As someone who bailed when the bailing was good (when the fifteen-minute buff fiasco was still impending),
it may not be my place to say this, but the enchanter class already had some severe problems.
Let's look at a few facts about enchanters:
1.) They can't heal themselves (or others).
2.) They can' take a hit.
3.) Their DPS has depended on the strength of everyone else in the party (party assumed, since nobody
in his or her right mind solos on an enchanter -- or at least not by choice) and (rarely) the strength
of the charmable monsters in the current region.
4.) Most of their utility is useless/undesirable in group content 65+.
With the list above, we can see that enchanters are going to have a hard time questing and farming by themselves. One can box a tank, but it had better be able to heal itself. If it can heal itself, then you probably don't have much DPS. You can box a healer, but who's tanking, then? Maybe you can charm something, and heal the charmed pet, but when charm breaks, you're struggling to keep the enchanter alive (this has actually gotten a great deal easier with the removal of summoning mechanics in many zones). Full disclosure and 100% true story here: When I created my enchanter and did all of its main quest up to 5th seeker, I boxed a high tier monk/warrior through most of its progression and spammed runes, where applicable. When I boxed the warrior, I'd use bloodlust, cast SB on the warrior, then enrage directly thereafter for "acceptable" damage output and healing once every blue moon. Things worked out, but it was super annoying, slow, and often dangerous. Any time an enemy casted spells the enchanter would take damage that I couldn't mitigate with runes or heal -- well, not unless I used the monk, instead of the warrior, and used its Rujik bracer. (I remember the Nazdrich being especially bad in DL -- especially with their cold based melee slows.) The WW-esque ice burrower type mobs weren't much fun either, since neither of the classes in the duo could track.
All of this was before the change to enchanters; and I want everyone to focus on that for a minute, because I waited until my enchanter was t8-9 before I even did any of its faction quest and MQ past 6th seeker, because I knew how annoying the 6th to 5th seeker segment of its questing would be. (Even before that, the enchanter was 100% useless in Heartland Undercaverns where everything reflects and is an uncharmable robot aside from the fungus men in the beginning of the zone!)
I want to focus on point #3. An enchanter doesn't get better (in most situations) as it gets more gear. Yes, you can get archaic mez and CE4; yes you can get some AAs(now) (and an EF tome) to help with mez duration --and that's great for Rujik; Farguzair, Master of Ice; Plane of Frost's linked pulls; The Abyss trash; (some) Silent Halls trash; (some) Windstone trash, the pull in EF in the room directly before MT; and maybe some other situations that elude me, at this time. Don't get me wrong, I love me some mez. That's actually why I made the enchanter. I loved those sorts of fights and frequently played other people's maxed-out enchanters for them. I think it's regrettable that this mechanic isn't desirable in more areas (and the talk of making stronger monsters in experience zones, which would actually make it useful again, is actually really cool --though I expect as much to come of it as came from the DFS revamp many moons ago.)
Anyway, back on point: What about an enchanters damage output? Either one was grouped with strong characters to mimic, or one did basically nothing. My enchanter had rank 8 DI/AF/MR/FR/CR/DR focuses, AoD, and LB; and none of that mattered in the slightest when I went to Eldenals and grouped with some fresh 65 characters. I could copy garbage DPS from a melee; copy worthless low-level spells the few times a grouped player had mana to cast them; or I could do crappy relic nukes with an annoying pushback. I ended up charming The Crypt Guardian when it was up and doing better damage --granted I didn't mind doing that as I like exploiting class utility when it's available; but I could take that same enchanter and DESTROY Kaesora while boxing a wizard with a decent mana pool and that class tome (at the time) that gives mana back upon kills (while grouped with a sufficient tank/healer, of course). On raids, I was top DPS --and that's funny because it didn't matter what raid I was in (t5-15). If an enchanter was equipped with decent DI/CR/FR focuses, max CoP bonus, and AoD, it would top the DPS charts, with a proper raid composition. By and large, gear didn't matter. One could argue that the mana pool could restrict the enchanter -- causing its mana to run out before the end of a higher tier fight -- but with the Gather Mana AA, this was never a problem (especially post cooldown reduction), even when my enchanter was substantially undertiered for any of the encounters to which I brought it. The only risk in bringing it was its lower HP, which was largely outweighed by its DPS output. My enchanter was legitimately top DPS the instant it got AoD, because it was geared enough to have decent focuses by the time the spell was accessible. SB/boon were hit and miss DPS, since it depended on what melee DPS characters were in the raid (scaling with their characters rather than the enchanter).
The fix for the raid side of this seems pretty self-evident:
Make it so that AoD does ((N-1)/10)*100 percent less damage per nuke/DoT tick than it normally would after scaling with the enchanter's focus effects, where N is the current number of players with AoD cast upon them by the enchanter in question.
(Effectively, this would reduce the damage of the mimicked spells by 10% per extra concurrently mimicked player.)
The formula would be this: mimick damage = scaled damage * (1 - (n-1)/10)
Example: You AoD a single wizard and it does a nuke that you copy. With your focus effects, CoP bonus, deity spec....etc. it scales to 3k damage. If it's your only target, it would do:
100% [1.00] - [((N-1)/10)] = [1.00](100%) - ((1-1)/1) [0.00](0%) of its scaled damage, which is
3k*(1.00 - 0.00) = 3k.
If you had any two AoD targets and the same nuke being mimicked for 3k scaled damage, you'd have something like this:
3k * (1.00 - (2-1)/10) = 3,000 * (1.00 - 1/10) = 3,000 * (1.00 - 0.10) = 3,000 * (0.90) = 2,700.
(90% the nuke damage). The same percentage would apply to whoever else has AoD at the time when they cast a DD/DoT.
Of course, this could be changed to scale more harshly. It could be (n-1)/5, so each additional
AoD target would drop the efficacy of the mimicked spells across all targets by 20%.
There's no reason that something like this couldn't be tuned! This would allow enchanters to stay good or even great in groups (depending on who's in the group with it) while not being overly powered on raids, since there'd be a quick limit on how many targets could be usefully mimicked at once. There'd be a bit of a bell curve to the mimicked DPS output where, at some point, adding another person to the AoD chain would make you worse off. This also punishes enchanters when they AoD someone who is being lazy and inattentive (which was often the case when I was raiding on an enchanter). It's very common to AoD a wizard or necro only to find out that s/he is AFK for the majority of the buff's duration. That's a very frustrating waste of DPS/mana/time/effort. Further, this leaves room for improvement. "Class tomes" (AAs) could be setup to decrease the damage penalty per extra concurrent player upon whom AoD is currently active. There could even be worse versions of AoD for lower level enchanters to prepare them for this game play mechanic that would have harsher penalties per extra player upon whom it is cast -- or even initial penalties applied to the formula (I.E. n/7 instead of (n-1)/7). This can also be explained diegetically. Imagine the difficulty an enchanter would have copying what ten people are doing at once. S/he might get sloppy. If it's just one or two, s/he would probably imitate the spells pretty well.
For SB/LB, the same approach could be taken, though simply restricting them to one or two targets would be fine, in my honest opinion. This was typically the worse choice of the two, anyway (as it should be as a more easily obtainable spell). I'd imagine that it's pretty important for rogues these days, with all overhaste procs having been removed; but I'm out of the loop, so I'll leave it at that.
Note that I don't think this is a "fix" for the enchanter class. They will still feel like garbage when in the wrong group settings, since they will resume relying 100% on available charm targets (which are going to vary in strength by zone), if their group members are lackluster. Being able to do some melee DPS oneself, as an enchanter, is not something that I've experienced (given the junky weapons that mine had), but I doubt that it ever rivaled healer DPS --and with verdict, it came at a risk to your survival and annoyance to your groups' healers, anyway.
The problem that I always had with my enchanter that it wasn't nearly as effective in all zones and group/raid compositions. One should never feel like their character is substantially worse (or even useless) because of where they are or who they're playing with. That completely goes against the idea of "progression." If a fresh 65 enchanter can charm the same mob in Abyss, have other people enhanced control it, and do the same damage with it, you haven't really "progressed" your in your ability to contribute DPS via charming by filling every slot with t99 gear, have you? If you are stuck AoDing a wizard without Archaic: Moon Comet, you will very likely do less damage than an enchanter with worse gear that is AoDing one that does have it.
Look, the TL;DR is that not being able to be effective really sucks all enjoyment out of the game; and being variably effective, depending on things that are out of your control sucks, too. Consider reverting with some of the changes I've mentioned and doing so while keeping some of the quality of life changes like the new AA versions of curses (See Iliangur's post hereinabove). Some of these things seem really cool, and I wish that they'd existed when I still played this game.
I don't peek at these forums much since quitting, but it's how I get my SoD fix post buff-apocolypse. It really saddens me to see threads like these. I hope that things get better for everyone who's still playing the game!
