patch 3.10 :
Testing out bone curse specced into the bleed nodes (cloven flesh) and armour shred nodes (defile defences) and mark for death, on the target dummy.
Using a single skeleton mage = crits 300, bleed damage 400
Using a single skeleton mage with bone curse on the dummy = crits 400-600, bleed damage = 400.
Skeleton archer = crits 600 , bleed 700
skeleton archer with bone curse = crits 700, bleed damage 800
wraith = hit damage 200, bleed damage 1200
wraith with bone curse = hit damage 200, bleed damage 1200
wraith with bone curse and dread shade = hit damage 200, bleed damage 3500
wraith with dread shade = hit damage 200, bleed damage 3500
4 mages + 7 archers = impossible to see numbers for hits, but assume they are the same as above. Bleed damage cumulative = 6K
4 Mages + 7 archers + bone curse =impossible to see hit damage but bleed damage goes up to 9K briefly.
There are noticable changes, but those changes do not make sense.
Why would the mark for death not give a noticable 25% increase to damage of all types?
Why would the bleed and armour shred from bone curse be so inconsistent? It seems that the armour shred cap now makes speccing into it even less useful?
How exactly does bone curse even work - it says when the enemy is hit, but does that include if a minion hits it? If a minion hits it who applies the bleed, the player, or the minion? Or if it is reflected damage from nowhere, does the bleed not get any buffs from minion or player damage increases?
If armour shred gets capped now, then it seems to only be useful for hit damage builds, and has no effect on bleed. Is this a reasonable interpretation?
Compared to dread shade, which has 100% increased attack speed and 160% more damage (with expected 300% damage multiplier) giving the exact numbers you’d expect, it seems that bone curse is bugged somehow. Maybe the mark for death is not working? Maybe it just doesn’t work on the practice dummy? Maybe the bleed chance is not working, or doesn’t proc with minion hits? - in which case the skill descriptions need to change. Maybe bone curse doesn’t work with wraiths for some reason?
The issue with bleed (& all dots) is that the damage is based on hits per second, so either more minions or higher attack speed (dread shade) & you didn’t specify whether the bleed damage was per hit or after 3-4 seconds (which should be when your damage is ramped up.
As I understand it, hits from bone curse count as the player’s hits & scale with the player’s damage. This is correct for the hit damage (try equipping a staff with lots of adaptive skill damage compared to a starter wand or nothing) but I’m not sure it’s correct for the freeze chance (per my bug report here).
Mark for Death should reduce the target’s resists by 25% & increase the damage taken by a similar amount.
Shred should be reducing the target’s resists by 5% per stack (2% for players/bosses) for a total of 100% against normal mobs or 40% for players/bosses & increase the damage taken by a similar amount for both hit & DoT damage. This should be most effective from Bone Curse proc’d by minions (more hits in a given time period).
Yes, Bone Curse does a hit of damage when the minion hits the target. The effects (damage, dot, shred, freeze) should all count as if they were from the player & be based on the player’s damage (but as I mentioned above, that’s not how it appears to be working with the freeze multi & freeze chance node).
Edit: Sorry, I was being stupid. Armour is hit-based damage reduction so it wouldn’t reduce the damage taken from DoTs like bleed.
1 & 2. Remember though that all attacks have a damage range that can mess up identifying how much damage is boosted. Plus mob base resists will effect damage increase from resist reduction like Mark for death and shreds. Its possible that they are not working properly due to the change from protection to resists.
Bone curse does damage when target is hit by any non DOT effect and is tripled if it’s the caster that lands the hit. Its a player character casted spell so will scale with player stats and not minions.
Armor effects all damage apart from DOTs so though it wont effect your bleed or poison damage it will effect all attacks and spell that apply them.
Bone curse only has a 75% chance to bleed if maxed out for bleeding so it not always going to proc. To test it you really need to remove all other sources of bleed chance and give it time.
