[2020] Curse Skills in Path of Exile: Heist

In Path of Exile: Heist we're making some changes to curses to provide incentive to self-cast them. We've made some small changes to existing curse mechanics, improved their visuals and added one new curse skill and one new support gem.

An Overview of Curses

Curses are among some of the first skills that were introduced to Path of Exile. Over time, we've introduced a number of ways to take advantage of their mechanics like the Blasphemy Support which creates a curse-aura, or adding the ability to apply curses with the Curse on Hit support.

While having a number of methods of applying a curse is certainly a good thing, there was a lot of automatic-cursing going on and we wanted to give some incentives to those who wanted to take the time to actually cast a curse manually on a pack of monsters.

While we were doing this, it felt like a good opportunity to review all curse gems and see what other improvements could be made. We were going to see if we could add any new curses to the pool, but found that the current set of curses already covers pretty much every niche we wanted. However, this didn't stop us from making other gems that could interact with them in some way.

To this end, we've added one new skill gem, one new support gem, reworked a number of curse skills and improved their visual effects.

Curse Types

Curses are now divided into Hexes and Marks. We've tried to make them feel distinct while still sharing some identifiable properties of being a curse.

Hexes
Hex Spells apply curse debuffs to each enemy in an area. If the spell was self-cast, the debuff will gain doom over time up to its maximum. The effect of the curse is increased by the amount of Doom it has.

The curses that are now considered Hexes are Flammability, Frostbite, Conductivity, Elemental Weakness, Vulnerability, Despair, Temporal Chains, Enfeeble and Punishment.

Marks
Marks apply the curse debuff on a single target and cannot be applied to more than one target. We've created new passive skills that apply specifically to marks and marked enemies. We're aiming to move Marks towards being more dexterity-aligned as a mechanic, so these passives will be closer to the Ranger area of the passive tree.

Curses that are considered Marks are Warlord's Mark, Poacher's Mark, Assassin's Mark and Sniper's Mark (which is the reworked Projectile Weakness).

Impending Doom/Doom Blast

Impending Doom is a support gem that can support hexes. When the supported hex expires or is removed in any way, it triggers Doom Blast which causes a chaos explosion. The more Doom the supported hex built up before its expiration, the greater damage the explosion will deal.

There are a number of ways to cause the explosion to occur. At the most basic level, you can simply kill a monster with the supported hex. However, there are many other ways you can cause a hex to expire, but that's an exercise that we'll leave to you to figure out!

Hexblast

This is a new skill gem that calls down a beam of chaos damage on the target. If the target is cursed with a hex, it consumes that hex and causes a shockwave around that enemy. Similar to Impending Doom, the more Doom the supported hex built up, the greater damage the skill deals.

Although Hexblast is a chaos damage spell, it has some elemental-themed properties that make it special. For one, the damage it deals has the ability to ignite, shock or freeze. Secondly, it deals damage based on the lowest resistance the enemy has! For example, this lets you use an offensive hex such as Flammability and still make use of the fire resistance reduction that it provides.

Punishment

Punishment has now changed to provide benefit for a greater variety of builds. It no longer causes you to gain bonuses when monsters hit you but instead curses monsters to take increased damage when they are on low life. This synergises with the second effect that Punishment now applies which causes monsters to explode, dealing a percentage of your overkill damage to monsters around them. In addition, if cursed monsters hit you, they get debilitated (a debuff that causes enemies to deal less damage and have less movement speed) for a duration.

These changes make Punishment much more useful and a more well-rounded curse, with mostly offensive capabilities as well as a defensive component to it in case monsters are able to get close to you.

Sniper's Mark

[To be revealed later]

Existing Marks

All Mark Curses have been rebalanced to be more suitable for a single target. In addition, the curse penalty that is found on many bosses in the endgame no longer applies to Marks and only applies to Hexes, allowing Marks to apply to these bosses at their full power.

Other Small Changes

We have also made some smaller changes to radius values, bonuses that certain curses give and some additional quality stats. You'll find these changes outlined in the patch notes.

In addition to these changes, there will be some passive tree adjustments and a new keystone that changes how self-cast curses apply their debuffs.

Check out the Curses in action in the video below!