the magical cross-tier.
3. Corpses: Unlike other curses, the highlight here is the level 3 which uses Retch when you get low. This can cleanse physical debuffs and save you from death. It also dispels buffs from enemies and makes you benefit from enemy Retches. Ghouls are unreliable since they only rise from humanoids and they are useless as fighters, but they can be great anyway just because they also Retch. Even when you dont care about Ghouls, it is good to have this curse at level 4 to increase the power of the Retch. As a small trick, it is possible to keep it at lower levels and then raise it at instant speed with Defiling Touch when you need it.
4. Madness: It can boost damage and return mental debuffs to enemies, nice to have in general.
5. Misfortune: Fitting name when an item rolls this. This may be the only detrimental curse because all its effects are useless. Avoid it if you can.
When I first picked up Cursed I was worried that Antimagic+Curses would limit equipment choices too much, but I can safely say that is not a concern. And even less so after font of sacrifice, which can strip all arcane egos from items.
In theory a randart amulet with Cursed Aura mastery could allow more flexibility with equipment, however the chances to get such an amulet are so slim that you should not count on it.
If you really want to minmax endgame, AFTER you have optimized all your other equipment, you can get a randart amulet and roll the greater ego perfection on it with the font of sacrifice. Then you can keep rerolling a lesser ego so the categories change until you land on Cursed Aura. This can cost obscene amounts of gold (up to tens of thousands) for a small and unreliable benefit so it is entirely optional. Most of the time it is better to simply grab Limmir's amulet and use all that gold to improve your other equipment instead.
Brotherhood of Alchemists
Take the 2 talent potions first, then aim for Lifebinding Emerald.
Elvala Wil>Stats>Saves.
Derth PhysCrit>Cun>Defense
Last Hope Generics>Strength>Armor
Hermit Class>Luck. SpellCrit is useless.
Overall Generics>Class>PhysCrit>Str>Cun>Wil>Luck>Defense>Stats>Armor>Saves.
Escorts
Betray when possible.
Alchemist: Willpower.
Defiler: Resonance Field.
Loremaster: Disarm.
Seer: Nature's Touch is the correct choice. But Earth's Eyes works well with Preternatural Senses and Blindside, granting you style points every time you needlessly blink through a wall.
Sun Paladin: Telekinetic Leap. Augmented Mobility can also be taken if you are desperate for another category, but if you can choose, the other ones are better.
Temporal Explorer: Dream Walk.
Thief: Scoundrel category (optional) > Track (optional) > Lacerating Strikes.
Tinker: Tinker categories (optional) > Endless Endurance.
Warrior: Conditioning category (optional) > Unflinching Resolve.
Categories are labeled as optional because you shouldnt take more than 2 in most cases.
Tips
Optionally you can minimize the risks of RNG by creating new characters until you get a category escort (Thief, Warrior or Tinker) in either Trollmire or Korpul. Even if you end up dying afterwards, that escort will be guaranteed to spawn in all future runs with that same character, albeit not necessarily in the same place.
I cleared T1 in the following order: Trollmire, Korpul, Norgos, Rhaloren, Scintillating, Gloom (dont forget other T1 content). I dont guarantee this to be the best possible order but it was consistent enough for me.
Hoarding equipment with Cunning or Constitution early can be a good idea to unlock talents from escort trees and Adept. Later on Dexterity equipment can also be useful to unlock Flexible Combat.
Always side with the Assassin Lord. For other classes it is good, for Cursed it is essential.
Cursed has a unique special zone called Tranquil Meadow, it spawns near Angolwen and it is a T3 dungeon. Clearing it rewards a variant of the Iron Acorn, depending on your choices. The regular variant is slightly better and it is obtained by picking all the morally good choices. These are:
- Help him
Destroy the book
I want to overcome my curse
Play very carefully early game, as that is when Cursed is at its weakest. If you manage to reach level 25 it is very likely that you win. It is no hyperbole.