Enduring Cry

I tried making a tanky melee that uses Enduring Cry, and after using it for a while it's just not worth keeping it, having to cast it every 5-8 seconds is incredibly annoying and self-destructive when you're playing melee.
Another thing is that Enduring Cry doesn't even come close to working as a means to aggro mobs, weaker party members would be better off just kicking me and using decoy totems instead, since they actually work.


tl;dr: Needs longer duration or less cast-spam requirement, and make the aggro function actually useful.

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Vipermagi wrote:

You can easily improve the Endurance Charge duration (and get more of 'em at the same time), and Faster Casting makes a noticable difference on cast time.

However, since you're saying they're "not worth it" you're likely not in Merciless, so yeah, don't really have to bother yet.

If you don't have decent base armor to fall back on endurance charges lose a lot of their effectiveness. Especially if you don't have increased charge cap and duration.

Relatively long cast time for mediocre damage reduction isn't worth it in a dodgy build. Even in merciless. But then a dodgy build is a very different thing from a more general armour build. Of course dodgy builds have their own host of problems, and 9 charges is totally worth it if you can get it. Base charges tho are just terrible without armour to multiply their effect.

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Vipermagi wrote:

Reducing all incoming Physical damage by 15-20% is pretty good in my books (Evasion builds tend to take fairly large hits), and it helps a lot in capping your Resistances. If you're already capped, it defends against Elemental Curses. Plenty of reason to use Endurance Charges if you ask me.

I am still not sure what triggered that response though, lol.

Gains versus costs for actually getting those charges. Dex builds don't always have the ability to go snatch up endurance duration boni. Or cast speed increases.

Also I think I was REALLY tired when I wrote that response so I don't know what I was really responding to either. Mostly just saying that the way endurance charges work 15% damage reduction will be a drop in the bucket in most builds outside of armor builds.

Personally I just use Warlord's Mark whn I want endurance charges. uch better than Cry.

Most annoying skill,even tho having 7 endurance charges is pretty amazing i am too tired to recast it every 7 seconds.

And against large pack of fast mobs it can be very very dangerous. Id rather stun them with Ground slam rather than use enduring cry and get swarmed before i can start attacking.

I hope there will be unqiue that refresh endurance charges on attack or they make increase duration support work correctly with endurance charges.

I assume the lack of response from GGG is simply because they are reworking melee and intend to reveal all the changes at once. That said, this skill is poorly implemented simply because the other two charge types get built up while doing what you normally do, kill stuff. This skill does nothing immediately advantageous, takes forever to build, is a pain to keep built, and is nearly useless on bosses (7 X 4 seconds to get to full? are you kidding?).

Some random ideas:
Make it an aura that constantly recasts itself every 4 seconds (so the charges would still go up and down depending on danger). You could even give it a smaller than normal range such that only other meleers would get the benefit.
Add a passive to gain an endurance charge when you get hit.
Make it add charges based on the monster level in proximity (thus giving full charges on a boss instantly).
As others have said: lose one charge at a time vs. all of them. make it last much longer.


Personally i like the first idea best. If I want to build a tank and spend the passives to get all the charges, I shouldn't have to constantly worry about keeping them up (This isn't fun. Taking big hits to the face IS fun). Paying a fee (mana or life) for that is fine though.

Related: Why on earth did you put a cooldown on enduring cry instead of immortal call? That just seems completely backwards to me. Reduce enduring cry to as close to zero as you can make it within the engine and give immortal call a 10-30 second cooldown. Without making ANY major changes you'd just have at least made this skill somewhat useful again.

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Vipermagi wrote:

A cooldown on IC would either make the combination instantly useless, or it would be a pointless change. Either you wouldn't be able to keep IC up, or the duration on IC surpasses the cooldown, respectively.

Unless I'm not understanding something, the entire point is that you shouldn't be able to keep IC up all the time. Endurance charges + armor are your 'normal' mitigation and IC is for an anticipated big couple hits. Getting 2-4 seconds of physical immunity every 10-30 seconds seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Edit, in its current form, completely buffed and qualitied, IC will give quite an extended period of time of immunity (had to research the outer limits). >11 seconds with just fully leveled and quality. Passives extend it even further. So I see where you're going and I also see how you could build around this to get nearly constant physical immunity in the current game (albeit it'd be a pain in the neck and require a build specific for this).

My assertion is that this probably isn't a good thing for the game because it makes for one stupidly OP tank build but many many crappy ones. Instead, nerf IC a bit so that it can't be up all the time, but at the same time make the average tank build better through buffing endurance charges.