Enduring Cry, Endurance Charges and You!

*Disclaimer* Below text is dealing with the subject from melee character perspective, a character that uses endurance charges to secure its survival.


Playing melee class in Path of Exile can be frustrating and unrewarding experience at times. It is possible to build functional melee character but the amount of chores connected with such endeavor is way too high in my opinion.

I would like to focus on one of the more annoying requirements that are placed in front of melee character/player in order to succeed: managing Endurance charges.

The way Endurance charges interact with other means of mitigation, and overall lack of other solid mitigation means in PoE, Endurance charges are simply required in order to survive in this game as a melee character taking hits regularly. The fact that there are only 2 ways to generate Endurance charges, one limited by CD and the other requiring to kill monster with a chance to obtain a charge, is very limiting to playstyle. Adding to the hassle of acquiring Endurance charges, they also have limited duration, which is rather short as well.

There are other classes that utilize charges, Frenzy or Power, however, the major difference is that those other 2 mentioned charge types are used for offense and offense only. Endurance charges on the other hand play pivotal role in melee's ability to survive in melee combat for even shortest of time. Not having Endurance charges up means every melee character is in permanent threat of dieing.

Main culprit of this situation is in my opinion Enduring Cry. This skill is dysfunctional and unintuitive in its use and purpose. Cooldown prevents quick acquisition of Endurance charges. The wording of the skill is catastrophic--I admit that after playing PoE for several months I still do not understand it. Finally, the fact you can only acquire Endurance charge by using Enduring Cry in vicinity of monsters is the final insult.

My suggestions to change Enduring Cry are following:
1. Add additional functionality to Enduring Cry that would allow acquisition of full stack of endurance charges on a prolonged internal cooldown. This should only activate whenever player has zero Endurance Charges and could have 45 to 60 seconds internal cooldown--internal cooldown would not impact standard 4 second cast cooldown.
2. Change Enduring Cry to a passive buff similar to Bloodrage and still maintain its original functionality of acquiring Endurance Charges. The buff should refresh Endurance Charges timer whenever player is hit by melee/AOE ability. Side benefit would be that such buff could be modified by support gems and passive talents to last longer--not the charges themselves.
3. In addition to one of the above changes, I would love to see duration of Endurance charges to be increased. I base this on a fact that while there are other types of charges, only Endurance charges are required by melee characters to keep at all times. The rest is just reduction to damage output of impacted character without any harsher repercussions.

I also want to add that keeping 2 separate Endurance Cry skills to alleviate the problem is very poor solution. It makes it even harder to utilize less-than-mandatory gems, which kills skills variety.

What is your experience with Enduring Cry and Endurance charges? How would you like to see them changed?

Part of the problem with making end cry better is discharge. If you can generate charges too quickly you have a nuke ready often. I think your suggestions are on the right path, things that allow you to hold them longer rather than generate them quicker.

>.>

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Moosifer wrote:

Part of the problem with making end cry better is discharge. If you can generate charges too quickly you have a nuke ready often. I think your suggestions are on the right path, things that allow you to hold them longer rather than generate them quicker.

>.>

I tried to address this concern you raised in your feedback post by putting the disclaimer on top. I don't think any melee character would really consider discharging all of Endurance charges for DPS gain. Even if such thing would happen, the ability to generate full stack of Endurance charges can have rather lengthy cooldown. I picked 45 - 60 seconds but it can easily be 2 minutes or more. It is not that often that you lose stacks, it happens to me I when travel larger distances or occasional when I get distracted and forget to refresh their duration.

I mainly suggest to have this full recharge feature of Enduring Cry because my inability to generate Endurance charges quickly at the start of a fight leads to very strange situations, such as me running in circles around certain hard hitting bosses or even rares until I get full stack and feel safe to engage.

Ya I understand your POV but the majority of the end cry nerfs have been because of discharge. It kinda sucks.

and the gameplay isn't even interesting. i'm currently using 2 enduring cry, and it's pretty boring to have to stop to use this skill to not lose all your charges.
maybe if we could use it while doing something else (I don't know... like... attacking!!!)

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kodr wrote:

and the gameplay isn't even interesting. i'm currently using 2 enduring cry, and it's pretty boring to have to stop to use this skill to not lose all your charges.
maybe if we could use it while doing something else (I don't know... like... attacking!!!)

I thought about different ways of acquiring Endurance charges but I purposefully avoided "on-attack" option because that could be easily utilized by non-melee characters. I prefer reversed option as seen in my OP, "to get hit" in order to refresh the duration. In order to make this fair to evasion characters, the refresh could occur on hit or dodge/miss.

I meant being able to use enduring cry while attacking.

Here's the idea that I had for Enduring Cry. Add these bonuses to it:

+1 charge for every two magic enemies in the radius
+2 charges for each rare enemy in the radius
+3 charges for each unique enemy in the radius

So you'd get the same amount for normal enemies, but more if you're facing a tough situation. Like if you're going in to fight 6 magic enemies, you'd get 1-2 charges for monster amount depending on EC level, then 3 more for the magic enemy bonus. A rare would give you 3 per cast, or 5 per cast if you stumbled upon two at once. If you're fighting Brutus or Kole (for example), you'd get 4 charges per cast.

This doesn't address the tedium of spamming it every 9-13 seconds to keep the charges going, but it does make it easier to acquire charges, making it less of a problem if you accidentally lose them.

"

I meant being able to use enduring cry while attacking.

I think they said that the game engine isn't capable of doing multiple actions at the same time.

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StarlightGamer wrote:

I think they said that the game engine isn't capable of doing multiple actions at the same time.

Geez sometimes it makes me wonder what they CAN do with it.

Hey, atleast they aren't as bad to get as power-charges.