Charm is too strong

Hey Hades, I said necros ‘soon’ get more feigns and I was referring to soloing. The point still stands that necros have plenty of tools to use charm effectively. It was extremely rare for my necro to die while soloing with charm.

Somebody suggested that having the pet take some of the XP might work. I don’t think it would, because again, you can just break charm and kill the pet for full XP and then kill the now weakened NPC that was fighting the pet and get full XP for that one too.

As for the parse on Eye, it does slightly over exaggerate the situation because of both the resists making it an all melee fight and because of the necro and Mage pets being counted as enchanter pets along with four enchanters all being lumped together - but that part was freely acknowledged, I’m not saying the parse was deliberately set up to mislead it just is important to fully understand the dataset. Bear in mind that on fights like eye which are super resistant, the fight goes longer than it would if spells were actually landing like normal. This means that if a chanter is doing around 32 DPS (adjusted by dividing by four and taking a little off the top for the bump they got from necro and Mage pets) and the monks are doing 19-22 DPS then as the fight goes longer the gap between total amount of damage done widens.

So it looks like, based on the sdps numbers, which are what we should be looking at, the chanter pets are doing about 50% more than the monks, but actually less than the tank. Honestly that is what I would expect from my experiences in game. Chanter pets are good, I’ve never claimed otherwise.

Personally I wasn’t bothered when chanter pets would outparse my monk. I was just happy that the fight was shorter.

When MoTM first game out and Velious dropped on Ragefire the mob regen was insane. My guild was the only guild that was able to kill Aaryonar and AoW before they fixed the regen. We had a two hour Aaryonar fight (imagine what that was like for the clerics) because of the insane regen. AoW was only killed because we were able to mass zone in 210 people at once (zone was capped at around 95 but if you all zoned in at once the server wouldn’t prevent it) and we had at least 14 charm pets. That fight took something like an hour. Personally, I was very thankful that charm pets were a thing and did not care one whit that they did more damage than me. As a souvenir, I won the monk pants that dropped. It was a very memorable experience, partly because we had a cool tool like charm pets to use in our toolbox. Smackage led that raid, it wasn’t me and hats off to him for putting it together.

I guess I am just ok with charm pets being Uber and I have a laundry list of good experiences and memories that probably wouldn’t exist if charm pets weren’t strong. I still don’t think their strength is an actual problem.

Funny you got a parse and now you're doing this.
Sky isn't even a good place for ench pets to parse.

Enchs are broken.

They are combined because the charmed pets have the same exact name.

Me wonders if tuco ever parsed or logged before.

Surely you can provide a parse of these amazing Frost giant pets. Surely you can provide an Inny parse of Abhorrents in Hate dominating the parse. Surely they won't be doing half the damage of any decent Wizard

You have to look at the sdps not the total damage done. Total damage is skewed by a lot of things like when you start and stop attacking and the length of the fight. sdps is normalized to straight damage per second and is most directly comparable. In this case the enchanter sdps needs to be divided by four (thanks to the original poster who quite fairly pointed this out when they posted it) and then reduced slightly more to account for the necro and Mage pets (if the parse just lumped anything with pet into the chanter slot). So if necro and Mage pets are included the chanter sdps is around 32 DPS and if the necro and Mage pets are not lumped in then chanter DPS is closer to 37DPS. Monk DPS is 16-22 and the tank is 37 DPS (go go gadget ripostes).

This means that chanter pets are doing roughly 1.5 to 2 times the damage of a monk depending on how good the monk was doing to begin with.

Don’t forget that a pet doesn’t lose any damage to positioning like a monk or rogue does.

I’m ok with charm pets doing 1.5 to 2x my damage though. Let’s see more parses, I love looking at parses. I think a large number of different fights with accurate details about the parse will help to define exactly how good enchanter pets are.

When are we going to get nerf Tank DPS thread going?

Right after Enchanters get nerf-batted

Rokyl is immune to charm

This thread is still full the brim with conjecture, exaggeration, hyperbole and anecdotal stores of non-meta game play. To be taken seriously, can we please separate fact from fiction with some actual parses of typical fights - not cherry picked highly specialised fights over a 2 min period. It should include: -

1. zone wide dps
2. in a level appropriate zone
3. with a typical grp and buffs
4. over several hours
5. from start to finish.

Otherwise, you just look like and sound like a bunch of whiny dis-organised kids.

Forget trying to balance anything around the minority (think about the top and bottom of a Gaussian distribution). Whilst the aim is to balance everyone, the reality is that this is impossible for all circumstances and permutations (as you progress through the levels, raids/grps, zones, content etc). The best you can typically hope for is to balance the middle 90% so you can forget that top/bottom 5%. Anyone hoping to balance this top % are living in a dream.

Min/maxers will figure out the optimum combinations (classes, buffs, exp strats etc) and they will flock to these as an over-representation of the population, which will give an illusion that "everyone" is doing it and that class X is "broken". Please try and see the bigger picture and separate what's possible with what is normal meta game play for 90% of the population.

Based on the comments, it's only those that TLP hop that want charm nerfed (because later expansions make it mostly useless and Enchanters become irrelevant for the most part). The arguments for nerfing it don't hold up.
If charm is so OP then it stands to reason that every 3rd person you meet in the game would be an Enchanter.. which is clearly not happening. When a class has an ability that is seen as OP, many more people play that class to take advantage of that ability. And let's face it, when you say "Charm" you're clearly talking about Enchanters because other classes have very limited uses of charm.

If Charm is so OP then it would be hurting game play for many which is also clearly not happening. Very few have ever complained about Charm hurting their game play experience from what I can see (given how many actually play the game and how few actually make comments here or even in game). People charming named/quest mobs was a problem that was rightfully fixed. In a group setting, it's not an issue. There are plenty of picks when things get crowded and plenty of places to go for xp/gear.

As someone pointed out earlier, you're still going to get to 50 or 60 long before the next expansion comes out (depending on your play time) whether you use charm or not. You're still going to get all the loot you want. You're still going to be able to raid all the content you want. When I look at the comments wanting it nerfed, it's clear that those people feel they won't be the first to hit max level and/or won't be able to lock down a high value camp to farm Krono because they don't have charm in their spellbook (even though the Krono farmers are mostly bots using multiple classes in a group or top raiding guilds selling raid loot and will be on Aradune as well).

Charm, as it is, isn't hurting your gameplay unless you let it. If you feel it's OP, then don't use it. The one thing that has never changed since EQ was first released is the tiny minority that constantly rant on the forums about how some ability or some class is OP and want it nerfed.

Parsers don't lump all pets together, they lump all pets with the same name together, hence the 4 way chanter parse. The necros and their pets are separate. Anyone who played a necro for a long enough time would know this.

Velious is not 'soon'. Half of the charming hayday is over. Listen, I did some crazy stuff with charm all the way back to '99 when you could charm something and FD and it wouldn't break the charm. I will be the first to admit that charm is super OP and game warping.

How about this: go experience it yourself newguy. If you had, you wouldn't need any of that crap to know how game-breaking charm is.

When confronted with a constructive request - this is your response. lol. FYI I have been playing on and off since 99 including ENC

Magus Rokyl has always been immune to charm, it has nothing to do with the no longer able to charm Rare mobs change. King Tranix was also immune to charm and Efreeti is immune to charm before you go and say you used to charm him. Warlord Skarlon is the only named giant that you were ever able to charm and Fire giants aren't even the highest DPS pets in SoL B. The Imps from Efreeti will do the most damage. Even in Classic Wizards should be doing 2-3 times as much damage as any charm pet and by the time Kunark drops every Melee in the game should be beating any Charm pet on Naggy.

You don’t need both feign death and death peace it just enhances your existing tool kit. As for the necro pets and parsing, I have always played necro as an alt and so I don’t raid. Mostly I solo charm with it because it is fun, it’s like a mini game within EQ so I usually keep a necro between 50-60 and just enjoy it as a side thing.

In any case I ran the numbers both ways in my post and the charm pets at best were doing twice as much damage as the weaker performing monks and 1.75 times the damage of the top monk in the parse. Reflect on the fact that within the parse itself the monk doing 22sdps was doing almost 1.5 times the damage of the monk doing 16 sdps and twice the damage of many of the other classes on the parse so these kinds of differences are normal.

People in this thread were claiming that one charm pet will outdps entire groups of real toons and that just isn’t supported by the parse. Doing at best twice the damage of the monk means a group with two monks is equivalent DPS and you still have four slots left. The warrior tanking did more DPS than the charm pets.

Be careful... by making sense you will actually just enrage the vocal minority into petty name calling and attempts to discredit you. Meanwhile, the parses were cherry picking and not representative of normal play over an extended period of time as well.

I'm really glad that this thread is still a thing.

I spent a lot of time debating on this issue. I think the main problem I have with charm is it makes the server launches too easy*. I think its fine after that (now that they fixed some of the named mob exploits). But they really should straight up take charm out of the game for the first month of launch.

You would still have the entire rest of EQ to charm.

* Charming allows naked characters to function much closer to raid geared characters with almost no gear. So it is kind of like giving certain classes a bunch of starting gear and saying "well in the long run its not that overpowred."

And charm isn't much more overpowered than other classes on a long enough EQ timeline. Even when it is, the gap is pretty small starting in Kunark launch. Groups with out charm pets can preform fast enough to clear the spawns anyway.

Solo xp has never been nerfed. It's been boosted, quite a bit over the years. It just hasn't been boosted by as much as group xp has, so it feels like a nerf by comparison.

Here is how exp works. This is based on killing the exact same mob. Let's use a fictitious exp number of 100 per kill for easy math.

1 person gets 100% of the exp for that kill or 100 points.
2 people get 100 * 1.2 / 2 or 60 points each.
3 people get 100 * 1.4 / 3 or 46.6667 points each.
4 people get 100 * 1.6 / 4 or 40 points each.
5 people get 100 * 1.8 / 5 or 36 points each.
6 people get 100 * 1.8 / 5 or 36 points each.

So adding a 6th person to the group provides no bonus, but you don't divide them into the exp either.

What this means is, if you can solo, adding in other players is only beneficial if they improve kill rate by more than they cost you in splitting exp. It also means that, other than the 6th player, adding in additional players is still a slight penalty, but it gets less so each time on a PER MOB basis. The biggest drop being going from solo to duo, then duo to trio. I find that once I hit a trio, I might as well add in other players assuming they don't delay the group. Remember that there are other things to consider like mob availability as well. No point is being able to mow everything down in five minutes if there is a 30 minute respawn.

Ideally, if you are a class that charms in a charm friendly area, find another person that also charms and start mowing. If they can't charm, they will only slow you down. Then avoid adding the third person if all you care about is maximum exp rate. That being said, if you are a charmer + box combo, adding in the third person will be very beneficial if they charm, less so if they don't. If they also box, the penalty is only 6% for adding both of their characters. Honestly, once you go past two people, you might as well fill the entire group as long as they are productive players.