POE2 Currency continues the legacy of its predecessor, offering players even deeper customization, more complex mechanics, and new ways to enhance their characters. One such system is the addition of powerful passive skills that can be applied to gear, such as Storm Charge. This passive skill is a significant component of many end-game builds, especially for players who rely on elemental damage and critical strikes.

Storm Charge is a powerful passive skill that grants notable bonuses to critical hits and elemental damage. Here's what the skill offers:

40% increased elemental damage if you've dealt a critical hit recently

20% increased critical chance

The primary bonus from Storm Charge is a 40% increase in elemental damage. This bonus lasts for 4 seconds after you land a critical hit. The key word here is "recently," meaning that the bonus only activates if you've dealt a critical hit in the past 4 seconds. This gives you a short but powerful boost to your elemental damage, helping you deal significantly more damage when you can maintain a steady stream of critical hits.

In addition to the elemental damage boost, Storm Charge also provides 20% increased critical chance. This helps you land critical hits more frequently, which not only triggers Storm Charge's elemental damage bonus but can also enhance other parts of your build that rely on critical hits.

The way Storm Charge works is simple yet highly effective in optimizing your damage output. If you manage to deal a critical hit, you instantly trigger the 40% increased elemental damage for the next 4 seconds. This bonus applies to all elemental damage you deal during that time, not just the damage from the critical hit itself. So even if you have a steady way to deal critical hits, but your primary source of damage is elemental (and doesn't necessarily deal critical hits), you can still benefit from this boost.

This feature is what makes Storm Charge so valuable in optimized end-game builds, where maximizing elemental damage is key to defeating the toughest enemies.

While you can gain Storm Charge by investing skill points in the passive skill tree, there’s an alternative method for obtaining it: Anointing it onto an amulet. In PoE 2, anointing allows players to apply passive skills to their gear, making it easier to acquire certain bonuses without needing to allocate additional skill points. To apply Storm Charge to an amulet, you need to use a POE 2 Currency Orbs special crafting item called Distilled Emotions, which are part of the game’s new crafting system introduced in the Delirium Expansion.