Mezzing at 305 Charisma-485 Charisma

I did some parses today to test how well mez worked at 305 and 485 charisma..

Using Spell: Complacency (our level 62 mez) versus 'an orc patroller' in Everchill caverns

305 Charisma: 17.45% resist rate (212 casts)
485 Charisma: 15.49% resist rate (226 casts)


While this really wasn't highly scientific as 220ish casts isn't enough to get a good percentage my finger was getting tired after mezzing 430+ times in a row so I stopped.

In my oppinion both resist rates are too high for a spell with a -25 resist check, it's almost 1 in 6 casts being resisted which makes Complacency too much of a pain to use, which is also the reason it isn't in Maimai's line up anymore...

I'd expect to see a level 65 enchanter with all resist AA's, hidden strength 6 and maxed charisma casting Complacency at around 7.5% resist rate or less, I can understand how there'd be a desire for it to be unreliable at low charisma or low AA's so there's a scale of improvement; but at this volume of resists for the best an enchanter can achieve is far too high, and imo it doesn't leave much desire for improvement..

http://www.shardsofdalaya.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8371

In this thread Wiz said hidden strength is a 3:1 ratio in terms of how much bonus you recieve over the cap, meaning 180 points of charisma over the cap would actually have the effect of 60 regular points of charisma. So while the resists may be too high to begin with getting resisted 2% less for 60 more charisma doesn't seem that bad.

I dinged 62, memmed complacency, and cast it 13 times in Cmal1, got 9 resists, at 244 CHA. I then switched back to Rapture (level 59), and out of the next hour, got one single resist. One.

I know thats absolutely unscientific, but.... anyone able to explain it? I realize it could just be random numbers owning me, but it really seems unlikely.

He isn't questioning hidden strength, which btw is nice to see that it has a tangible difference. I think he is questioning the spell itself and how many resists he gets, even with its -25 mod.

Maimai said:

Complacency too much of a pain to use, which is also the reason it isn't in Maimai's line up anymore...

Click to expand...

Out of curiosity (as someone who occasionally plays his wife's 65 ench =P), what mez IS in your lineup? I would expect Rapture to be resisted more, since Complacency has the -25 resist mod and Rapture has none, but that's not what Aaubert seems to be seeing in his unscientific sampling.

Rapture has next to no resistability. It is a short term, fast cast, sure land mez. Complacency is a long term mez with an average resist check. Relic: Eternal Rapture is a combination of both.

Rapture is good for using as your opening mez on multiple high level mob pulls when you cannot debuff a mob or else suffer instant death from aggro i.e. Cmal.

Rapture -> tash -> Complacency before Rapture wears off.

Duma said:

Rapture has next to no resistability.

Click to expand...

Ahh, just noticed the "Resist Type: Unresistable" flag. This explains Aaubert's findings as well.

The duration is only 25% longer on Complacency (20 ticks instead of 15), but I guess the reason you would use Complacency is if mana were an issue (Complacency is less than half the mana), and of course if you're mezing 64+ mobs.

Minimum resist check is always applied last--I wonder if you weren't running into that? Maybe you slapped into it somewhere around 365 and it stopped improving, but then again, you didn't mention casting tash and tash is usually what brings it to the minimum.

My guess? The minimum resist is too high vis a vis the spells that have to land fast--like compl--which were given negative checks to offset the new higher resists, but which probably often ding into the minimum resists and don't get much benifit from having a resist adj. That's my guess, however. Don't take it as gospel.

200 casts gives you a naive ststistical 95% confidence interval of +/- 6%.

(Naive confidence radius is sqrt(1/samples). With more knowledge of the situation, you can make it tighter, but usually not by more than a factor of 2.)

So, note that the tests above do not demonstrate any change or lack thereof between 305 and 485 charisma.

The issue with the failure rate is when you compare the use of mezzing with this spell to other alternatives (be it offtanking, single-pulling, or casting some other lower-resist mez spell) and the consequences of failure (namely, pissed off mob beating on enchanter).

Yakk said:

200 casts gives you a naive ststistical 95% confidence interval of +/- 6%.

(Naive confidence radius is sqrt(1/samples). With more knowledge of the situation, you can make it tighter, but usually not by more than a factor of 2.)

So, note that the tests above do not demonstrate any change or lack thereof between 305 and 485 charisma.

Click to expand...

Yeah I knew that so focused my post on the fact that 1 in 6 resists for Complacency with the best mods an enchanter can ever achieve is far too steep..

Maimai said:

Yeah I knew that so focused my post on the fact that 1 in 6 resists for Complacency with the best mods an enchanter can ever achieve is far too steep..

Click to expand...

Alternatively, enchaneters can be balanced so that they are useful even if their mezzes are resisted they can do their jobs.

CC spells that have a decent chance of being resisted have the nice property that at least one portion of the "cost" of using them scales up with NPC DPS.

For this to work, it requires an enchanter who can deal with an NPC beating on them in a somewhat efficient manner. Tanks get all jealous-like if anyone else can be beat on optimally (a bunch of masochists!), so this tends not to work out.

And the existence of "Rapture" line spells means that players have the option of not being resisted by NPCs for a bit of extra mana cost (and getting the spell, of course).

The era of a certain other game in which enchanters where top-notch was an era where enchanters where actually better short-term tanks than the tanks where.

No, really. With a 5% to 10% resist rate, an enchanter with 3 PBAOE 5+ second stuns up could reduce a 3 second delay NPC's DPS by a factor of 16. Slow, at it's worst, was a factor of 4. And at the time, warriors where not 4 times more durable than enchanters.

Relatively cheap PBAOE stun spells allowed the enchanter to massively reduce the expected amount of damage they would take from holding aggro, even if they had 3+ mobs aggro on them at once. This eventually culminated in the PBAOE group and all of that sundry mess.

(PBAOE chain-stuns meant that an enchanter was slightly better at tanking than a tank in the short term. The ability for multiple enchanters to PBAOE stun, and the resulting defence stacking with each other, meant that two enchanters where ridiculously better at tanking than tanks over a short term (on any stunnable mob). Finally, the ability for casters to ramp up their DPS linearly with the number of mobs present meant that this ridiculous tanking power on low-con mobs could be used to generate ridiculous DPS. Finally, ridiculous DPS on acceptable-XP NPCs lead to ridiculous XP generation.)

The removal of unresistable CC, and an increase in the burst-durability (not sustained durability) of enchanters to tank-levels (be it via PBAOE spells, Runes, HP->Mana shields, or anything else), would make medium-to-high resist level mez spells quite viable in gear-appropriate content.

...

But practically, just use Rapture. ^_^

PBoE stun here is HUGE agro and also sets the mobs up to be immune to stun for the next 30-45 seconds, there's no way it's viable for agro reduction here.

Maimai said:

PBoE stun here is HUGE agro and also sets the mobs up to be immune to stun for the next 30-45 seconds, there's no way it's viable for agro reduction here.

Click to expand...

I apologize -- I wasn't clear.

I was describing how enchanters became CC gods in a different game, not claiming how it should or does work in SoD.

The lessons learned (that a CC class, to be viable, has to be better at reducing incoming NPC damage than a tank class -- both in terms of mean and variance) was all that I intended to be taken away from that overly verbose rant.

Or, in other words, 16% mez resist rates are a-ok when a mez resist or two is nothing more than a minor annoyance to an enchanter. When individual resists matter, and double-resists are disasterous -- 16% mez resists means that 1 in 50 encounters have double-resists -- so the spell becomes very non-viable.