Cursed Ducats and Mercenary Nerfs in Path of Exile 3.29.3

Path of Exile 3.29.3 hands players a new way to crank up the difficulty of Voyages and Charts in exchange for better loot, adds a proper keybind for reading Voyage border modifiers, and tones down several enemy Mercenary skills that were killing characters too easily. It sits on top of the Curse of the Allflame league and refines what launched with 3.29 rather than adding a whole new system. The full official 3.29.3 patch notes cover a long list of bug fixes alongside the headline changes.

Quick answer: You get your first Cursed Ducat by defeating Velka. If you already beat her before the patch, speak to Valerie on The Sovereign to collect it. Then socket up to three Cursed Ducats into the Voyage Planner to raise monster Toughness, Quantity, and Rarity.

What Cursed Ducats do

There are six new Cursed Ducats, and they slot into the Voyage Planner to Empower your Voyages and Charts. You can socket up to three at once. Each one stacks Toughness, Quantity of Items dropped, and Rarity of Items dropped onto the monsters you fight during those runs.

The catch is that every Cursed Ducat also carries its own specific difficulty modifier that changes how monsters behave or how dangerous a fight gets. The idea is to pick the downsides your build can shrug off. A tanky character might happily eat one drawback that would wreck a glass-cannon build, so the right combination of three depends on how you play.

One Cursed Ducat also gets a targeted buff. The Genteel’s Ducat can now swap modifiers on Small Cluster Jewels that grant single attributes, giving you more control when you fine-tune those jewels.

How to get Cursed Ducats

Cursed Ducats show up only in the endgame, since they are tied to Velka rather than the campaign. Here is the order you unlock them.

Defeat Velka to receive your first Cursed Ducat. If you already beat her before installing 3.29.3, you don’t need to fight her again. Head to The Sovereign and talk to Valerie, who will hand over your first Ducat.

Socket that Cursed Ducat into the Voyage Planner. You must have one socketed for the rest of the set to become reachable.

Run Voyages and Charts. With a Cursed Ducat active, the remaining Ducats can drop from certain monsters and objects inside those areas. You know it worked when a new Cursed Ducat lands in your inventory and can be slotted into the Planner.

View all 12 Voyage border modifiers with one keybind

Planning a Voyage used to mean hovering back and forth over each area to check its border modifiers. A new keybind in the Voyage Planning UI now shows all 12 border modifiers at once. Hold Alt on keyboard, or the Left Trigger on a controller, to see the full spread and decide whether a reroll is worth it.

Voyage Planner area board showing adjacent-area border modifiers — Hold Alt to read every border modifier at once. Image via Grinding Gear Games.

Mercenary nerfs and fixes

Several enemy Mercenary skills were dealing too much damage, so their numbers are down. The reduced skills are Frostbolt, Ice Nova, Ice Nova of Projection, Flameblast, Fireball, Fireball of Impact, and Rolling Magma. Together those cover the elemental spells that made some Mercenary duels feel like instant death.

Combat scene with Mercenary enemy nameplates on a stone courtyard — Enemy Mercenary elemental skills now hit for less. Image via Grinding Gear Games.

A few Mercenary bugs are also cleared up, and hiring is a bit smoother now.

Issue	Fix in 3.29.3
Wither on Hit support	Applied Withered for only a single frame; now lasts the intended 2 seconds.
Hiring a third Permanent Mercenary	Blocked if you had two Permanent Mercenaries plus a Temporary one; now allowed.
Trarthan Scarab of Infamy	Wild Mercenaries could drop loot without being defeated; that no longer happens.

The Conflagration fix and other notable bugs squashed

The most build-relevant fix outside of Mercenaries is Conflagration. A bug introduced in 3.29 made level-one Conflagration deal no damage while firing far more projectiles than intended. That is corrected, so anyone leaning on Conflagration should re-check their damage after patching.

The rest of the fixes span Essences, Abyss, Heist, Atlas, Harvest, and several Unique items.

Area	Change
Essences	Monsters trapped in Essences can be interacted with from further away to break them free.
Abyss	Abyssal Crystals from the Abyss Scarab of Crystals now shatter when the final Pit closes (visual only).
Heist	Minimap icons for Heist reward chests are once again always revealed.
Pact of Ghorr	The skill now correctly empowers Desecrate.
Atlas Passive	The imprisoned-monster Essence-modifier passive no longer occasionally rolls Essence of Desolation modifiers.
Pearl of Tsoatha	Unequipping it no longer sometimes despawns Spectres.
Zana’s Ingenuity	Its charge-protection modifier now applies to certain Eldritch Altar modifiers.
Harvest	Harvest no longer fails to start when the Map owner is absent from the area on interaction.
Standard Astrolabes	Applied Astrolabes could persist across an Atlas reset and become impossible to complete; fixed.

On the quality-of-life side, the swapped Frenzy and Power Charge bench recipe descriptions are corrected, the missing “Unscalable Value” line in advanced modifier descriptions now displays, and the Intrigued Interlopers challenge shows the right conditions for Eater of Worlds, Searing Exarch, and Maven completions. The Undying Syndicate Merchant microtransaction now tracks gold outside your hideout, the Settlers of Kalguur Farm Plot and Workers dropdowns are taller, overlapping text in the Currency Exchange and Harvest Tier icons is fixed, Tarkleigh finally picked his bow up off the ground, and a client crash was resolved.

Taken together, 3.29.3 is a tuning pass more than an expansion. The Cursed Ducats give you a knob to trade risk for reward on a per-build basis, the border-modifier keybind cuts down on menu fiddling, and the softer enemy Mercenary spells make those duels far less punishing while you chase the rest of the Ducat set.