On the subject of Charges (Endurance, Power, and Frenzy)

Fair enough. Witch Builds feel a little empty/homogenous now, though, between summons not transfering between zones and no power charges.

You basically pick an element and go for the same general passives.

Though, I suppose they felt homogenous with Power Charges before, so its not much of a change :(

Power charges suck at the moment. They are the same or worse than 0.92 when they were supposed to be buffed compared to 0.92.

30% increased critical chance is like 2% with staves, and less on some other weapons like maces. 0.92 was 2%, which is the same or better than the current — supposedly buffed— version.
2% wasn't even good in 0.92 for melee users compared to the DPS benefit they could get from attack speed — in fact 3% wasn't even as good I don't think.

I hope power charges can be useful for melee users now as opposed to just spell casters, but at the moment, it probably sucks for BOTH.

Considering the fact that the number of charges has been halved (or more than halved), and are harder to get, I don't think the bonuses on endurance or frenzy are good enough either, although they seem to be pretty close.
It takes a LOT of points to invest in various charge clusters — points which could be spent in a LOT of damage or speed (or other) modifiers instead.

Critical strikes in general got a nerf for 0.9.3, with the default multiplier being reduced to 150%, down from 200%.

This means a critical strike gives 50% less benefit than before, and also any +% crit multiplier mods also give half benefit compared to before.

Charges in general also got a variety of nerfs. So yeah power charges do suck ATM.

Assuming a weapon with 7.5% crit chance, and the default 150% multiplier, three power charges works out to roughly a 7.1% average damage increase. That's not terrible since it's multiplicative with your final damage, but hardly worth the effort.

Damn.... yeah that too!

That's another reason that explains why 1 power charge only gave me 0.8% extra DPS :\
(why that's half(my crit rate was 5%) of your theoretical value, I don't know)

I wish I reported this back in the alpha, but I didn't run a character using them at the time.

I know it's in beta, and that this is a new change, but that aside I was pretty upset to learn that the 10 skill points I just invested resulted in a 0.8% increase in DPS for like 20% of the time I am fighting — pretty ridiculous.

Err, I made a mistake, in my example above, 3 power charges only results in a 3.375% average damage increase.
I was including the extra average damage from the existing crit chance, not just from the increased crit chance from the power charges.

so yeah, it's even more miserable.

For 5% crit chance, theoretically it's only 2.25% from three charges. That pretty much matches up with your observed 0.8% increase, rounding can probably account for the difference.

Summons REALLY have to be able to go with you from zone to zone, even to town.

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Rory wrote:

0.9.3 removed many of the "Gain ____ Charge on ____" Passives from the Passive Tree. This is an intentional change, in preparation for the inclusion of many more skills that use and expend charges. For now, this limits characters building Power Charge characters.

I'm not sure what to think of this idea. I mean, it's basically just a convoluted way of giving certain abilities a cooldown without calling it a cooldown. But I guess I'll reserve judgment for now.

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gilligan wrote:

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Rory wrote:

0.9.3 removed many of the "Gain ____ Charge on ____" Passives from the Passive Tree. This is an intentional change, in preparation for the inclusion of many more skills that use and expend charges. For now, this limits characters building Power Charge characters.

I'm not sure what to think of this idea. I mean, it's basically just a convoluted way of giving certain abilities a cooldown without calling it a cooldown. But I guess I'll reserve judgment for now.

The fundamental mechanisms are different. Cooldowns require time... charges require actions.

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zeto wrote:

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gilligan wrote:

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Rory wrote:

0.9.3 removed many of the "Gain ____ Charge on ____" Passives from the Passive Tree. This is an intentional change, in preparation for the inclusion of many more skills that use and expend charges. For now, this limits characters building Power Charge characters.

I'm not sure what to think of this idea. I mean, it's basically just a convoluted way of giving certain abilities a cooldown without calling it a cooldown. But I guess I'll reserve judgment for now.

The fundamental mechanisms are different. Cooldowns require time... charges require actions.

Not really.

With how charge generation works an ability that has a set CD and an ability that needs charges both require waiting a certain amount of time before being usable. It is clearly not a case of one requiring time while the other requires actions, because both require time.

As I see it the main difference is that one of them contains a random element while the other is a constant. The player is always in control of when to trigger cooldowns, and consequently, of when the ability will be available (note how this also requires actions). Charge generation, in contrast, is always at least partly tied to variables outside of the player's control (at least as it currently works). The player can not decide when to crit or when a minion should die, for example, leaving the implicit cooldown to be determined by the RNG.

To me this just looks like another case of where they think they're giving the player more control, while in reality it's the opposite.