Enduring Cry

I can't believe people are complaining about this skill!

It is borderline OP. It is an AOE TAUNT at the PRESS OF A BUTTON, and although it costs a bit compared to other cheaper mana cost skills, it is very cheap for what it actually DOES. Add on the fact that it also gives endurance charges which make you even more of a beast and I can't believe people are complaining about recasting it every TEN seconds!? TEN seconds is a long time in a fast paced game like this. In fact, it is more than enough time to already be past one group of monsters and onto the next group, where you need to recast this anyway to re-taunt if you are running in a party. If you are running solo it's even easier because you only need to cast it before it expires, not to taunt the monsters.

This skill is GREAT. I used it on my tank marauder in 0.9.7 chaos in parties and I am currently using it again on my 0.9.8 hybrid E.S. tank/AoE DPS/control char. It provides the taunt effect I want (to keep the rest of the party safe) and also adds up my endurance charges that I use for additional defense (running all ES gear so no base armor) and discharge (when I need to DPS).

This skills effect is not, to me, worth recsting it every 10-13 seconds. I find it more of a bother than something I'd waste a slot to bind it to, let alone a gem slot in my armor.

I would recommend causing it to heal you based on the amount of enemies nearby, something like 3% of max per enemy, increasing .2% per enemy per level, so that it becomes more of a utility skill than a pre-combat annoyance.

As a Sword and board full tank Marauder this skill is amazing for group play. However if there is one thing I'm not really liking with it that would be the lack of a noticeable spell effect for the taunt effect. When in group play the taunt part is a lot more important to me than the Endurance charge part seeing as my character is sitting at 83% armor mitigation 20% dodge and 33% block with 75/75/62 resistances. So the mitigation was just overkill to me. However my friend and I had our Hardcore play-through end prematurely because my taunt on a rare mob ended without any really noticeable sign and had it turn a degree or two to promptly two shot my glass cannon Ranger friend who in a moment of hubris had ventured into melee range.

Even when not getting him killed though I found the skill to be a bit unfriendly to the user because of the lack of showing what was and wasn't taunted. Not only does the taunt effect only seem to work in an AoE smaller than that of the sprite for the skill but mobs also tend to take ~1second to actually react to being taunted. At this point you will already have had to taunt like 1-2 more times "to make sure". This isn't a huge deal but having some little red thingy show up above taunted mobs heads would surely be a really neat feature.

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Ryukira wrote:

At this point you will already have had to taunt like 1-2 more times "to make sure".

As much as I find this skill borderline OP and great, I will admittedly agree with the above sentiments.

Enduring Cry doesn't always "seem" to taunt everything within its radius.

However, as a possible explanation, I offer the following point to think about.

If you are soloing and there are 20 melee enemies around you, only about 8 of them can fit "around" your character to bash on you. The other 12 (in this example) melee enemies that cannot close in to your character to hit it will simply sometimes just turn around and walk or run away a bit. As the enemies next to you die, the "gap" will be filled in by a surrounding enemy.

So what could possibly be happening with Enduring Cry is that for a split second all the enemies ARE immediately taunted, but then once the AI for each enemy sees you are already "surrounded" it immediately drops the taunt aggro and looks around for something else to bash.

Ryukira, have you noticed this before and could this be an explanation to your friend's death scenario?

The death had nothing to do with that. The taunt had simply ran out and my friend ran into melee of a multi-shot rare and got taken out. However the mentioned scenario does not fit with what I've been seeing the skill do. Most of the time I run in to 10+ enemies spamming taunt and like half of them will be obviously taunted while the other half sort of seems to not really care. And if you keep running all of them will just drop aggro and run off to do whatever making me think there is a very stringent "leach range" on the taunt. Seeing as the skill doesn't mention any duration of the taunt and there is no visual feedback as to when the taunt ends it is just so hard to gauge whether you need to taunt again because the taunt has ended or not. This is really what killed my friend. I hadn't taunted in 3 or so seconds and had no way to tell if my taunt had ended or not seeing as I was the closest target giving me aggro but as the ranger ran past he ended up closer/more threatening/whatever and got aggro and promptly died hard.

Ah yes, I hear what you are saying now.. And you're right-- sometimes even if the taunt "works" it doesn't seem to last very long. I guess I just got used to it being that way.

When in a party we noticed right away that when fighting the swarms of monkeys (who run when an ally dies), I had to keep holding the Enduring Cry key down in order to taunt over and over and over to keep the monkeys around me (underneathe my friend's Rain of Fire spell). If I didn't keep retaunting they would run away when one of their allies died.

So i guess I developed a habit of using this skill more often than really necessary sometimes. I am not even sure if there is even "aggro" programmed into this game, perhaps this "taunt" works in a different manner entirely. Because you're right, if you start running away after doing it the monsters quickly lose interest in following you.

So I think this skill is pretty ridiculous the way it is now - the repeat spamming in order to max out on endurance charges is a) not fun, b) too easy -- which makes all other endurance-charge-based skills broken (Immortal Call and Discharge in particular). The gameplay mechanic of repeatedly spamming EC and then turning on IC for perma-physical-immunity should just not exist.

I'm not sure how best to solve this, but I'm thinking there needs to be some kind of limit to EC'ing off of the same set of mobs. i.e. once you've "used" some monster for an EC, it shouldn't be considered by further cries for the next X seconds (5 or so seems reasonable).

Possibly this could be tied to the taunt effect instead of a timer - no re-EC until the monster loses aggro on you, at which point it becomes eligible for another EC. This would mean you can only EC off a group of monsters once, until you either run away or have other party members attract their attention.

[Aside, as someone else already said, I think the skill description should be "1 charge per X nearby", instead of "X per 100" - that's just confusing.]

biggest problem with all those spells... you stand still in the middle of the fray casting it until the animation is through... this can kill you and it breakes the game's pace. @10s recast time is not worth taking imho.

as for the taunt... it's not always working. no idea why.

Could someone tell me how early can I obtain this as a reward as a Marauder?

I've played two pure tank marauders to 40+, and I realized the other day that I really, really hate this skill. I shouldn't have to hit a button every few seconds for as long as I'm fighting more than one or two enemies. It doesn't matter what skill we're talking about, or how effective it is; being forced to spam a skill like this is just stupid, and yes, I am being forced to do it.

I don't know how anyone could be in favor of this kind of gameplay. There's no challenge to it, absolutely no thinking required. There's nothing interesting about it at all. There's no real cost.

Charges should be a reward for some amount of risk. Make Enduring Cry a short-duration buff that taunts when cast and has a chance to add a charge every time the player is hit for the duration. This would alleviate the keyboard spam and the redundancy with Warlord's Mark.