Charm is too strong

This comment proves you are exaggerating if not outright lying. Deep red mobs will break charm constantly (assuming you can even make it stick in the first place). And you would have to have a healer with you just to stay alive. Also, if you're 55+, there are no deep red mobs in Chardok to charm. Enchanters also aren't the best class by a long shot. Monks are top dps basically throughout the entire game so far, plus they have FD. Clerics are required (for anything outside of grouping) for pretty much the entire game (all expansions to date) as well making them the one of the best classes. Warriors are also required for most of the game to tank which makes them a top class too. And if you're only looking at soloing, then a well played Necro will beat an Enchanter pretty much every time in a race to level 50 in classic. Charm makes the Enchanter into a viable solo (if needed) class for the first 4 expansions or so.. after that they're just a buff bot that anyone can box.

I have a question for the nerf advocates, do you want to make charm completely nonviable? After all, there are charm pets and then there are charm pets. A number of the recent changes to charm have rendered what were formerly the best pets no longer subject to charm as well as preventing a charm class to even escape a situation without having their former pet breaking and having aggro on them.

This was balanced by setting charm to be non dispellable. So what exactly do you want, if charm becomes more dangerous and the pets less capable that spells the end of charm in groups but opens up reverse charming which can gain exp just as fast if not faster.

BTW I think I know what the answer is from both content and tone of messages, the majority of the nerf advocates want no charm whatsoever

I think Charm is OP but not actually a problem and lots of the examples given here are heavy hyperbole.

Guess I’m a third type of person. I also leveled in kennels without an enchanter which is apparently impossible.

Auto21. Nice delusional post. There are facts then there are people trying to convince otherwise. Fact is charm is over tuned. Done hearing from you. Agree to disagree straw boy.

While some of this is technically true, in practice it isn't quite this straightforward. Having a good enchanter in your group means the puller doesn't even have to worry about pacifying or feign splitting. Say what you will, that takes time. A better option is, "Pull 'em all and let the chanter sort things out." The good news is that the good enchanters can do all this and charm at the same time.

I'd also add that the level 46 charm spell for Enchanters only works on mobs level 51 and below. The next charm they get is level 52 which works on 52 and below. So once you hit 51, you will not be charming any yellow or red mobs because the spells have no effect on them. Anyone claiming a level 51+ enchanter was running around with a red or yellow con charm pet is flat out lying.

You need to figure out to how quote.
Anyway, you proved my point - thanks for stopping by.
In other news for the oldies... screenshot or it never happened.

/boggle

How would those wizards do without the stuns?

Heh. You literally are so spinning so many circles within that complete inability to mount any non-direct and/or rational game related reason player charm *shouldn't* be re-balanced that you've reached the dizzy point where you are basically just left 100% projecting the against's own weak foundation onto the other side. You might not being able to see that, but you really should be giving anybody who can without a horse in this race (such as say a dev) more credit to do so.

Gonna let you in on a rational deduction spoiler. The parses you keep pointing out aren't readily available right this second without a lot of us currently playing on a server in that era, to better highlight something most pro and against people here are already acknowledging exists to at least some arguable extent, will come soon enough with the new server launches. Barthom will also end up essentially being right in what he said a few pages back. Player Charm will indeed see a second pass though re-balance. Probably is not going to happen in time to save the upcoming server from another round of extreme CharmQuest...but it is going to happen at some point in the future. That much will be more of a given after Aradune in particular plays itself out too.

It's also going to happen for the same exact reason a lot of other blatantly obvious stuff in need of such in past was re-balanced into a "nerf" too, and which has and will always lead to a fair amount of screaming ""nerf bat!!!" in the immediate aftermath before a lot of those same people just move on to exploiting the next best major imbalance that pops up. It gets re-balanced...because people exploit it to the point in the game world that it needs re-balanced, and "I have fun exploiting it" or "I don't have any firsthand insight on the issue but am still choosing to take a super generalized all nerfs are bad principle stance here anyway" simply isn't a rational enough presented reason *not* to do it in the best interests of the gameplay as a whole.

It is really that simple. Regardless how many will fail to see that, and then choose to place the blame on "whining" latter.

This post is a bit out of context because it came from one of the nuked threads, but I asked permission from Dreamweaver to repost here, as a heartfelt reaction of an ex-Enchanter who retired from the class after the original GoD nerf to charm.

I am sure so many people have said what I am about to say, but I wish I had saved a lot of the materials / forum posts / etc. from the original Everquest days. Did you know, the original pre-release version of Enchanters had no animation? The class was created as, and played to be, the master-of-manipulation playstyle. Both from the point of buffs, debuffs, and crowd control.

But:

1) Other classes become more and more viable as Enchanters for crowd control.
2) End-game content becomes, with certain exceptions, less and less designed for crowd control.
3) Mana regeneration buffs become shared with other classes, although always in weaker forms.
4) Enchanter buff duration became incredibly lengthy. This is a huge boon from a micromanaging point of view, but makes it far less necessary to bring an Enchanter as part of a group.
5) Early Enchanter nukes have stun components and very high aggro values, not to mention push. This is eventually removed, thankfully, and Enchanters can deal okay damage with them, but if that's the kind of play style a person wanted there are classes that can do it much better.
6) Enchanter damage over time spells are similarly weak. They have a DD component to them, and would often break root back in the day (not sure how they fare now with the changes to root), but again, if that's the kind of play style a person wanted there are other classes that can do it much better (especially Shamans, who still have powerful slows, incredible heal over time and very decent direct heal abilities, incredible self mana regeneration, and a ton of important buffs).

And this trend does continue. On Fippy, I eventually got to the point where I didn't even need an Enchanter in group to handle even heavy crowd control, because my Bard box could very easily control mob density from the pull and mezzing from a stupidly strong AE mez she eventually got. Not to mention AE slow and snare, while still providing overhaste and regular haste or mana regen without even needing to do anything more than hit the correct melody hotkey.

I have been told in the past that nobody is trying to remove charm completely, that it could be toned down, and other such responses. Sure. And wizard nukes could be toned down, who cares if they do a little less damage. Especially AE nukes, because hell I can't do that kind of damage so why should anybody else? Heals could be toned down, who cares if they heal a little less. Especially CH, because hell I can't do that kind of healing so why should anybody else? What's a 20% reduction here, a 10% nip and tuck here, what's the big deal if the hasted and dual wielding charm pet that was tickling an NPC breaks charm and swallows the Enchanter whole and poops it out in letters that spell "git gud" right?

And again, when this playstyle has been firmly discouraged, exactly what is it that we expect the Enchanter to fall back on? Wandering aimlessly, looking for a crowd needing to be controlled perhaps exactly once while the camp is broken and probably not again for the rest of the exp session? Because if charm isn't worth using, there's extremely little reason not to replace that Enchanter with another class that can nuke harder, dot harder, slow better AND provide incredible heal coverage while doing it, or run mobs back to camp like Mario Andretti on speed.

Or is the goal to reduce the effectiveness of charm while buffing the Enchanter's abilities that...other classes can still do better than the Enchanter? Why even bother? For that matter, why would we even want the Enchanter to play differently than it was designed to play?

My very long-winded point (apologies) is that as time goes on, Enchanters lose much of what made them special at the start. Some of this is arguably good - it's not really healthy for the game to have trinity-classes hard required for the most optimal game play sessions. It's probably not good to have to design around these powerful abilities for every raid encounter. Enchanters aren't the first or last class to have their unique abilities diluted and spread among other classes. Even charm is shared with other classes that can make more than adequate use of the ability.

But for those who enjoyed what the class was at the very start, everything that made that playstyle enjoyable was very slowly removed and diminished. And this is why I have played a Warrior in this game ever since charm was heavily nerfed post Tipt in GoD. Every class that has gone through this has not enjoyed it, and it's almost always the result of complaints from people that would rather tear a class down than build up their own. This thread, and many others like it, aren't even properly posted on these forums - they should all be removed as per the forum guidelines. Just because other classes cannot do what an Enchanter can do, does not mean it should be removed.

And even today, no other class risks as much as does an Enchanter while charming - far less, since other DPS manages only threat whereas the Enchanter manages control of the actual MOB. Just because survival is easier today, does not mean Enchanters should be nerfed - else logically, EVERY class should be nerfed because it is easier for them to survive their own mistakes and aggro control, etc. If people are so wantonly jealous of charm, they should either roll an Enchanter and deal with the various downsides of the class, or else convince the developers to strengthen their own classes.

That is absolutely not how it works at the pointy end of new TLP's. If a group is at Hamlord, and they have downtime, they absolutely will try to pull more trash mobs toward Frenzied or Crusader. No one owns the trash. If you aren't standing there when "your" trash mobs respawn ready to pull them, someone else will.

So after churning through your wall of text, you still failed to produce any facts, only more conjecture. For example, you claiming that a 2nd pass will happen. Based on what evidence or dev??? more nonsense

People get DPS disciplines in Kunark too for boss and named fights so don’t leave those out of the parse. I don’t recall ever seeing a charm pet pop a discipline.

One of my major objections to this, aside from it actually being very difficult to find something that will actually make a difference without massive downside, is that one of the best parts of EQ is emergent gameplay created by finding cool ways to combine abilities that result in strong and possibly unexpected outcomes. I am anathema to the idea that every time something cool is found it should be ‘fixed’ once large numbers of people know about it. Just let us play with our toys instead of taking away each one, as long as they are not a grief or an exploit.

It’s not emergent gameplay though, it’s just broken. There’s no trick to it or some clever process involved and no one discovered it - it’s just there. Every new TLP sees more charmers than the previous one and eventually charm is probably going to become a victim of its own success. Aradune is going to have so many chanters that it’s going to be difficult to ignore anymore. Still, charm has been this way for at least 9 years now and the devs have known about it for just as long, so it’s either next to impossible to fix or they think it’s fine the way it is. For very selfish reasons, I hope that it doesn’t get nerfed at this point.

Why is it that there has always been that one person that has to ruin things for everybody. Screw off with your nerfing bs. They have nerfed the living hell out of everything useful in this game, including HS which was one of the more fun parts of playing TLP's after PoP and now its worthless, you MIGHT average 1 an hour. People like you should go play single player games.

I'm going to be very busy replying to all this conjecture and nonsense. There have been 5+ TLPs already so what is the ENC population every new TLP? you don't know? but you still make these claims = conjecture and nonsense. What is difficult to ignore is all this nonsense.

18 pages to go... divided by 7 days = 2.57 new pages per day to hit our target of 50 pages.

I didn't see any charm changes in the latest patch notes. Guess It's still safe to roll and enchanter for now.

I already spent a large amount of this thread focusing on the actual facts vs strawman stuff. I also explained in that very last post why it's going to happen. You apparently just lack either the willingness or the ability to fully comprehend the always surrounding reality of that why, or what ends up actually going into the always fairly predictable outcome of similar scenarios you never need a crystal ball to see coming once that growing "me too" exploitation factor starts making a fairly sizable and universally acknowledged gameworld imbalance a lot harder to continually overlook.

But hey, having almost the entire against argument focusing solely on trying to pretend an big imbalance doesn't exist to a point almost nobody wants to even dare acknowledge or present their own fair version of what a re-balance might look like? Yeah, EQ history suggests that counter stance always helps and ends well for the people taking it, right?

Please quote the facts. I can't wait....

Honestly, I don’t have the numbers and even if I claimed to they would be disputed because of roleplay/anon. I should have said that it’s my opinion based on playing on every round of TLPs since the beginning, seeing various reports of class populations over the years and just paying attention to chat channel numbers. I think I’m right, but if i’m not, you guys have even less to worry about than I already think you do.