Revision as of 20:15, 31 October 2006

Small Charms

Small charms are the most popular type of charm since they take up only 1x1 inventory space. Small charms with specific bonus can boost areas like resistance, life and damage potential quickly. The bonuses gained from small charms are similar to grand charms and large charms, except small and large charms can’t spawn with +skill modifier. The bonus gained from small charm is usually fraction of large and grand charms, but the decrease in bonus is proportional to the inventory space. (meaning that two perfect small charms can equal to one perfect large charm.)

Magic Prefixes

These are the prefixes that can spawn on a charm. The bonuses can stack with suffixes of similar type

Key:

(1) = level required for bonus

[1] = bonus

+ Defense

Defense bonus on charms is usually sought after by melee duelers when going against other melee characters. Barbs for example can benefit more from these charms as their warcry, shout, can increase the effectiveness two fold. The bonus gained from dexterity is applied at the same time as shout, so it increases the effectiveness of the charm further.

+ Base Damage

With high clvl requirements, these charms may not be attractive at first, but these charms, unlike bonuses gained from jewel, add onto the base damage of the weapon before the skill and stat bonuses are applied. Therefore, depending on the weapons and stats, the maximum gain can shoot up to 20+. +

Stamina

It is useful to have some extra stamina for lower level characters on larger maps. However, it’s not an essential bonus considering that using other charms with other bonuses can be more worthwhile.

+ Attack Rating

Attack Rating is also sought after by many melee characters. The classes that benefits the most from these charms are werewolf druid and assassin as their melee skill centers around getting as many hits as possible as fast as possible (therefore requiring more chance to hit). These attack rating charms also get boosted by stat / skill bonuses. However, these charms are usually a waste for classes like amazon (who already has high attack rating due to investments in dexterity) or casting classes such as sorceress and necromancers.

+ Mana

Pretty straightforward bonuses. Useful for sorceresses and necromancers who require more mana. But for high level characters, these charms become pretty much useless unless paired up with other useful suffix.

+ All Resistances

These charms are popular among all classes in terms of PvM and PvP. With 5% resist all charms, one can quickly fill up the resistance that is much needed in nightmare and hell mode. However, they are pretty hard to come by and cost a lot for trading.

Elemental Resistances

+ Cold Resistance

+ Fire Resistance

+ Lightning Resistance

+Poison Resistance

Individual resistance charms are pretty common to come by and are generally used when one needs specific needs for resistance.For example, a player might want to stock up on perfect lightning and fire resistance charms when facing Diablo to compensate the damage received. On the other hand, when a player is going against frozen orb sorceresses, who has cold mastery that cuts into cold resistance, he / she might want to stock up on as much cold charm as possible. These charms are pretty flexible, but shouldn’t be valued too much. It is generally recommended to use other charms that gives bonus to life or damage while saving the resistance charms in the stash for later.

+ Elemental Damage

Cold

Cold damage charms are good for increasing the chilling and freezing duration. The damage done isn’t too bad either. Stock up on few of these and you’ll find that monsters are slowed longer and die faster. The class that benefits the most from these charms is probably the Frostmaiden – amazon who uses cold skill for her main weapon, especially the freezing arrow, as the 1 second chilling duration adds onto the freezing duration as well. These charms give bonus only to physical damage dealth, not to any cold spell.

Fire

Fire charms do more damage then cold charms generally, but doesn’t slow the enemy down at the same time. The inventory spaces are better spent on either cold or lightning charms as lightning charms do more damage and cold charms gives you chilling effect.

Lightning

Lightning charms are the best in terms of damage dealt. A lot of players stock up on these charms to increase their maximum damage. These prefixes are more valuable when paired up with other suffix that deals poison damage or cold damage.

Poison

Poison prefixes are the most popular for dealing damage for several reasons. The poison damage cancels out monster healing, which is a problem in hell mode since monsters regenerate so fast. Also, not many monsters are immune to poison in hardest areas of the game – such as Throne of Destruction or Chaos Sanctuary. On top of that, poison damage dealt doesn’t get PvP penalty (penalty which decreases all the damage done to 1/4) so duelers like to stock up on lot of these. One other interesting thing about these prefixes is that if a charm is spawned with longer duration than 2 seconds, the damage doesn’t increase linearly. In fact, it can spawn with range of poison damage that’s a lot larger than the listed damage. For example, toxic prefixes have been known to spawn poison damage anywhere from 50 to 100 with duration ranging from 4 to 5 seconds. Most common duration range for any prefixes is from 4 to 10 seconds.

Magic Suffixes

+Base damage

This is a nice suffix that can stack on the prefixes that adds on the base damage of the weapon. It works exactly like its prefix counter-part, adding onto base weapon damage before other bonuses are applied. At the same time, it has lower level requirement than the prefixes – making it accessible by most characters faster.

+Faster hit recovery

Faster hit recovery bonus allows a player to recover faster from the stun animation. These stun animations activate after either spells or physical attack hits a character. This becomes important in areas where monsters hit fast and hard, such as cow level and throne of destruction. In dueling, stocking up on these charms can be the difference between winning or losing. There are many factors that can stun a player or even put them into a stunlock. Stunlock is a situation where character is stunned and cannot be maneuvered by the player temporarily because the damage received is larger than 1/12 of their life or the character receives series of attacks that has inherent stunning property (for example, assassin’s lightning sentry and mind blast hitting a character at the same time will cause stun lock). Usually, the stun length is proportional to the damage received – so larger the damage, the longer a character stays stunned. Considering these facts, this suffix can be important in dueling.

+Gold from monsters

This suffix is useful when one needs lots of gold quick. However, items like tarnhelm or goldwrap - which are common unique items that anyone can have access to have way more gold find % that makes this suffix looks sad. It’s generally recommended to drop or sell these charms for more useful charms.

+Magic find

This is possibly the suffix with most trade value since it helps one of the most popular routines in d2x, magic find runs. Since a character can have as much as 40 small charms in the inventory, the maximum magic find gain that one can achieve is 280%, which is a lot considering the best MF item in the game, Skulder’s Ire, only gives 123.75 % magic find at level 99. For more information about MF and specific chance for each items to drop, check on our magic find section.

+Life

These suffixes aren’t exactly valued unless a charm with perfect vita suffix is spawned. It’s always nice to have extra life as it makes a character last longer. However, it is recommended not to go overboard with stocking up these charms since the life boost isn’t that huge. Only exception is barbarians and druids who shoot for the highest life gained for dueling purposes. Barbarians and druids can gain huge life bonus from battle order and oak sage respectively, boosting the use of these suffixes further.

+Strength

Strength charms have no particular use except boosting the base stats far enough so one can use items that require more strength than a character has. This suffix is useful for characters like sorceresses or necromancers that may require extra boost in strength department to wear extra heavy armors or other equipments. The damage boost gained from this suffix is minimal, (only 1 ~ 2% bonus) so melee characters don’t need to look at this suffix twice.

+Faster walk

Faster walk suffix is useful for most characters as it increases the speed of walk and run. The bonus gained from this suffix is added with the bonus gained from other items. Stocking up on these charms can make a character super fast. For example, barbarian with 10 points into increased speed and 20 of these charms can run as fast as an arrow fired by amazon. The classes that benefit the most from these charms are melee characters as they have to close in before they can do damage. However, this suffix is useful for all the other characters as it allows them to escape the danger faster. There is no known cap on extra speed gained.

+Elemental Damage

Suffix can stack with the prefix, meaning the poison duration / damage could multiply if a charm has both poison suffix and prefix. There have been reports of small charms that do as much as 300+ damage over 10 seconds when paired by poison suffix and prefix, which is huge for dueling.

Generally speaking, the elemental damage gained from suffixes are miniscule compared to the prefix. However, the cold duration stacks with the prefix, making the cold suffix useful to some extent.

Fire damage gained from these suffixes is too miniscule to be useful in any situation. Unless these suffixes are spawned with nice prefix, it is recommended to drop the charms or sell them.

Lightning damage can stack nicely with prefix. The lightning damage from these suffixes are best complimented by huge damage from poison prefix.

Medium Charms

Medium charms have exactly the same prefixes / suffixes (except for few which has the same type of attributes anyway) as small charms except the fact that they are upgraded. The bonus gained from medium charms can be as much as twice the bonus from small charms. However, medium charms aren’t generally preferred over small charms because they take up 1x2 inventory space and is generally harder to spawn with perfect mods.

For bonus descriptions, refer to small charm details above.

Magic Prefixes

Defense

+ Base Damage

+Stamina

+Attack rating

+Magic Find

+Mana

+ All resist

+Elemental resist

+Elemental damage

Magic Suffixes

+Base damage

+Dexterity

+Faster hit recovery

+Gold find

+Life

+Strength

+Faster Run/ Walk

+Elemental damage

Large Charms