Bone Curse questions due to non-helpful tooltips

I am curious about the Crimson Enlightenment node. Tooltip reads: “When Bone Curse times out, you cast Rip Blood on that enemy”

  1. What does “times out” mean? When it ends? What if I’ve cast it on the same enemies multiple times? The Acute Affliction node mentions a way to make the curse end sooner (after 4 hits) but uses the term “falls off”. Does that count as “times out”? Would hitting multiple (4+) times with Soul Feast trigger the Rip Blood?

  2. Who exactly do I cast Rip Blood on when it triggers? All enemies cursed? All enemies that were hit while cursed? Something else? Is there a max range?

  3. What does Cursed Ground do?

Very unhelpful tool-tips.

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I’ve not tried the curse, but,

  1. Times out should mean that the curse ends on a mob due to it’s duration ending, rather than being fully consumed, which is probably what they mean with “falls off”. Two different ending conditions.
  2. Could be anything, from the target of the curse that timed out to the nearest mob (like Smite does when proc’d by the idol).
  3. From the sound of it, when you cast Bone Curse not only do the mobs in the area you cast it on get cursed but the area that was cursed will curse any mob that enters it. So instead of being an instant skill (that only affects mobs the instant it was cast), it becomes a duration skill that affects anything that enters the area 1-5 seconds after you cast it.

But at least they’ve added the “curse” tag.

I’d like to add some feedback on this new skill:

Cast time and sound works well. Good feel imho.

Visually the skill may need some improvements:

  • In dark areas ist hard to tell where exactly I cast it. The AOE visual is very dark
  • I can’t really tell which enemies are affected by the curse and which not. The bones that stick in the enemies are hard to see and for the first time I cast the skill I didn’t even recognise. Mark For Death hat a symbol above cursed enemies. Spirit plague has well noticable effect as well. I see that physical damage doesn’t have the white/green art style of necrotic damage. But the actual effect needs to be more pregnant
  • I’d like to see a cool skill effect when a Skelleton Vanguard is summoned. Maybe also acompanied by a cool sound effect

Skeleton Vanguards:

  • I dont think they scale in any terms with the summon skeleton skilltree. But where are the Vanguards in terms of hp and damage? are they comparable with Rogues? Or Warriors?
  • The Vanguards attack animation does not fit the weapon type they use. They wield spears, but chop with them like they are wielding axes

I really love the spell design and the tree looks very interesting!

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OK can someone explain to me how to actually specialize in a new skill after the patch? I now have an empty specialisation slot where Marked for Death used to be, although that slot is showing as level 20 for some reason. I cannot see how specialise in Bone Curse (or any skill) for that matter. It doesn’t work the same way as before, nor does drag/dropping a skill into the slot. Is this a bug? I seem to be stuck with only 4 skills.

There were already some bug reports and devs confirmed that it will be fixed in the next patch.

  1. I assume Times out means it ends due to time running out IE the 8 second duration has passed. But it might just be when it ends for what ever reason with the mob still alive.
  2. The mob that Bone curse has timed out on get Rip blood casted on it.
  3. Cursed Ground creates a ground based AOE that applies Bone Curse on mobs in the AOE. Its a good combo with the Illusion of Pain node.

Now I have tried the new curse on the training dummy I can answer at least this question I posed. Yes “falls off” and “times out” appear to mean the same thing. Taking the Acute Affliction node, I was able to trigger Rip Blood immediately by casting Soul Feast once (with the “up to 6 extra hits” node). The trigger occurred whenever the cast of Soul Feast applied at least 4 hits. However the trigger effect is bugged as follows:

a) Rip Blood never once triggered early with Wandering Spirits with Spectral Putrescence, hitting the dummy, despite the tooltip for this node making it clear that the spirits “hit” with this ranged attack (it applies poison “on hit” after all, and the spirits are not Minions). Acute Affliction tooltip does not state that the 4 hits to trigger Rip Blood need to be applied by me, so this should work. I also assume in multiplayer, the hits dealt by other players should trigger it but obviously I cannot test that.

b) If your first cast of Soul Feast does less than 4 hits (hence no trigger of Rip Blood), casting Soul Feast a second time will NOT make the Rip Blood trigger no matter how many hits the 2nd cast does.

c) If you do: Curse → Soul Feast → Soul Feast and the sum total of hits from the two Soul Feast is less than 4, then the Rip Blood will never trigger, even when the curse times out after 8 seconds.

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That kinda sounds like a bug then (especially c & d).

On further testing, I was wrong about (d). Removed it.

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It’s a complicated skill/node.

I really want to see how the “falls off after one hit” node, the “cast rip blood when times out node” and the “apply bone curse on hit” node work together, but unfortunately you can’t get all three until very high skill level and I don’t have tons of time to play.

One really annoying thing is, if there is a strong synergy between these nodes, it doesn’t really start working until you have all three, so you spend tons of levels putting points into things that don’t feel like their helping much while leveling. I respecced from transplant to rip blood at level 19 and it was a major step down in power, since transplant is pretty awesome with bone curse, but “falls off in four hits” just makes bone curse more of a pain without actually casting many rip bloods.

I’ve ended up giving up on Bone Curse. I think it’s weak. Basically I’ve realised that I was relying on Marked for Death’s mass fear for my build and Bone Curse doesn’t have this. I’ve switched to Spirit Plague and am getting better results. I’ve lost about 50 Arena waves due to the removal for Marked for Death, so thanks devs.

I tried it and no, it doesn’t work how you want it to. You only get 1 Rip Blood when the Cursed Limbs duration ends rather than on every hit until Cursed Limbs ends. You also don’t get a RIP Blood if the target dies.

Yeah, I ended up leveling an acolyte and found that out for myself. A couple of hot fixes ago, though, there was definitely some weird stuff going on, I think particularly with transplant. Sometimes I could proc a big series of rip bloods from a single transplant (enough to spike me up to 2k ward against bosses around level 40). I don’t know whether that was changed at some point.

What I didn’t end up testing was how cursed ground works and whether or not it’s the same as cursed limbs, or whether it automatically reapplies bone curse at a fixed interval and so fast enough attacks could knock bone curse off and proc rip blood before it reapplies.

I don’t think the rip blood node is worth it with cursed limbs, and to be honest I’m not really sure when it would be worth it.

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