enchanter charm

Manguadi

Dalayan Beginner
Recent (I mean this relatively) changes to charm have made it vastly less powerful. Charmed pets are now limited to two attacks per round and a max haste of 50%. In my testing I've found that a charmed pet with goe and gog is an even fight with the same mob when slowed. Also, at 65 there are no outdoor areas where fearing mobs is reliable enough to exploit your charmed pet. This is alright in groups, but it means that soloing (or duoing) is basically out. It's just too much of a mana drain to win fights.

So you're stuck with a group if you want to get much done. Your primary role is likely to be as crowd control and this demands a fair bit of attention most of the time, so maintaining a charmed pet can be a liability.

As you progress through AAs at 65, the summoned enchanter pet becomes increasingly important, and since the DPS provided by a charmed pet is both unreliable and fairly low, charming becomes an even lower priority than it used to be. Furthermore, groups become capable of handling several mobs at once and exploit area damage, damage shield, and extremely powerful healers. As a result, mez begins to become obsolete except on raid encounters designed to have mobs mezzed. Besides, the vast majority of even botched pulls can be handled by a necro or bard and their greater versatility and dps make each far more desirable. With a competent splitter, an enchanters role is limited to marginal damage nukes and spells that impact the mob only intangibly which, frankly, isn't much fun. Even dire charm is only useful when you can get it at 59, and I would wager your time is better spent getting to 65 anyway.

As a reference, only two of the top 5 enchanters are purported to be active, and compared to the top five of the other int classes they have far inferior gear.

The thing I used to like about enchanters is that they weren't as much a gear class as say, a monk. An enchanter was limited by the skill and reflexes of the player, and with a fair bit of work could solo some extremely challenging encounters. This was never true about raiding but, like paladins, they were a blast to play in groups and solo.

To make enchanters more viable when soloing, useful in high end groups, a more skill-reliant class, and generally more fun, I suggest at least one of the following changes be made:

- Add a new charm spell or replace a current one with a less reliable (more random duration, but please don't screw resist mods that just makes things annoying) version that does away with the current charm limitations altogether. This would force an enchanter to monitor his or her pet more carefully while also giving the class the option of contributing a significant amount of damage in high end groups.

- Increase the level limit on dire charm to something that makes people want to buy the AA. It's awful, really. Even if the AA is linked to druids and necros I wouldn't shed any tears when the 99% of the server that skipped the AA decides to go back and buy it.


If you have any suggestions about improvements for raiding enchanters, please don't hesitate to mention them here. Every guild leader will tell you that enchanters are a low loot priority because their largest contributions come from encounters designed for them and from their buffs. Also, it's extremely unexciting to play a class where your contributions have to be parsed for you to notice them (gog, vex, curses, rune).
 
Charm pet haste restrictions make me cry. Other than that, I charm in any high end group i get, unless the mobs are immune (which many zones are)

If you are in a zone where you are A) too shitty to take the hits from said mobs or B) your healer/s suck balls and cant toss you a quickie during a fight, then whip out old sword/shield.

That said, I always Always push for enchanters to be looked at, and am ALL for lowering / doing away with some of the awful restrictions put on charm pets (the haste cap / 0 ac)

The most powerful WoC charmable pet i've found is the murderer sivyaka(sp) type mob in FR. From the back with GoE and wizard proc buff it was reliably doing approximately 300 dps, or 120 less dps than our rogue.

Sounds great, eh? Well, it's a very high end pet that would kill most enchanters without decent brains and more than decent gear(not to brag though =P ) Also, that dps was in optimal conditions, tanks will rarely turn mobs just for your pet, often the pet would be free of charm during fights (stunned / mezed / being recharmed) etc etc etc. Also of course, is the mana wasted by healers keeping you alive occasionally, your lack of ability to do much other than CC and a nuke here / there while maintaining a pet (very high mana cost considering the random breaks ...


I'm not sure where i'm going with this but it equates to the best pet i can find ingame (off the top of my head really) being only 'meh' overall, and the rest of them considerably more lackluster.

Should you charm? Yes, it makes you go from LOL_U_CC, too: LOL_annoy_group_with_charm_pet_but_do_mild_dps.

I asked multiple times for a way to scale charm with raid tier, and have yet to see any implementation. ( my tests showed no increase in average duration with charm enhancement either, though it is said to be working currently. I suppose the percentage boost could be SO minute that it is not registrable)
 
The best thing an enchanter can do when they get to the high end is get the info of another class to play in groups.

The last time class improvements were addressed was in february, and as far as I know rangers still have yet to see that buff implemented. I'm fairly sure the only person authorized to modify class balance is Wiz, and since he is absolutely tied up in Dawntide and other concerns, the only things that draw him to SoD are staff meetings where someone mentions how broken charm or pally hot is.

Having new things to do (thanks, devs) is awesome, but the core of this game is your class. This is an old game and has almost no character customization or personalization; everyone is always striving for the exact same things depending on their tier. Most of the fun comes from what you're designed to do. What we should be seeing in addition to new places to do things are new spells and new stances with AA requirements and updated or improved or fixed AAs.

As far as the enchanter class goes, they have to hope and pray that zones and encounters are designed where mezzing is necessary, yet not predictable, yet not doable by a bard or necro just as well, yet not so mind-bogglingly crazy that an enchanter is as required as pot4. Enchanters need something else.
 
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