The disaster that is last year to the ENC class aka Everything Wrong With Enchanters

Nwaij

Dalayan Pious Diety
In the past year, staff decided to fuck over enchanters in a great many ways. Here is a list of how, and I don't think it is complete.
  1. they kill buffs for everyone, just that PAL SHM DRU get compensation buffs, and everybody gets ENC buffs as potions. ENCs get jack and shit and there is no aego potions, so while everybody got hit, ENCs got hit extra hard
  2. they kill unique fun ENC play style because "OMG TOO MUCH DPS"
    1. then they turn around and add charm pets that get ENCs back up to said dps numbers
    2. they also killed one of the ENC class tome lines doing so
    3. they made ENC, one of the if not THE worst duo class EVEN WORSE in duos
  3. they try to force ENCs to spam nukes, just like wizards. with all the drawbacks of wizards (atrocious damage per mana ratio) but none of the perks (better crits)
  4. they try to force ENCs into being a pet class, just without any way to heal the pet, no pet stances and the constant risk to get murdered by it. Oh and good luck finding a new one should it die!
  5. they force a new focus effect that ENCs and only ENCs need, on a class that already needs every focus effect under the sun except pet focii, IN ADDITION TO CE, a focus effect noone but ENCs (and maybe SHMs) care for.
    1. said focus effect, labeled a "new elemental focus effect" by staff, only has 4 ranks/4%, when every single other elemental focus effect has 8 ranks/8%
    2. said focus effect is also hillariously bad spread across the tiers. There are 2 t13 fights that each drop a bracer with said focus effect. One is rank3, one is rank 4. Reason behind that: who the fuck knows?
    3. The spell line (yes, ONE spell line, exclusively) is horrifically bad - lots of mana for pathetic damage and a 400 pt rune on targets target at its highest incarnation. (read rune that does nothing but block clickies/cotb on tank, if he even has room to land it)
At this point, ENCs should just be deleted entirely.
 
agree with most of this.

no idea what the classes identity is supposed to be. runes scale horribly, the power of the rune scales with the enchanters codex bonus and the recipients abjuration mod / rune tome. the new weird chromatic nuke line is just confusing. its a 400 base rune being cast on characters with upwards of 15k (fifteen thousand) hitpoints, and is getting scaled up to be an 800ish absorb at best. the fact a focus effect exists for 1 spell (and is weaker than regular elemental focii, and lacks supporting tomes) is also just really confusing.

aod / bond and true giant (cascading bond) were the most unique things about the class and they've seemingly been abandoned in favor of cycling low CD, low damage, inefficient nukes while maintaining a DoT. the cool factor of seeing like 5 of your raid members take on your appearance or werewolf illusion (RIP old giant illusion) no longer exists.

its a pet class but it doesnt scale its pet via traditional means, in fact it can't even scale its pet through its best haste spell (charmed pets have a cap on how much haste they can get, 50% iirc). its pet scales based on the zone its in (aka what mobs it can charm), rather than every other class in the game that scales based on how strong your characters gear / exp / spells are.

risk:reward ratio on charm is just flat out something that will never feel good as a player. most of the time before engaging a hard boss you enhanced control your pet (or a necro/druid in the raid does) meaning you have literally 0 risk of it breaking. even w/o EC, you'd be foolish to not keep a charmed pet because in a lot of cases having a charmed pet will more than double your dps output. they also do fun things like reset your quickmed timer when they break. without a charmed pet they compete with healers in dps.

in fact, enchanter pets are the highest dps pets in the game, and compose the largest part of their damage output. making enchanters the defacto pet class for some reason?

if you have the SH robe their best spammable DPS ability is misery of the swamp, a DoT spell.

class literally could've been nerfed by toning down damage mimic'd from AoD and adjusting values on boon/bond, instead it has a confusing re-work where it feels awful to play and somehow got worse in the areas of the game where it was already the worst class by far. afaik most people playing the class were playing it because they liked the aod/bond based gameplay.

would be cool if we could get a post clarifying what the classes identity / theme / role is supposed to be
 
As one of the few t9ish mained enchanters who logs in and has non raid progression to still hammer out, enchanter is in a really bad spot. It can do some really time/mana inefficient cheese type plays with a druid or cleric, but it is by far and away (truly, without competition) the worst duo class. This cannot be overstated. In a game functionally built around dual boxing toons for step by step progression, enchanters cannot effectively duo in any configuration. No other class is as hamstrung right out of the gate. But there's more.

The class has no compelling, readily apparent niche that is satisfying to live up to. Shamans, Dalaya's other red headed step child, at least have a niche that simply hasn't stayed productive in the modern era of the server. Enchanters are just a smorgasbord of buttons. These buttons are either (1) contrived utilities that are so situational/poorly designed/nerfed into oblivion as to be discouraged from broad use (the visage line, the misdirect line, green gem nukes, mem blur, single target stuns), (2) damage spells that are so inefficient they are outclassed by other casters with a third of the effort, (chromatic nukes, single target long cooldown nukes, dot line), and (3) crowd control that is usually unreliable, and may shine the once every 40 play hours you *really* need it, but can be provided by 4 other classes who bring actual usefulness to the encounter anyway (non archaic mez, pacify, ae stun). Charm is cool but it's maddenly risky and just not a satisfying mechanic to be an answer to other class woes. Shared Mind is cool but 100% passive. I haven't played with cascading bond but at least 3 other end game enchanters are screaming that it sucks it's been neutered. Bond/AoD thing is obviously cool but even admitting nerfs were needed it's basically been removed in its current state. It used to be that you didn't need an enchanter, but golly they were a nice thing to have around. Now, you don't need an enchanter and even when they're around, there's only really immediate dividends in a handful of raid encounters. The best buffs are easily replaced by potions.

What is an enchanter? That's a rhetorical question. The devs need to figure that out, build a vision around the answer, and adjust the spell lines to fit the vision. Enchanters are HURTING.
 
I believe that peoples time investment should be respected. If you started to play a class based on mechanics / style that should not change years down the road. Some of the individuals in this thread have hundreds of hours into their characters only to be changed on a whim. I do however believe that class balance needs to be a thing. However not at the expense of the core class niche. ( shards of dalaya not everquest )
 
The thing that indicates to me personally that enchanters have lost their place, is that their utility uniqueness is so far diminished that when you want to build a caster group for a raid you'll just compare dps between the four caster classes and as long as you don't want/need mezzes for an encounter you'll probably just double up on a MAG/WIZ/NEC. I understand that their 'invisible' dps boost is present but it doesn't show enough. ENCs were probably too strong, but I didn't often see serious raids running 2 or more of them. Now I often see zero on raids. I think that adding back some of their niche and dps output should be seriously considered.
 
its always worth bringing one for buffs / curses / shared mind and the damage they do in most zones w/ a charmed pet but the issue is finding someone to suffer through playing it. raid content isnt hard enough in its current state to warrant min/maxing that hard anyways unless you're trying to do content you severely undergear
 
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