What illanguar wrote about exp being challenging and what fun it was to accidently miss pull X mobs and survive is the thrill this game needs more of. Make harder exp zones that have really good exp reward/plat reward that make you pay attention. Citadel was great when you where tier 8-9 and you couldnt mass pull and it had good exp/plat before the nerfs.
Second Pass at Enchanter Balance Changes
- Thread starter DodoBot
- Start date
Another thing I think enchanters need is some way to heal their pets. this is pretty important if you are soloing on an enchanter and they are the only pet class without a pet heal. if you are depending on a pet tank it really sucks to just depend on pet sitting recovery without any way to expedite it since you are stuck doing nothing as the pet recovers between pulls.
I know a certain rune spell heals the loio pet. I wonder if enchanter runes could be coded to work as a pet heal for their pet and possibly others?
cornelweezy
Dalayan Elder
The warrior and rogue changes are celebrated (and I'm sure attention is finally being paid to knights and shamans) but can the enchanter community get some insight on where we're going from here on further class development? Chromatic changes are queued up but what else is going down?
classes are being worked on and spoken about in staff channels. i can tell you this is one of the ones that is getting the most attention.
cornelweezy
Dalayan Elder
Ty, looking forward to news
DodoBot
Dalayan Elder
Wanting to bump this post with some positive notes - what are things that you LIKE about playing an enchanter? Can be past, present, live, or whatever.
I'll start. I enjoy:
I'll start. I enjoy:
- Being able to take a bad pull or potential wipe into something my group can manage. Crowd control is huge... when you can use it...
- The feeling of enhancing my abilities or the power of my team.
- Charming a powerful monster, potentially turning the tide of battle.
- Clutch utility to throw a rune to buy tanks or healer time to do their job.
- I like the variety of play, including options to melee. Enchanter is the closest class SoD has to what I consider a battle-mage archetype.
- Crowd Control
- 1) Increase the number of difficult pulls or monster difficulty in general. Reduce overall monster density;
- 2) To compensate for difficulty boosting, increase experience, cash, and the number of mezable mobs;
- 3) Reduce the areas where trivial mob difficulty makes mass AOE farming preferable to slower pulls;
- 4) Reduce the number of free AOE procs, or re-tool them so select spells will not hit mezed targets.
- 5) Add another couple spells in the Entrancing Lights Line. Make more mobs able to be stunned. This gives some viable PBAOE CC at higher levels.
- Enhancing Abilities
- 1) Return AOD and Bond to separate timers (even if damage needs to be adjusted, the play style is much better);
- 2) Make Cascading Bond AA an activated ability that doesn't require it's own bond cooldown. Figure out duration and cooldown independently;\
- 3) Add some sort of buff to AOD like the ATK buff, Agro adjust, and the proc from Corporeal Bond;
- 4) Rework the visage and misdirection spell lines to provide a decent benefit and approximate this play style at an earlier level.
- Charms
- 1) Continue seeding out new charmable mobs into raid and experience areas;
- 2) Examine balance for the short duration (dark blue) charm spell (Control);
- 3) Perhaps add some sort of way for the player to identify good charm targets...
- I don't know how this would work if it should be an item or spell or an NPC that you could talk to, but it's a thought.
- Runes
- 1) Rune class AA - lots of opportunity that's already been talked about for bonus effects or stances;
- 2) Guarding rune AA - perhaps this can be looked to scale as a better "Oh Crap!" button end-game;
- 3) Chromatic rune - please improve this and / or make it scale with the spell's damage;
- 4) Maybe? Can we figure out a way to make runes scale in general (beyond what's in place with the emberflow tome)?
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DodoBot
Dalayan Elder
Charms... I hear they're en vogue now.
Per Request, I'm trying to develop a list of raid zones that are missing charm pets. For purposes of this thread, I'm sticking to Word of Command.Off the top of my head, the following zones don't have readily available charm pets (that I've seen) - listing in my percieved order of urgency:
- Prison of Admyrrza (Outer, Inner, and Sanctum all lacking to my knowledge)
- Tur'Ruj (the few charmable mobs are laughably bad, unless I missed something in Ju'Bor)
- Lower Thaz (Could add things to the lobby and spaced around the minis to mimic Upper Thaz mob placement)
- Plane of Fire (could be appropriate to add different mobs outside and within the city. Maybe something triggered with BW...)
- Sundered Caverns (Nothing that I know of - probably put in a few shades)
- Tower of Tarhyl (Has a couple of mobs already, but could probably add a few around the beginning and miniboss of each wing)
- Yclist (You would think for a city full of Enchanters, there could a lot more for us to do in there with both mezes and charms)
- ValorB (Simple enough to tweak a mob or two before each mini)
- Plane of Frost
- ValorA
- CoD / SoD
- Lower Tier Planes
I want to play around with Control a lot more, and I've discussed this with other enchanters. Unfortunately, the long recast time (in a class with a lot of spell gem needs), the large number of level > 58 mobs who are charm immune, and the high risk of enchanter death makes this something that very few of us have experimented with. Would the staff consider adding a class AA called Mind Probe that simply lets an Enchanter see if a target is charm immune without incurring agro?
Please feel free to add to the list or correct me if I missed anything.
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On cauldron of the dawn event do consider that the zone is used by lower level toons and there is also an adept on the same island as the event. The zone is already very dangerous for toons heading to do slor that don't have invis without adding mobs that they would have a harder time to deal with than the current ones(which are pretty much a death sentance if you agro at that level and don't have help close by). if charm mobs are added I suggest putting them south of the island where lower end toons don't risk running into them.
cornelweezy
Dalayan Elder
If charm is going to The Mechanic for enchanters we really need to think about a line or two of charm pet only buffs that give reasonable opportunities to scale with progression. Dire charm for disposable type exp mobs would be nice too given how absolutely faceroll many (most?) classes get at exp. I think charm info added to Jayla's Insight is probably good enough but maybe a companion AA for enchanters in case you don't have a bard around (think Read Mind) would fit theme wise.
Kedrin
Dalayan Pious Diety
Why not have an item or spell that summons an "enemy" NPC that doesn't have exp on kill. This would avoid having to make a charm NPC for each zone, which seems like a terrible way to balance a class.
The spell could then possibly be able to scale off the enchanters gear/exp when it is summoned.
I dislike pets in general because they are pretty hard to control in such an old game. Also, charm pets are the worst because it makes targeting even more difficult. Target nearest going to a charmed pet feels terrible.
Who wants this class to just become a charm class? Why is this happening? Other players in your group doing your DPS was deemed undesirable so let's just add all that DPS to an NPC you can find randomly in some zones. How is this an improvement?
The spell could then possibly be able to scale off the enchanters gear/exp when it is summoned.
I dislike pets in general because they are pretty hard to control in such an old game. Also, charm pets are the worst because it makes targeting even more difficult. Target nearest going to a charmed pet feels terrible.
Who wants this class to just become a charm class? Why is this happening? Other players in your group doing your DPS was deemed undesirable so let's just add all that DPS to an NPC you can find randomly in some zones. How is this an improvement?
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DodoBot
Dalayan Elder
Is this something that can be coded out? Especially if there are multiple charm pets, this is a huge pain in the butt.
Tevinter
Dalayan Pious Diety
charmed pets aren't very interactive and suffer from similar issues to old festering curse where you feel reliant on an enhanced control CD if you're doing hard content. pressing pet attack and having it do 60%+ of your damage just isnt fun, especially for people who didnt really sign up to be a pet class, espeically since that pet doesnt scale through conventional pet scaling methods and lacks any toolkit interactions w/ its owner. Mages / beastlords both have pet specific clickies, AAs, and stances to at least make pets semi interesting, enchanters just press pet attack and can walk away.
its really weird for a class to exist where a majority of its power comes from the zone its in / the content its doing rather than being baked into the character itself. doesn't feel good as a player and i can't imagine the dev process of creating a unique charm pet for every raid/6man zone and wing in the game is particularly fun either.
its really weird for a class to exist where a majority of its power comes from the zone its in / the content its doing rather than being baked into the character itself. doesn't feel good as a player and i can't imagine the dev process of creating a unique charm pet for every raid/6man zone and wing in the game is particularly fun either.
The process is more:
1) Identify core mechanics of an enchanter
2) Build up and enforce this mechanic
We can all agree that enchanters are top Charm class.
1) Identify core mechanics of an enchanter
2) Build up and enforce this mechanic
We can all agree that enchanters are top Charm class.
If some of the new charm pets are too strong, then they should be balanced. My method was modelling level 58 charm pets off Lashmaster (a mob that has existed for a while, safe bet) and scaling this up or down based on the tier.
Nwaij
Dalayan Pious Diety
I still do not understand where that "BUT THOU MUST!!!!!!!"-Mentality comes from. Why should ENCs be pet classes all out of a sudden? Why should they be required to spam nukes, just like wizards, but so much worse? What was even wrong with the unique ENC play style of piggibacking on group members? Yes, the numbers were a bit out of whack, but you tweak the numbers then, you do not reinvent the wheel and ruin a class in the process. That is just incredibly horrible game design!
Tevinter
Dalayan Pious Diety
core mechanics: AoD / somatic bond / boon, curses, debuffs, buffs, cascading bond AA. Strong crowd control through mez when applicable. these are what you brought an enchanter to a raid for and what you spent most of your time doing while playing an enchanter.
non-core but occasionally useful enchanter mechanics: rune, charm. these are things that you pressed in certain zones / encounters, but not frequently. (raid rune on essence of the mother phantom strikes, charm in 12 man zones, occasionally the 1 minute duration level 65 charm on stuff like farhag healers on folerit redsun)
niche spells that people almost never pressed except on saitha when ur take gets summoned after a dark energies: vex, runic 2
fun/flavor stuff: illusions / shapeshift
charm has been a weird niche mechanic you got to utilize sparingly in a few zones or encounters. I obviously don't speak for everyone but the consensus seems to be that charm is not an interesting or fun/engaging enough to build a class around and also isn't the class that people spent a decade of investment into their character for.
charm pets doing 60% of an enchanters damage has more to do with the fact that enchanters don't do damage themselves than the charmed pets being OP. the charmed pets also kill you damn near instantly if they hit you after a break. lashmasters own pretty hard if you're actually doing EF on tier, i think they do close to 500 dps which is really good. iirc i think a lashmaster is doing close to 40% of a endgame geared enchanters damage in a 6 man setting.
enchanters w/o pets are doing similar damage to healers which does not feel very good.
wizards are the top port class in SoD. We are going to halve their nuke damage and give all nukes a shared 45s cooldown. Porting to different zones is now their new mechanic to do damage. Do you see how ridiculous this sounds? this is how most enchanters feel about their class right now.
I did find it a little bit odd that the aod mimic damage % or the boon damage wasn’t just scaled a bit instead of only being able to choose 1 or the other. A lot of the enchanters I’ve talked to really enjoyed the aspect of weaving these 2 end-game attainable spells and trying to find the best dps classes to use them on for different encounters. If anything just make lower level versions of AOD so it isn’t just this spell you suddenly get when you can farm Ikisith.
Obviously the enchanter dps numbers were a bit higher than staff wanted, but to completely change their play style seemed like a pretty drastic change. I get that a lot of enchanter dps/utility is hidden in shared mind/curses/haste, but gutting the class and making them pet centric after so many years is really a curveball.
As nwaij mentioned, the chromatic fury focus only going up 1% per rank while all of the elements go up 2% a rank should probably be changed if this is the way enchanters are going. An addition 5% on thaz robe to a pretty small base nuke amount seems really minor and not a focus many enchanters even care about getting unless it’s on a piece of gear they would already wear.
Obviously the enchanter dps numbers were a bit higher than staff wanted, but to completely change their play style seemed like a pretty drastic change. I get that a lot of enchanter dps/utility is hidden in shared mind/curses/haste, but gutting the class and making them pet centric after so many years is really a curveball.
As nwaij mentioned, the chromatic fury focus only going up 1% per rank while all of the elements go up 2% a rank should probably be changed if this is the way enchanters are going. An addition 5% on thaz robe to a pretty small base nuke amount seems really minor and not a focus many enchanters even care about getting unless it’s on a piece of gear they would already wear.
This is a good point. Focusing on charm in a box, adding other mechanics to play around with duration would be cool.
I know it is less, but we could argue that it is more of a % than unresistable focus effect (there is none)
I would like to add more to this mechanic. I don't know if this means an entire rework of runes? EQEmu has runes that are a value, and mitigate a percentage (say 20%) of incoming damage. So they last longer and act like more of a buffer. I also think the scaling could be looked at. Lastly, is casting larger runes less often more enjoyable than smaller runes more frequently?
Focusing on charm in a box, mechanics that assist with preventing this would also be good?
The change to enchanters was a paradigm shift for everyone (myself included). What I have been doing is reading feedback, and hashing out details with admins.
A long while ago enchanters had a similar issue where players did not like their DPS contribution hidden. Interestingly, when an enchanter Boons a rogue, the rogue does the damage on the server, and we send Boon's contribution to the enchanter, and not the rogue. It was a solution that past developers came up with.
But the core mechanic for the enchanter was "boosting your allies damage".
AoD looks like it was a 30% spell crit bonus to your target. Historically we can see that these spells were intended to boost your allies damage. I do not know if perhaps this did not synergize well with wizard ultimates or what, but it got changed to a spell mimic. This percentage was 50%, and then this 50% was removed. (the 50% was may not have been live, but it was in the code base. We can use blame to determine who wrote it and when)
I hashed out Boon and AoD shared cooldown a lot. This will remain as a shared cooldown. I have talked about increasing the mimic portion of AoD so that AoD and Boon is more of a situational choice. (I have heard that Boon is always the better option in a raid). Also, real question. Would players prefer if the shared cooldown was 30s with a 24s duration? This is more active, but technically a nerf.
I like this mechanic. We talked about adding tank and healer specific versions of this.
cornelweezy
Dalayan Elder
Cole, it just stands to reason that if dev paradigm is to make dps piggybacking more exclusive and situational (keeping boon/aod on separate timers) and making charm the more conventional dps path for enchanters, then enchanters need WAY more charm+ spells/AAs/procs/tomes to make it a worthwhile trade off. Enchanters don't have pet heals. We don't have anything like frenzy burnout. We don't get pet proc spells or pet only haste/buffs. Recall Minion is useful. I still think, given how easily some pet classes can use their pets to farm content after like t7-9 progression, enchanters need something akin to dire charm on disposable mobs so we can be just as "easy mode." Charm riskiness in terms of charm breaks must decrease as an enchanter progresses, unique (and inarguably useful, even if ultimately situational) ways of modifying a charm pet dps must increase as an enchanter progresses, and charm pet survivability must increase as an enchanter progresses as well.
In my mind, the happy ending to this story of charm being The Mechanic is that an enchanter can go into a non raid zone, use an AA to analyze different mobs; some mobs are more raw dps, some mobs are more offtanky/taunty. Then, the enchanter charms depending on needs of the duo/group, augments/improves the pet characteristics with spells/AAs, and away we go. In raid zones, there are designated charm mobs, some more ideal or less ideal depending on the enchanter player's ability to maintain charm and have those charm antics supported by the raid. All this side by side with a way to make single target nukes less awful and perhaps some helpful AE dd/mez (like an upgrade to entrancing lights we've all been asking for) would be better than the current environment.
I personally would prefer that AoD/Boon stay at 1 minute duration because pressing other buttons is indeed more fun.
In my mind, the happy ending to this story of charm being The Mechanic is that an enchanter can go into a non raid zone, use an AA to analyze different mobs; some mobs are more raw dps, some mobs are more offtanky/taunty. Then, the enchanter charms depending on needs of the duo/group, augments/improves the pet characteristics with spells/AAs, and away we go. In raid zones, there are designated charm mobs, some more ideal or less ideal depending on the enchanter player's ability to maintain charm and have those charm antics supported by the raid. All this side by side with a way to make single target nukes less awful and perhaps some helpful AE dd/mez (like an upgrade to entrancing lights we've all been asking for) would be better than the current environment.
I personally would prefer that AoD/Boon stay at 1 minute duration because pressing other buttons is indeed more fun.