Last Epoch 1.0: How Does Endurance Defense Mechanic Work? - Endurance Explained & Enhancement Tips

Endurance is a defense mechanic in Last Epoch. Since many players don’t know much about it yet, in this guide, we will focus on discussing how this Endurance mechanism works.

Before jumping in, I want to remind you that this guide is only for the first cycle after the release of Last Epoch 1.0, so some information will change as the game mechanics change later.

Endurance Mechanic Explained

Endurance is a layer of defense inherent to all Last Epoch characters that reduces damage done to health below a certain threshold by a certain percentage. By default, a character below 20% of their maximum health takes 20% less damage. The cutoff below this damage reduction is called Endurance Threshold.

Endurance mitigates many damages and works on hits and damage over time. You can view Endurance Threshold in-game by hovering your mouse over the health bar.

A common misconception is that when you are hit, your Endurance must be below your Endurance Threshold in order for Endurance to reduce the damage to the hit. But that’s not true.

If you are above Endurance Threshold and an incoming hit puts you below Endurance Threshold, endurance will only mitigate the portion of the damage below Endurance Threshold.

For example, let’s say my health is 300 and my Endurance Threshold is 200. If I take 150 points of damage, stamina does not affect the first 100 points of damage. The last 50 points of damage are reduced by 20% to 40 points, for a total of 140 points of damage taken.

Another thing to note is that Endurance doesn’t work well with Ward. Endurance only reduces damage done to health, which means you can’t play a low-health Ward build and constantly benefit from being below your Endurance Threshold. Regardless of your current health, damage done to your Ward is not mitigated by endurance.

How To Enhance Endurance Defense Layer?

However, if you don’t choose to invest in Last Epoch Gold to improve your endurance, it’s not a very useful layer of defense.

If you have 1000 health, the damage to the bottom 200 health is reduced by 20%, meaning it takes 250 raw damage to kill you from your Endurance Threshold.

All in all, your effective health is 800 plus 250, or 1050. Therefore, for a purely health-based build, endurance will only give you 5% effective HP by default.

There are two ways to make endurance a stronger layer of defense: increasing Endurance and increasing Endurance Threshold.

Increasing endurance means increasing the percentage by which endurance reduces damage taken. For example, giving the “+15% Endurance” affix will reduce the damage you take from 20% to 35%. Endurance is capped at 60% and cannot be increased.

Increasing your Endurance Threshold is primarily accomplished through modifiers, which increase it by a fixed amount. So if you have 1000 health, then +70 Endurance Threshold will increase your Endurance Threshold from 200 to 270. Fortunately, Endurance Threshold has no cap, although there’s no point in raising it above your maximum health.

Why Increase Endurance To 60%?

So, is it worth investing in endurance? If you’re a Ward-based build, there’s no reason to invest anything in durability.

If you are a health-based build, my opinion is that you should at least invest in increasing endurance to 60%, even if you choose not to increase Endurance Threshold above its base value.

Why should you get 60% Endurance? Let’s do the math. If you have 60% Endurance, and your additional Endurance Threshold is zero, then the bottom 20% of your health gets 60% damage reduction.

When you have 1000 HP, the bottom 200 becomes 500 effective HP, for a total of 1300. At 20% Endurance, it only has 1050 effective HP. Therefore, increasing from 20% Endurance to 60%, effective HP increases by approximately 24%.

Given that doing so only requires three Non-Exalted suffixes on gear, or a suffix and an Empowered Monolith Blessing, it’s almost certainly worth it. In my opinion, until your Endurance reaches 60%, you could prioritize the endurance percentage suffix over the health suffix.

Endurance Threshold Suffix vs Flat Health Suffix

So how do we judge whether Endurance Threshold is appropriate?

For example, T5 Endurance Threshold suffix on the glove provides an Endurance Threshold of 56-75. For comparison, T5 flat health suffix on gloves also provides 56-75 health. Which one of them is better?

Let’s start with some basic math. 60% damage reduction is 2.5 times effective HP. When endurance is 60%, each point of health protected by endurance is actually worth 2.5 health points.

So, +1 Endurance Threshold essentially replaces 1 health with 2.5 health, for a net value of 1.5 health. Ignoring all other context, you can think of +100 Endurance Threshold as equivalent to 150 extra health.

Also, +100 Endurance Threshold is actually even better than having 150 extra health, since reducing damage is preferable to just having more health, even though both have the same effective HP. This is because it’s easier to restore 1000 health than 2000 health.

By this logic, Endurance Threshold is better than health point by point because it has better synergy with healing, regen, and leech. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

Health itself has several advantages. The most obvious benefit is that health actually has a multiplier. There are many places where you can gain “increased health” through equipment and passives.

On the other hand, there is no “increase Endurance Threshold” modifier in the game. If you have 50% more health, then +1 health is actually +1.5 health, which in itself is enough to close the gap in effective HP with Endurance Threshold.

But since your base Endurance Threshold is 20% of health, every 1 health is an additional 0.2 Endurance Threshold. If you have 60% Endurance, then an Endurance Threshold of 0.2 is actually 0.3 Health.

All in all, health is increased by 50%, endurance is increased by 60%, and the +100 health modifier is fixed at +195 effective HP.

On top of that, health has the advantage of avoiding stuns. In Last Epoch, the chance of being stunned is based on damage taken plus the sum of your max health and current Ward, so having more health makes you less likely to be stunned.

However, many incoming attacks will occur when you are close to your maximum health, rather than when you are near or below Endurance Threshold. When you are near maximum health, increasing your Endurance Threshold may not prevent stun unless your Endurance Threshold is very high.

Therefore, Max Health modifier provides more reliable protection against stuns than Endurance Threshold modifier.

So, would you rather have a T5 Endurance Threshold suffix on your glove or a T5 flat health suffix?

Endurance Threshold provides less life because of the lack of multipliers. However, Endurance Threshold may be more useful when considering its synergy with health regeneration.

Personally, I prefer Endurance Threshold modifier over the flat health modifier. Because I usually have enough layers of defense to slow down incoming damage, allowing me to reliably recover if I take significant damage.

Another thing to note is that T6 and T7 Endurance Threshold modifiers are significantly stronger than T6 and T7 flat health modifiers.

Generally speaking, T6 modifier is about 50% stronger than T5, and T7 modifier is about 100% stronger than T5. Health seems to follow this pattern, but Endurance Threshold does not.

T6 Endurance Threshold is about 80% stronger than T5, and T7 is about 150% stronger than T5. Why this happens, I don’t know. The upshot of this is that Exalted Endurance Threshold is actually a valuable stat, especially on slots that can’t roll percentages or mix health, such as Rings and Relics.

That’s all I want to cover about Endurance mechanic in this guide. Hope this helps. Looking forward to seeing you in the game.