Curse Aura (Support Gem)

The reason I think it is OP:
If you rely on (say) 2 curses, dropping a totem, and casting a spell twice to kill a pack, then it takes you 5 casts to clear a pack. By making curses castless (always active) you reduce the time it takes to clear a pack by 40%. That's huge.

Furthermore, those curses require (quite a bit) of mana, that to cast them 2 times per pack would actually require more mana management over the course of several runs than a flat reservation would.

Further furthermore, any melee with enfeeble always active, without having to cast a single thing, in melee range is GG. They have 100% pure reaction time, rather than time occupied casting and recasting curses, which leaves them vulnerable / requires more kiting and micromanagement.

If you disagree, I say go ahead and encourage GGG to add an aurification support for curses. There will be threads all across the board about how stupid powerful they are. At which point, to be balanced, they will either need to be nerfed to the dirt (won't want to use them) or will be another mandatory bit of power creep that every character has to build towards because the rest of the game had to be buffed to compensate.

The next time you run a zone, think about how much easier the experience would be if you never had to cast your curses, and they instead always active all the time.

Hmm, dunno if it would really be OP, I think many players would rather spend a bit of time casting curses than having a weakened version of it with a smaller radius taking up precious mana reserve space.

I sure wouldn't on most of my builds, perhaps on my BM caster mara, he really has no useful auras available and it kinda sucks to reset incinerate to curse enemies that appeared after I cursed the lot and started casting it.

Consider what permanent AoE temporal chains would do--makes kiting a cakewalk, completely marginalizing the potential of pretty much any melee enemy (if ranged), haste modded enemies and enemies that suicide bomb you. Enemies attack slower, which reduces rate at which you receive crits, and improves the potency of flasks and regen.

Now consider what permanent AoE enfeeble would do--makes kiting less relevant because enemies have a lesser chance of hitting you, penetrate less armour when they do, reduces crit chance and damage against the fewer attacks that do land (against an also aura-chained mob), and make status ailments less likely to occur.

Net effect is (roughly) thrice reducing the chances of an incoming crit, thrice reducing the chances that a crit would land a status ailment, thrice reducing the amount of incoming physical damage, and twice reducing the amount of incoming elemental attack damage.

What's worse, the combination of these two aurafied curses would make moot the need for any other aura (except unique circumstances like CI requiring grace and determination to stack any respectable amount of armour).

Without having to cast anything between each pack.

If you don't think that would be OP, then I don't think we're playing the same game. Even with a reduced area, nothing is stopping you from still hardcasting curses against distant enemies when needed, but the need is much less given any decent movement skill (or not at all with flicker strike).

Edit: Random idea: a more balance approach might be to convert the curse into an aura-like aoe that constantly degenerates a portion of the curse's casting cost every second, similar to arctic armour and without benefit of aura reservation reduction passives or uniques (which is where the aura support would become broken, and any cost associated becomes meaningless).

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MrMisterMissedHer написал:

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CanHasPants написал:

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Yeah apparently we didn't play the same game. If you think this would be GG for melee you are pretty mistaken imo, I generally easily maintained enfeeble at far less risk than having things approach me first (save for desync and the odd flicker striker).

This is where I think you're mistaken. You don't need to risk enemies getting close to them for the curse to be effective; you already need to risk getting close to them to damage them, and the curse is always there to support you where it counts, where combat is the most dangerous. It is never not there. Not when packs scatter, curses would have worn off, or new mobs wander in.

To put it another way, curses are very powerful. Part of that power is balanced by their having a casting time and a duration. This suggestion would apply the full benefit but attempts to trade those two balancing factors for another; one I do not believe is nearly as costly as you think (depending on which suggestion, exactly, we're discussing--I certainly wouldn't think anything of it, on any build, to run a 99 flat reservation permanent enfeeble if we're talking about the 200% mcm support).

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CanHasPants написал:

Edit: Random idea: a more balance approach might be to convert the curse into an aura-like aoe that constantly degenerates a portion of the curse's casting cost every second, similar to arctic armour and without benefit of aura reservation reduction passives or uniques (which is where the aura support would become broken, and any cost associated becomes meaningless).

I like this idea. Something like 20%-30% of the cost as a continual drain on mana. Running one would be manageable but running two would take up a lot of your mana regen.