Bless definitely needs a longer cooldown, a higher AP cost, or both. Cursing, as Trace says, mostly comes from void blood, so that's hard to control.
I think some kind of global solution to surface combos is in order: What if a surface interaction, say blessing a character on a surface, didn't transform the entire surface into a blessed variant, but only blessed a small section of the surface below the character, maybe blessing more and more of it as the character walks around.
Similarly, electrifying a puddle of water could have a limited range, say 5-6m from the origin point of the air damage.
Maybe this overcomplicates things, I dunno, but it would help keep surfaces more in check.
I also think exploding could deal less damage, buffing the fire/poison skills slightly to make up for that. Right now it feels a good fire/poison wand DW combo can do more damage than most skills because of the explosion combo.
More surface/cloud removal skills will also help, but that feels more like a bandaid than dealing with the fundamental problems.
(And one more thing I haven't enjoyed in DOS: smoke from poison explosions makes me not use poison. It's impossible to evaluate what you can hit after the explosion (because the smoke blocks you view completely to some targets), before the explosion that is. Too random to be fun. Otherwise, these are amazing games!!
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I also agree that smoke can be a huge pain. It's hard to see, and often times one tiny speck of smoke in front a character can make them essentially blind. Would be interesting if smoke didn't completely block vision, but reduced your range according to how thick the cloud is, maybe even like 1m of smoke means you have 1m range less in that direction, though perhaps 1m of smoke should be 2 or 3m of less range, or even worked as a percentage reduction so it affects melee characters less than ranged ones.
