Endurance Charges Overpowered?

Why is it that Endurance Charges are so unbelievably powerful for armor builds that they can double or even quadruple your EHP, yet the other charges are nowhere near as useful? Doesn't this break the design for charges, i.e. that they should be optional? Because there's literally no reason why any armor build should forego endurance charges.

For example, a character with Nine endurance charges can reach the Armour cap vs a 3,000 damage opponent using just 27,000 Armour. A character using only five Endurance charges will only have one THIRD of the EHP. Why should Armour's efficacy be concentrated so heavily on this one mechanic?

even full stack of those charges make any melee feel underpowered in endgame

the current power of endurance charges are the only thing that actualy allows one to be something that might be called "tanky".
while i agree that it seems silly that you can get a fully tank focused templar or Marauder without endurance charges and will be less tanky then a Ranger that goes for a heavy endurance build with endurance charges.. it would require a major rebalance of a major part of the passive tree to fix it.
i don't know how far GGG is willing to go in that regard, but i would welcome it.

Even with 9 charges you can still easily be killed end game. They're nice, but no where near as useful as you're making them out to be.

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Nituvious wrote:

Even with 9 charges you can still easily be killed end game. They're nice, but no where near as useful as you're making them out to be.

ofcourse you can still die with maxed endurance charges, but without charges you can not even go near mobs for the simple fact that you might get killed in ~5 hits.

there is a reason everybody and there mom are ranged, wand templars and bowrauders + EK spamming shadows are everywhere, there are few, if any, meele builds in endgame, especialy in HC.

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Strill wrote:

Why is it that Endurance Charges are so unbelievably powerful for armor builds that they can double or even quadruple your EHP, yet the other charges are nowhere near as useful? Doesn't this break the design for charges, i.e. that they should be optional? Because there's literally no reason why any armor build should forego endurance charges.

Try them out in end game after 70lvl and youll see how "usefull" they are...

you can not tank without them. not overpowered in any way.
Armor as it is, is completely useless for a tank without endu charges, take them away and tanks die like CI characters did (especially melee).

Best case for endurance charges at 9 is that they could boost your EH by a factor of five, so OP is not exaggerating at all. Most people dont' run around constantly with 9 charges, though. Even 8 is a stretch for most builds, and that's with two signets switched on. 6-endurance build with tank switches; it's situational.

Having spent a long time with armour and understanding how it scales very well, I must agree that endurance charges are a little too good. They allow you to cap reduction on a very tight armour budget sometimes, or in very high damage situations otherwise.

I honestly think the next logical step in tuning defensive systems is to cut endurance to 4% reduction per charge. That's a counter balance to the now MUCH higher armour budget. Then, best case at 9 charges would be to boost EHP by a factor of 4.6, instead - if you have exactly 54% reduction without charges.

But, anyway, the number you choose for them has to do more with where you want the armour cap to go, and how drastic you want increasing gains on armour to be - not really with the best-case EH boost. Because you'll never be in your best case.

Putting a new perspective on the issue: stacking charges lowers the armour cap way too much. In my opinion.

cheers

The design problem with endurance charges is that they offer increasing return, while frenzy & power charges are strictly linear. As long as they work this way, they will be required for melee builds.

If it is working as intended, they might as well add 4% Block per Frenzy charge until they fix melee another way.

There is a hidden problem with switching endurance to yield linear returns on EH, though.

It ends up with endurance being way more powerful in a life build than in a reduction build. That's backwards, and I don't like it. So I'm just proposing trimming back on those increasing gains a little bit.