Best Cursed race for mid-game onwards?

[dukereg]

What is the best race for Cursed in the mid game and beyond, and why? To be clear, I only care about things that still matter after level 18 or so on Normal difficulty.

I'm excluding early levels because many guides rave about Cornac's level 1 cat point in Rampage, without any analysis of the later racial trade-offs. The starting challenges are relatively easy, and a dead low-level character takes very little time to replace compared to a dead character in the mid-game, so Rampage at level 1 vs level 10 seems irrelevant on its own.

[OrionJAnderson]

TLDR: Cornac, Thalore, Shalore, Ogre, Skeleton, Doomelf

Cornac: Cornac is okay but not super great because while rampage is amazing, Cursed don't really need to unlock much else. Rampage + 2 inscriptions leaves with you 2 category points to spend. Some people like predator, but I personally don't use it. That means I have 2 catas to spend on harmony, light, stone alchemy, cursed aura, or fungus, all of which are nice, but not amazing.

Thaloren: The first character I took East was a Thalore Cursed. She hit 40 before I took a break from the game and came back to a new release. At the time, I felt that I got more out of it than out of Cornac. Better HP and a really nice 1/1/5/1 tree. All the damage reduction is great for a melee class with reduced healing, and the disease & blight resist are clutch. Cursed have so much stun and confusion resist that building saves and packing cleanses doesn't always feel high priority, but they don't get spell save from any skills and don't stat Magic and have no disease resistance. When your healing is nerfed, huge damage-over-time can kill you. Downsides: It's hard to know when to pop your active because as soon as you realize you're in for a tough fight, your rampage procs. It's not worth using wrath of the wood through rampage. Also, bonus phys and mental saves are not exciting.

Ogre: My Ogre Cursed keep dying before 20, so maybe there's something wrong with this combo I'm not seeing, but I want to love it. The trick would be to collect +strength items and run Carry the World. Ogres benefit more than other classes from pumping base stats because their inscriptions scale so hard. Cursed have lots of skills that scale on strength, including strength-scaling damage multipliers, which I believe are unique to them. They also care about fatigue management. They don't really need physical power for anything, so monkey gripping is totally doable, and since your skills aren't equipment-based, you can switch back and forth at will. Plus, the ogre active is bad, but at least it can put you up to 100% stun fairly easily.

Skeleton: Again, this seems like it should be really good, and yet I keep dying. My reasoning: Cursed have nerfed heal ratios. Skeletons have a giant bone shield. With that and shield runes, they can mitigate a lot of damage even at 0 hate. Shields work really well with the Cursed's hit-and-run skills. Status resistance and vampirism compensate for the lack of wild and regen infusions. I would float weapon mastery at 3/5 and consider flipping to daggers eventually. With maxed dex, sustained surge, and frenzy/blindside, it might be possible to get enough defense to be useful.

Shalore: This is an extremely painful start. Low HP on a healing-nerfed melee class is not good. But Grace of the Eternals have crazy synergy with Rampage, because one grants global speed and the other grants move / attack speed. If you get +40% global from GotE and +50% attack from Rampage, then you effectively have +110% speed when attacking. Plus, using Timeless to extend rampage is just mean.

Doomelf: I tried this once and died in my starting zone, but on paper it looks great. Targeted teleport is great for Cursed and the defense scales on Will. With your racial teleport and blindside, hunting for voidwalker gear could be pretty good. You have lots of debuffs and ways to force talents on cooldown, so Pitiless could be pretty brutal as well.

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I'd skip Highers because you don't have range, spells, or scarce resources. I pass on Dwarves because I don't need physical save and I can blindside over walls and I don't want to pump con. I avoid halflings because Cursed have -luck, their own way of generating crits, and near-immunity to the conditions that halflings can break. Yeeks are not playable with their HP (even though their skills are *amazing*) and Ghouls are just awful.

[dukereg]

Interesting. I got an Ogre Cursed to level 12 before realising the two-hander gimmick had no particular synergy with the class the way I'm used to playing it (the Auto-debuffer 3000 aka Gloom uses mindpower; I use Surge just for speed with a 2H weapon). Still, I might try again using the Ogre with Str based infusions and the Fungus tree, and if I don't want the mindpower penalty I can just use different weapons temporarily (or permanently). Maybe I'll get enough size category that it's only -10% penalty for two-hander gimmick and use Repel instead of Surge.

Well I've decided what to try next, but I'm still curious what others think about the best race once you get rolling.

[OrionJAnderson]

If you want a Fungus ogre, make sure you note that your racial active is a spell, so you lose access to it when you join Zigur. It's pretty bad anyway, so no big loss. Also remember not to take it at character creation, so that you aren't locked out of Zigur itself.

[Mordy]

IIRC, Zigur only disapears if you have an arcane ressource bar, not if you know spells. Else, the map would be impossible to visit for ogres because of their runes.


Also, the ogre dual wield penalty doesn't only reduce physical power : it lowers all powers, including mindpower. Might not be a good idea in the end.