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.

　　In the new season, we will change the curse to encourage players to use it by self-casting. We slightly adjusted the existing curse mechanisms, improved their visual effects and added a new curse skill and a new auxiliary 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.

　　Curse is the earliest skill in POE. With the development of the game, we have designed a series of ways to give full play to its mechanism advantages, such as creating curse aura, such as curse aura (auxiliary), direct curse hitting and additional curse (auxiliary).

　　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.

　　It’s a good thing that the variety of ways to curse has increased, and automatic-cursing is also used by a large number of players. So we came up with some ways to motivate players who are willing to take the time to curse monsters manually.

　　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.

　　At the same time, this change is also a good opportunity to review all curse skills and see their improvement potential. We were going to add some new curse skills, but the existing curse types are enough. Nevertheless, this will not affect us to design other skills linked with curse skills.

　　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.

　　In a word, we added a new curse skill and auxiliary skill stone, redone a lot of curse skills and improved their visual effects.