Essence rarity, corrupted areas, enemy charge stealing and more

I have a strange assortment of questions here. Just trying to clarify some confusing mechanics or curiosities.

1) Is the rarity of the Misery, Dread, Scorn and Envy essences as extreme as I feel, or is it just a matter of running more maps (I keep starting new characters, so none my mine have made it past tier 8 or 9 maps so far)? Playing since the start of the league, with 4 characters now running maps (again, not beyond T9, but still running predominantly T6s and 7s, depending upon what drops and what Zana sells), and I have only encountered 5 of those essences, and none of them effectively corrupted into the corrupt essences. Do any of you have anecdotal (or even better, collected data) on the rarity of these things? I wanted to aim for the challenge point, but not sure I can before the end of the league at this rate.

2) I was having a crazy time trying to spawn the Clouded Ridge corrupted area for the ledge (for the challenge point). I ran the ledge on Merc as often as I could every day for over a week, and then started spawning corrupted areas using the sacrifice fragments (which I never realized is a great way to farm midnight fragments). None of this worked. What finally worked was getting the prophecy that a corrupted area with strong creatures would spawn, and then immediately entering the ledge to make it trigger. However, it made me wonder whether there were differing rarities of the corrupted areas as well, and if so, why, as they all seem to offer similar rewards. When spawning them with the fragments, 5 or 6 areas came up almost every time, with a new random one appearing once every 6 or 7 fragments.

3) I have been running with six endurance charges and either 4 frenzy or 4 power charges for the past week, and have noticed that some creatures appear to gain charges when I do. Do some magic monsters have the ability to steal charges? I know some spawn their own every few seconds, but there have been times when it seems that as soon as my charges trigger (e.g. endurance charge on stun from vengeance or riposte), the monsters around me also gain charges. Is this a bug, something I am missing, or my mind playing tricks on me? It only seems to be magic creatures that do this. Perhaps they also run with CWDT charge triggers :)?

4) I notice the purple swirl occasionally appear under creatures at times that indicates they are vulnerable to lightning or fire (or is it the slowed effect?), yet I am not running with elemental weakness or any other curse or item that would confer that (or temp chains) on them, and this is not just in totem maps. Any one else notice this?

1) from my experience they are very rare, I have three characters lvl 90/84/84 and have found only handful of them

2) some areas have the chances of spawning vaal area reduced, to prevent trivial farming. Ledge is one of them.. Prophecy would be my favourite method of getting one in these areas

3) not sure, havent noticed monsters stealing my charges.. they have multiple methods of charge gaining, whe damaged, when % of life removed, on death, cry..

4) Elemental Equilibrium

1. Yeah, they're fairly rare, I got this many so far with level 90/87/85 chars


2. Right, areas that are either small or linear have reduced chance to spawn a corrupted area, ledge, climb, city of sarn and dried lake are good examples. If an area is included in the corrupted area challenge it will be either small with reduced spawn chance, big and hard to navigate or a side area nobody normally visits, just to remind us it's there.

3. Only players can steal charges, monsters have their own ways of generating them.