The effect of CHA on mez/charm/lull

The benefits of charisma on various bard songs and enchanter spells has been thrown around since before I started playing. But, what I'm wanting is any tests people may have done on the benefit of charisma, rather than just taking "common knowledge" as is.

I've searched for any sort of tests or parses for resist rates or charm durations and can't seem to find any. I'm sure there are multiple developer statements saying something has some effect, but that's not what I'm interested in.

Due to a lack of testing to look through, I did a quick (small) test of my own. I took a level 4 enchanter with no buffs, AAs, or other confounding factors to mention and repeatedly mezzed a level 9 rotting initate 100 times at 70 CHA. I deliberately chose a red con as a low resist rate wouldn't show me much. 49 resists, which I thought was a perfect start for comparison. I tossed the character some CHA gear and a CHA buff to get to 185, and cast another 100 mezzes on the same mob (never killed it, never zoned, exactly same mob). 50 resists out of 100.

Now, I realize 100 attempts is insufficient to identify how much of an effect CHA would have, but it seems to be enough to get a good idea *if* CHA has an effect on resist rates.

So I guess I'm here to ask for two things.

1) Where can I find anyone testing resist rates at different CHA amounts for mez, charm, or lull?

2) How many attempts at mez would I need for a "statistically significant" difference to be identified?

Because, right now, I have absolutely no proof that CHA does anything other than old wives tales that are as reliable as anti-camp radius, and that guy in the warrior channel that says offhand delay doesn't matter.

Edit: I'm posting this here rather than class forums as it's rather irrelevant on non-TLP servers due to the sort of gear commonly available there.

As a bard main for over a decade, I can honestly say I've noticed very little influence of CHA on any of our songs. I tested with full crustacean shell armor and some other -CHA gear, got my CHA down to 1 and still didn't notice much difference.

first off.....youre trying to mez a mob that is red con 5 levels above you, that is not an accurate test. Of course youre going to be resisted due to the fact that it takes into account your level check 1st, then bases it on other outlying factors including CHA etc..its all dice rolls

If the intent is to identify if charisma reduces resists, it would be quite stupid to test on a mob that rarely resists the mez, yah?

Yes, of course I'm going to be resisted. The idea is to identify a reduced rate of resists. Otherwise the charisma is useless... and determining that would be the point of such tests.

Edit: feel free to suggest the sort of test you feel would accurately display the beneficial effects of charisma so that I may learn something.

It may have "an" effect, but it's a very minor roll check in the grand scheme of things. Levels are more important than anything else. I used to pull TRC for my guild and never noticed any difference with or without CHA buff. The horrible resist rate was just the same.

main'd an enchanter from classic to OoW myself i've always wondered that... i came to the conclusion that, like most stats in EQ, wathever difference, if there's one, is soo insignificant it's hardly parseable. ( aka 100-150 heroic dex for 1% crit, or 100 heroic strengh for +10 damage...)

not saying there's no difference... just saying that level and actual resist ( aka, tash) matters a thousand more.

anecdotal stories about personal experiences while charming is probably the closest ''evidence'' you'll get.

Exactly.

That's why you pick a white con mob, or a yellow con with a static level range (so you know what level it is).

You have to take into account that a Level 4 fighting a level 9 is not only fighting a mob 5 levels higher, but also more than two times their level. There's more at play here than CHA. In fact CHA is going to have very little effect.

Now I could be wrong. But I believe the CHA effect on mez's does not affect the initial casting. But the secondary effect of the memblur. Take what I am about to say with a grain of salt, but one thing I have noticed in the last two years between leveling a DE and HE enchanter. The DE with its lower CHA was not seeing the memblur effect very often, my current HE enchanter sees the effect almost every time. Enough that I can reliably use it on a ticked off mob as a detaunt.

It also affects the lull second resist chance. You know when you see the resist message but you don't agro. That's a CHA check.

I wonder if we can get a dev to comment on this like they did with AC? That would cool... and scary.

You say this with more faith than I have. Why would charisma reduce resist rates caused by a mob having high MR (or anything else), but not reduce resist rates caused by a mob being higher level?

Where does someone get the certainty that charisma has some effect, but not against resists solely created by a level disparity? Is CHA only to have an effect when resists are already low? How useless.

I've read this before. I don't remember the numbers, but it was a specific formula of base chance to memblur plus a % for CHA plus another % for level. It seems believable, though a bit beyond what I care to test.

I've read that too, and I think even from patch notes in '02 when lull abilities were tweaked. However, I'm a bit saddened this too gets so little testing, yet all the faith in the world.

CHA also effects the duration of the charm not just the resist

Well it probably 'does'. But because level probably (can't confirm this however) has so much weight in the equation, CHA might not matter for that test as much.

Personally I think it works well for whites and yellows. And probably blues. But get too far blue like for a level 9 vs level 4 mob... then its going to work whether you have CHA or not.

That's my opinion on it though. I haven't thoroughly tested it. I can only speak from perceived experience. What I do know about CHA though.. is it doesn't give benefits beyond a certain point. For example, selling to vendors, you stop getting a bonus beyond 100 something, maybe 113, or 123 or something. I noticed this back in Luclin/PoP. It -might- be different now, but the reason I bring it up is there might be a hard cap on how much CHA does for you.

Its not like STR which will up damage (once past the damage caps) and keep doing so, or INT/WIS which always provide Mana, and STA which always gives HP. I think once you get to a certain point it caps or has diminishing returns. Like 70 to 100 is a decent boost.. but 100 to 130 doesn't show as much, and so on.

I wasn't going to post again to add that I didn't notice any appreciable difference in duration either, but well now I just did.

I literally saw no *consistent* benefit of CHA with any of our songs, ever. I just started calling it the "merchant" stat.

You chose a mob 5 levels above you. Honestly, I'm surprised you landed half your spells on it.

Like someone else mentioned, you need to pick a mob closer to your level, preferably one that cons even to you. Levels make a huge difference in resist rates on mobs.

Anyone who tells you that CHA isn't important on a bard has not had to pull while rocking a Gypsy Lute before. At 50 going into the hole and planes, rock at least 150+ if you are lull pulling, and get chanter buffs if available to make life easier. If your lull becomes a pull spell, you are getting rezzed instead of peeling loot off mobs. Be the hammer, not the nail.

This closely resembles the way I looked at it recently. I'm not trying to say it works or doesn't work in some way. I initially just wanted an idea about the mana cost of addition mez casts to cover resists to weight CHA gear vs INT/mana gear. So I did a quick 200 mez test and now I'm refusing to accept anything other than reproducible experimentation because I'll be damned if I'm one of those people to make numerical decisions based on how something feels.

IIRC charm has a "break check" every tick that uses CHA somewhat in addition to your lvl, mob lvl, etc. I also think that CHA has a softcap value where everything over 150 or something has no effect. So CHA gear is going to be the least useful.

If charisma has little effect on monsters that are a certain amount of levels higher than you.... does that mean there is no point in having really high charisma gear on raids in say plane of fear, plane of hate, etc.

I think CHA has little affect on mez if any at all, it has more of an affect on charm and lull.

The types of replies that boil down to "lol of course it resists it's +5" are very unproductive. That doesn't mean they're wrong, just that they're not adding anything to the conversation. There are a lot of instances where crowd control against high con mobs is quite important, so the scenario shouldn't be thrown out.

So, I'm sitting here trying to think of how the mechanics would work where CHA helps with resists on an even-con (as the peanut gallery above suggests), but not help against a red con. If charisma is it's own check, rather than a modifier than helps resists like an MR debuff would, then testing against a target with either high MR or high level difference could invalidate the test; the mez would fail level-bases resist checks and cha-based checks wouldn't show. If this is how it works, there are a lot of other implications for the mechanics of resists here.

If there is a separate charisma check that passes or fails, perhaps the best way to identify it would be to find something with a near 0% resist rate with high CHA, and see if resists start to show with low CHA on that target.

If this is the case, then CHA would be quite worthless in a raid situation where the enchanter is trying to affect +con mobs.

it was stated long ago cha had nothing to do with charming for anyone other then enchanters however it was even later said that cha was pretty done after max cha to get vender prices down it had no effect on anything , not sure about last sentence but I know it was tested in depth till a dev finally said no