Path of Exile: Ramble about Endurance Charges

In poe, every day, players from all over the world play in it. Many players choose to share their anecdotes and experiences in the game, so today I want to talk about a thing that is rarely noticed.

Both Frenzy and Power charges have plentiful ways to keep them up. So much so that even skills that eat them such as Flicker Strike (Frenzy) or Cold Snap (Power) are easily able to manage them (Cold Snap not being in a good place atm has nothing to do with its charge requirements). But what of Endurance Charges? Well, as Tectonic Slam has recently showcased, the moment endurance charge generation is stressed it just quickly falls apart. Even Juggs struggle to keep T.Slam always at max coverage (and anyone who imagined a Chieftain could keep it up was quickly disabused of that idea). The other specific Endurance-consuming skill in the game - Vigilant Strike - is barely seen (sure it's namelock, but that's not the only reason it doesn't get used). What's more, the methods of generating Frenzy and Power charges are just plain easier to incorporate into builds - so much so that their respective curses are quite likely the main charge generation mechanism on only a minority of builds that use them. Meanwhile, the most common way of generating Endurance Charges is still Warlord's Mark (which is just a 30% chance ON KILL, btw).

It almost feels like GGG is too afraid of allowing players to possibly maintain perma-Immortal Call. But then why introduce skills like T. Slam and Vigilant Strike in the first place? And besides, they then added in Poet's Pen, which does that anyway. There's already loads of game mechanics that build off of Endurance Charges, yet I feel that one go-to defensive skill is preventing them from becoming too readily attainable i.e. in line with the other two charges. Immortal Call is a ridiculously common defensive skill in builds already - perhaps too much so. People complain about stale metas when skills like Barrage, KB, Blade Flurry or Sunder are common, yet NONE OF THEM even come close to how common Immortal Call is. I suspect even everyone's favorite movement skills - Whirling Blades and Shield Charge - aren't as common as Immortal Call. And this ubiquity is negatively impacting the creation of more builds - and especially more non-Jugg builds - that might make more aggressive use of Endurance charges, simply because they're too much of a pain to keep up (and no, casting Enduring Cry on every pack is not a solution - the only ones for whom that ever felt like an acceptable trade-off were the old burning Dischargers).

I have played as a Jugger. And while he isn't the only class that gets them (both Duelist and Templar ascendancies also get nodes that generate them), he is the only one who gets them reliably. Perhaps too much so. The Witch, Shadow, Ranger and Duelist ascendancies all generate power and frenzy charges much more evenly between them. But even Juggers can easily generate power charges - just Romira's Banquet if you're not crit, or PCoC or Voll's Protector if you are. The test for this is how well the mechanism works when it's under stress - skills like Flicker Strike, Cold Snap and Tectonic Slam serve this purpose. And both Frenzy and Power charges are so smooth to generate that their respective skills were designed to not even work without them, while endurance charges are so comparatively weaker to generate that T.Slam was made to still 'work' even without having them (the other main skill that consumes them - Vigilant Strike - does completely rely on them...and never took off).

The idea of Endurance Charges is here, and the self-speaking of these non-purposes is purely irrelevant. In comparison, exploring in the game, constantly challenging the task, getting rewards and poe orbs. This kind of fun can make people always addicted to it.