Sooo marks are just a worse version of a curse ???

I haven't played in a few years and returned for this league. I decided to play bow character, things are going well, progressing through act 2, I come up to one of the quest rewards and chose "Poacher's Mark" not thinking anything about it, I go to use it in the next zone and lo and behold it only applies to one enemy.

So, confused, I read the description and also go look up other "Marks" and as it turns out Assassin's mark and every other curse, with "mark" in its title now only applies to a single target, what gives ? As far as I can tell they're just shittier version of curses now, why use a mark that only applies to one enemy when I can get something that increases my damage to everything ?

What am I missing ? What the hell was the point of these changes ? To nerf specific curses into the ground for group clear ? This is a terrible change from what I can tell, I can't use those curses for charge generation without an "on hit" support gem anymore or for early game many and life sustain. I hate these changes, never going to use these again, will have to replace them with the curses that still have aoe, this sucks.

Marks provide a lot more power than a curse. They would be wasted on blue/white mobs so they are only applied to rare/unique mobs.

Yeah that's not a valid reason, curses are two for one, marks are not. GGG just wanted to nerf them from what I can tell, cause no fun allowed. If the excuse is that they're "Too powerful" for a group of enemies please provide a weaker version that does the same thing. As of now I simply see it has a huge loss in utility and some skill gems I'll never use again, outside maybe sniper's mark, since you get it in act 1.

hoho that's on you if you can't see how to utilize it. "no fun" lol...

snipers mark with Mark on hit support is huge for a deadeye build when boss killing

You are vastly underestimating the power of a mark on enemies that matter.

Marks are way stronger than curses, that's why you can only have them on one enemy at a time. You're supposed to either, manually use them against rares and uniques, or apply them with mark on hit support on attack builds.

And on a side note, you can use mark on hit support to get full benefits from marks on attack builds, while you can't do that for hex curses. So almost every attack build uses a mark for both mapping and bossing. On spell builds you manually cast them on bosses or trigger them with something like arcanist brand, because as I mentioned, marks are generally much stronger than hex curses on single target

I was using poacher's mark with Excess Sustenance nodes to face-tank crucible rares/uniques until 5-links on poisonous concoction.　:P

TBH, I am still considering a mark (alchemist's) as 3rd Hex for an extra burst damage if there is enough space in sockets.

So you basically did not play for a couple of years, come back, play for half an hour or so (act 1).. .get a gem that you don't know how to use... and the first thing to do after a couple of years absence is to go to the forums and complain about "no fun allowed"?

Dude, really? ^^

Build dependent, marks can be strong