Punishment

I was theorycrafting a build around the newly announced Ancestral Protector melee totem today, when i came across Punishment. Seeing as this is the first totem able to gain the bonus effects from Punishment i was wondering the following, does anyone know more?

1) How will my totems be able to get the buff, does it work when melee monsters attack the totem, or do i have to get hit myself?

2) Following from that, am i right in thinking totems are hit more easily than myself, or do they gain benefit from things like my evasion, dodge, etc?

The buff duration is too short and/or the buff is too hard to get!

When you're fighting stuff often you are stunning a lot of creatures and often you encounter fights where things just don't melee! I was trying with facebreaker cyclone (my range is TINY) and even in boss fights you just don't get the punishment buff up much. Also that I tried with character is a is a heavy leech based character who would benefit the most from something like the punishment buff (both more survivability and more damage).

In the end it doesn't even affect boss fights very much (how does curse effectiveness affect this curse anyways? At the moment I'm assuming the buff grants reduced more melee physical damage and increased attack speed.)

I think it should change to apply to being hit by ranged hits too, that way its also significant for ranged players hit by this; the melee monsters they attack become stronger as well (well if they don't instantly melt D:)

I feel kinda sad for the Creator of Shackles of the Wretched, with his unique robbed of one of the few actual synergies with Punishment being changed.

Currently trying a buff build with Mantra of Flames, and the damage boost is certainly notable, but I find myself wondering if I wouldn't be better of just using Elemental weakness; which would likely boost my damage more in the long run.

For anyone wondering, boss curse resistance applies to the buff AND the duration. Unacceptable. This curse should at least circumvent curse resistance for all the drawbacks it has, considering it applies as a buff. There is no reason to use this over level 1 Vulnerability with 20 quality as you get the added benefit of scaling bleed/poison/ignite for yourself and allies. I don't know why a level 20 gem isn't allowed to be as good as a level 1 gem. I don't know why ranged classes get access to generic projectile damage (melee phys only?) and pierce/knockback from Projectile Weakness. I don't know why elemental users get a similar conditional buff that lasts 8 seconds instead of 4. I guess we should just forget this skill until they do that long planned curse overhaul and MAYBE it gets shown some love...:(

Right, but its a bit confusing as it's a buff, albeit sourced from a curse. I kinda expected something like that to be a yes or no for placing the buff and not actually mess with the numbers. Yeah, I miss the old reflect version as well. Love the concept of where they were going with the rework (general melee booster), but like I said, I find it more effective to just use a level 1 gem (or more depending on INT). Would feel kind of crappy if, for example, Enfeeble was "has X% chance to reduce monster damage etc. by y%" which is what current Punishment feels like in application.

I still stand by letting it apply buff via spells and projectiles, only letting totems and traps escape this.

If it really must be applied from melee, then, I wish there was another red curse (plz no warlords mark) I could swap this garbage out when I fight stuff with no melee /bosses with no melee/ ads that melee... Last i used it was testing on terrace bosses devourers. Funnily enough it let out dps the bosses heal by a ton. The way it is now you can't even do a vulnerability swap.

Well I think a cool minor thing about this curse/buff is that elemental melee using physical scaling and conversion can make use of this instead of like elemental weakness.

Will the buff work with SRS?

It should, but it won't be consistent because very few things will melee and hit your srs since enemies don't target srs, and they must have aoe to hit your srs. if you want to boost srs damage better to use elemental weakness or something.