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Charms are one of the more unique additions to Path of Exile 2. They function like a hybrid between trinkets and utility flasks, designed to automatically trigger under specific conditions and provide temporary defensive benefits. Unlike flasks, you cannot manually activate them—they're entirely reactive. Understanding how quality affects charms is important if you want to squeeze out maximum value.

How Charms Work

• Activation: A charm triggers when its condition is met. For example, a Ruby Charm activates when you take Fire damage from a Hit.
• Charges: Each charm has a limited number of charges (often 40). Using the charm consumes a portion of these, commonly 20.
• Duration: When triggered, a charm provides its listed benefit (such as +25% Fire Resistance) for the duration shown.
• Charge Recovery: Charges are gained by killing monsters, refilling at wells, or reaching checkpoints—similar to flask mechanics.

Players can equip up to three charms at once, depending on their belt and passive tree. Multiple charms of the same type won't double-trigger; only one activates per condition at a time.

Quality on Charms

Quality adds a percentage increase to the duration of a charm's effect. The base Ruby Charm lasts 4.00 seconds, while the Superior Ruby Charm (with 11% quality) lasts 4.40 seconds. This may not sound like much, but over multiple activations, the extra uptime can smooth out defensive gaps significantly.

Currently, quality on charms cannot be crafted. There are only two known ways to obtain it:

1. A random drop that already has quality.
2. Corrupting a charm, which has a chance to add quality (but comes with the usual corruption risks).

Unlike flasks where quality improves charges used or gained, charms are straightforward: more quality equals longer effect duration.

For players pushing into harder encounters, even a small extension in charm uptime can mean the difference between survival and defeat. Since quality charms are rare and not something you can directly craft, it's often smarter to plan your builds around the ones you find or trade for. And if you're looking to speed up your progress, you can always buy PoE 2 Curerncy cheap to get the resources needed for trading high-quality charms.

Practical Implications

• Longer Resist Windows: For charms that provide elemental resistances, quality can mean surviving big elemental bursts. Even half a second extra coverage can be life-saving in maps with frequent damage spikes.
• Consistency: Because charms trigger automatically, you can't time them manually like flasks. Having a longer baseline duration ensures better overlap with subsequent damage events.
• Investment Value: High-quality charms will likely hold strong trade value. Since they can't be improved through standard crafting, players looking to optimize defenses will pay extra for even 10–20% quality.
• Build Flexibility: Longer uptime reduces the need to run redundant charms of the same type, freeing up slots for other defensive or utility options.

Summary

Charms in Path of Exile 2 act as reactive defenses that share many mechanics with flasks but can't be manually activated. Quality directly increases their duration, which translates to more reliable uptime in dangerous encounters. Since quality is rare and cannot be crafted, superior versions like the one shown in the example will become sought-after items, especially for players chasing high-end optimization.