Endurance management

Is it generally considered better to build for increasing maximum endurance, faster recovery, or reducing actual endurance costs. Why?

Depends on the AT, and the Powers.

Example /rad as a secondary for Defenders, or Corruptors, is -extremely- expensive. So its mandatory to build for such.

To extend what Chriffer said, the traditional rule of thumb is "one endred in one attack pays for one toggle."

Faster recovery, in large chunks (e.g. "getting Stamina") is a major improvement as well.

All of the above, and be liberal in your use of inspirations. It sounds obvious but a lot of people forget they're even there. I developed a set of macros for my tray that allows me to automate conversion of other inspirations to blues. I mainly use them on endurance-heavy toons (my War Mace/Shield Brute was what drove me to create it), but they can also be handy in the earlier levels when you don't have quite as much endurance reduction and recovery available to you.

Put this in a text file called end.txt in your root CoH folder:

$$macro T1 "insp_combine "Insight" "Catch a Breath"$$insp_combine "Enrage" "Catch a Breath"$$insp_combine "Luck" "Catch a Breath"$$insp_combine "Respite" "Catch a Breath"$$insp_combine "Sturdy" "Catch a Breath""
$$macro T2 "insp_combine "Keen Insight" "Take a Breather"$$insp_combine "Focused Rage" "Take a Breather"$$insp_combine "Good Luck" "Take a Breather"$$insp_combine "Dramatic Improvement" "Take a Breather"$$insp_combine "Rugged" "Take a Breather""
$$macro T3 "insp_combine "Uncanny Insight" "Second Wind"$$insp_combine "Righteous Rage" "Second Wind"$$insp_combine "Phenomenal Luck" "Second Wind"$$insp_combine "Resurgence" "Second Wind"$$insp_combine "Robust" "Second Wind""
$$macro END "insp_exec_name "Catch a Breath"$$insp_exec_name "Take a Breather"$$insp_exec_name "Second Wind""

\bindloadfilesilent "PATH_TO_COH_FOLDER/end.txt"

The goal of being able to fight non-stop (or at least a really long time) without running out of endurance can be thought of as trying to minimize your net end burn, which is all the end you're spending using powers minus the rate at which you're recovering end back.

Typically, the scale of your end outlay is way bigger than your recovery. The majority of it is typically found in your attacks, mezzes, or whatever it is your character normally spams in the course of a combat. Usually, you gain the biggest bang for the least investment (in slots, market costs, etc.) by slotting end reduction in these powers. Edit: Note that this isn't saying slotting end is a bigger priority than other things in these powers, just that slotting end reduction in these powers usually shaves the most off of your net burn rate.

Your next biggest outlay of endurance is usually toggles, though this varies widely and depends a lot on the specific powers in question and how many you run. Broadly speaking, armor/mez toggles and things like Leadership or similar buffs fall into a range of ongoing endurance costs that put them below attacks in cost. Putting the equivalent of one SO end reduction in these is usually good, though exceptions abound.

Once you've done this sort of slotting, you've usually lowered your end expenditures down to a level where increases in your recovery start to have noticeable effects on your time-to-empty (the time it takes you to run out of end). Picking up Stamina is usually the next biggest chunk you can take out of the net end burn rate, unless you're playing a powerset with a reasonable substitute, such as Quick Recovery.

After this, your next smaller improvements are the recovery uniques and +endurance procs. Then things like +recovery set bonuses as well as +maxEnd accolades and set bonuses.

It may seem not worthwhile to keep caring about adding more and more smaller benefit, but there's a nifty thing at work here. The time it takes you to run out of end from a full blue bar is MaxEnd/NetEndBurn. 1/x approaches infinity as x approaches zero, so the smaller you get the denominator, the bigger that number gets, and as you approach zero in the denominator, small decreases in the net burn have stronger effects on how long you can fight.

this was all quite helpful snice i was wondering about the best way to get more end or whathave you because of my new end hungry tanker i made

Here's the Wiki article on Endurance.

Pay special attention to the Numbers section. Increasing your total amount of endurance pays off in having more on hand as well as having greater recovery.

Good luck!

Endurance management depends a lot on what AT and power set you pick. For instance, my Archery / Energy Blaster literally cannot run out of endurance without getting sapped or debuffed... he only has Stamina and some minor +recovery from IOs (no uniques) but he runs no toggles except Hover and has good end reduction slotting so he never runs out. My Plant / Storm Controller, on the other hand, will (when fully IOed) have an endurance usage of around 6 end / second... no possible slotting can get him endurance neutral so I'll have to be careful in long fights about what to use. Be sure to get an idea how much endurance management you actually need... it might end up being "all I can get isn't enough", but it also might end up being "Stamina plus a couple accolades or set bonuses is plenty". If you overslot for end reduction / recovery it will hurt your build since those extra slots / set bonuses could be used for other things with no reduction in performance.

As far as managing endurance goes, be sure to get all the +endurance accolades. They're free and not only give more endurance, but also more recovery (since recovery works on a percentage of total endurance, more endurance = more recovered per tick). If that and Stamina aren't enough, you have several options:

1) Frankenslot powers for high endurance reduction. Frankenslotting (using a mix of set IOs to get maximum enhancement value without worrying about bonuses) can give you very high levels of enhancement in a power compared to SOs or even full sets. However, remember that endurance reduction is not linear, it uses the formula end use = base cost / (1 + end reduction) so the more of it you have in a power, the less effective more will be. Going from 50-60% to 80% endurance reduction helps, but not as much as you'd think... so don't dismiss using a full set (or 5 of a set) instead, especially if it has decent endurance reduction already. That extra 20-30% end reduction from frankenslotting may not be worth losing the set bonuses. The real benefit to frankenslotting is that it's dirt cheap if you pick the right IOs... frankenslot around level 27-32 or so and you'll probably spend less than you would buying new SOs at 35, 40, 45, and 50.

2) Endurance and recovery set bonuses. Not only can these add up to a decent boost once you stack several, they often only require two or three pieces of a set to get so they can be combined with frankenslotting.

3) Recovery uniques. These things are pricey, but very useful. Stick a Numina's +Regen / + Recovery and a Miracle +Recovery in Health and you're getting about the same recovery bonus as unslotted Stamina. You'll probably pay over 100 million for the pair, but it can be worth it.

4) Performance Shifter Chance for +Endurance proc. Also a bit expensive (though cheaper than the uniques), you can slot one of these in Stamina for a chance to get extra endurance back every 10 seconds. If you do, be sure to replace one of the EndMod enhancements with a Performance Shifter EndMod IO... you'll get a 5% movement set bonus. If you have another recovery auto power like Quick Recovery you can slot a Performance Shifter there too... it's not unique.

Finally, decide on what you actually want to be able to do. While it's nice to be truly endurance neutral and therefore able to fight forever without worrying about your blue bar, in practice you only have to really worry about that if you want to solo AVs or GMs (or like running STFs and Khans a lot). Most fights, even with AVs if teamed, don't last more than a couple minutes. If you can last three minutes before running dry, you'll probably be fine since you can recover a bit between fights. If you're on a steamroller team that doesn't stop long enough to get any endurance back before hitting the next spawn you'll probably be getting inspirations fast enough to just use blues. Likewise, if you have Energy Absorption or Power Sink recharging every 30 seconds and slotted to fully refill your blue bar by hitting a decent sized spawn, you really only need to be able to last 30 seconds (and have some endurance left to fire off your recharge power). Being able to last longer is better, especially against single AVs where you lack enough targets to fully recover, but it's less important than it would be without the end recharge power.

If you don't mind a little math, the best thing to do is figure out your normal attack chain and add up the total endurance required, then divide by the time that chain takes. That gives you your endurance per second from attacking, now add the EPS from your toggles and any other click powers like heals you might use. This total is how much endurance you burn per second when fighting flat out... if you can get your recovery above that number you're fully endurance neutral. If you can't, the difference is the amount of endurance you lose per second from your blue bar... divide your total endurance by that number to see how long you can fight before needing to stop or pop blues. If that number is high (several minutes) you're probably fine. If it's low but you have a good endurance recovery power that recharges faster than you run dry, you're probably fine. If it's low and you don't have a recharge power, you need to either slot more end reduction, add more recovery, or manage toggles and attacks carefully to avoid burning too much endurance.

Or just do what I plan to on my Controller: carry plenty of blues. Three tornadoes and two lightning storms at once will be way too much fun to hold back... even if it does burn more endurance per second than a Regen Scrapper with Stamina and Physical Perfection can produce.

Depends on the character and the plans I've got for an IO build.

In general, I find that adding more end reduction to powers is a better and more cost-effective solution than building for +recovery. I usually shoot for 40-50% on most builds, and 50-70% when I can get away with it. If my goal is to fight forever, I've found that adding endurance reduction to attacks and spammable powers is the most cost-effective way to do this... especially for characters that have large numbers of toggles, like Scrappers or Brutes with the Fighting pool, or characters with Leadership. I like to reserve the final slot in attacks for a dam/end, rech/end, acc/rech/end, or a generic End Reduction enhancement for endurance management.

Sometimes, however, this is not viable. If I'm looking to increase my character's damage output with procs, or if I need the 5th bonus of a power to further the overall goal of the build (Positional Defense bonuses frequently come as the last bonus in a set), then my hands are tied in adding more endurance reduction to powers. I have to make do with the end reduction naturally in the set.

In this case, adding +recovery can do a great deal to mitigate my endurance costs. Through +recovery uniques, Stamina, the performance shifter proc, and +recovery bonuses scattered throughout sets, it's possible to add huge amounts of recovery to the build.

The upside to this is that it's slot efficient. An extra slot in Health and Stamina will let you slot both recovery uniques and the +end proc on any character, giving you the recovery equivalent to unslotted Stamina (on top of regular, slotted Stamina) and a 20% chance for 10 free endurance points every 10 seconds. This does a ton to help with endurance management and is a great option for performance builds, where you need to make every slot count for damage dealing, mezzing, debuffing, or making your character more survivable.

The downside to this is cost. The Numina and Miracle uniques are very expensive, and the +end proc isn't cheap either. Any character with Fitness can use them, and most characters will invest in the Fitness pool, making for a lot of buyer competition for these enhancements. I didn't even include the Panacea unique here because it just costs too much money to be worthwhile, in my opinion. You do have to pay quite a bit for this slot efficiency. Frankenslotting for end reduction is the cheaper option by far.

There are also a lot of +recovery bonuses floating around in the sets, and you will probably pick up 10-15% +recovery without even building for it. These help, but aren't enough to eliminate endurance issues by themselves.

Some ATs and Powersets give you access to endurance efficiency tools as a part of the package, too, which can be very useful if they're available.

In general, I use a combination of all methods by necessity. Endurance efficiency is important, but it tends not to be the focus of my build goals. I do make some slot or power decisions with an eye toward lasting longer in a fight, but these tend to be tacked on to the main goal of any given character build.

Start with a goal, give yourself a realistic budget, and build accordingly. You can't not get at least some end reduction if you use sets, and it's similarly hard to avoid +recovery bonuses. It's just a matter of whether or not to add slots or money to get more.

tl;dr version:

End Reduction is better and cheaper, but demands more slots, which may get in the way of your overall build goal.

+Recovery is good enough to do the job without soaking up a lot of slots, but will require a more substantial inf investment.

Most IO builds will have some combination of both, but those with higher budgets will often migrate to +recovery uniques in order to save slots for other things.

Edit: Maximum endurance is nice, but not really viable to build for. You can get the accolades for an extra 10 end, and you can get a few bonuses here and there, but it's just not really possible to build for loads.

Something to note: because endurance reduction is asymptotic, each EndRedux does considerably less than the last. You're pushing your costs closer to zero, so you're getting less benefit the closer you get. It ends up being far more useful to up the benefits you get from using those powers (as in most cases you're looking at damage, you want more DPE).

Gob, I'm very surprised those insp commands work for you. The multiple quotation marks per line tend to mess up the game's parser. Not only that, but when you copy these commands in game in the chat bar, all multi-word insps have to have an underscore between the words (example catch_a_breath) or they simply won't be read as a single entity; it doesn't work like some other commands where you can do part of the name or all of the name with spaces.

If it does work with the multiquotes, you really should change it to the underscores instead, as you are taking up extra spaces with the extra quotes which might make the difference in getting that last command on there. For instance, from the commands in my guide the small and large endurance insp command can both fit the break free type of insp, just not the rezzing type; only the medium sized one cannot fit the break free or rez type.

I've never tried it from a /bindloadfile but I'll have to go check it now

Edit: well I can't check it cause there is some sort of error with my account

Endred > Max End > End rec.

Realistically, combine all three in some fashion. I recently made a scrapper build with over 4 1/2 end/sec recovery.