please consider VT key revamp

That's just not true.

VT keying is absolutely still on going and it will be ongoing until PoP. Not only that, but the gear drops are supplemental up to Plane of Time.

The key drop rate and loot table availability needs tuning. Especially for Fungus Grove, Dawnshroud Peaks, Maiden's Eye, The Gray, and Scarlet Desert. These zones should have the lucid shard added to all NPC loot tables and their drop rates adjusted accordingly. That would literally solve a majority of the problems and in turn it would also reduce the number of support tickets created in the early days of the expansion launch.

The structure of botb meant that charm was useless there. Zones with overly bad mr like maidens eye also don't change things. Charm was wildly powerful and in fact the relatively weaker pc vs npc balance plus the lack of recent flat % nerf meant that a charm pet was capable of ridiculous amounts of dps. I mean, come on, if you were using charm to kill mobs like aow what stopped you from using charm to frogs or juggs or spiders etc?

So like I keep saying, fear of death and ignorance of just how wildly good charm dps was kept it out of the mainstream, but people today know too well how useful it is. Like so many aspects of tlps.

Charm has always been good but I do think it was riskier in "era" for a couple reasons:
-I think there was a change at one point to how channeling and the ability to get casts off while being hit in melee was modified, and casters at all levels are more able to complete spell casts while being hit now. In the old eras it was more difficult to successfully cast a spell while a mob was beating on you.
-The change to the AC system has given all characters significantly more mitigation than in era, which increases the ability of a geared Enchanter to "tank" his broken charmie.
-There was a baseline reduction in casting speed for a huge number of Int caster spells. I'm more specifically familiar with Necromancer which is the class I played in '99, but I know some damage spells went down from 6 second casts to 3 second casts. I'm not sure on this one but it could be the case some of the spells relevant to charming are also lower cast time than they were in '99-01

It just surprises me and tells me very quickly that some posters did not play an enchanter during release through pop when they state they always had this type of caliber for charming. No, no they did not, QoL changes over the years have improved them over all and people are playing an enchanter that has been improved. So those who do not want to see any QoL changes, I constantly bring up enchanters because they are so beastly now for offense, defense, and CC.

I had issues grouping sometimes in Luclin on my Necro (original era Luclin)--I had weird play times many days, so I used to charm in Howling Stones to farm AA. It was good XP and decently reliable, but I do think it was higher risk than today, at least for Necro I know some of your core spells used to cast slower and you couldn't take hits as well. The bad connection quality back then was also a factor, I was on dial-up until PoP era when I went off to college and if you're solo charming and your Mom picks up the phone and boots you off dial up you're dealing with an XP death and a corpse run etc which were fairly annoying in era.

I absolutely wouldn't change the structure of the VT key quest itself but I think it could benefit from being speeded up, faster shard drops or even multiple shard drops.

Increased drop rate would go a long way to reducing the farming problems.

Hmmm same drop rate, but 6 shards instead of 1 so the whole gorup can move on?

This...100%.

Back in OG Kunark Era, a geared, buffed Chanter could get 1 rounded by a geared/buffed frog in Sebilis.

Now, back then, those charmed frogs also put out considerably more DPS. However, it was this change with the innate AC that tipped the scales.

Also, the wipes caused by a charm-break lead to a lot of debate about whether it was more optimal to use charm vs not use it. Keep in mind, back in OG Times, a group wiping resulted in (1) a naked corpse run, (2) more XP loss than today (even with a rez), (3) very high likelihood you lost your camp (and no DZs to easily find another).

Thus there was a huge incentive for groups to simply post-up and play it safe. The down-time associated with a wipe was ridiculous.

Back then, my ideal group was Holy Trinity + 3 epic monks/rogues/mages. The enchanter in the group wouldn't charm. They were strictly there for CC, Haste, Clarity.

The other thing, back then, zones were so over camped, you really didn't "need" charm. It took away a spawn, and you didn't need the DPS to stay ahead of the spawn rates.

Yep, when I joined a group in 2000 Seb it wasn't, "Let's get you a charm candidate." it was "You're not gonna charm, are you?"

Yeah that's a good point about diminishing returns of charm, even on TLP with pickzones, I've been in charm groups in some camps where you literally run out of mobs because the charm pet(s) do so much damage. In the OG days you sometimes camped a single room of a dungeon and were happy to have gotten that camp, if anything the charm pet was just taking a mob out of your xp rotation.

Even in the OG days, if you charmed one of your own camp's mobs and thereby lost a mob out of your rotation you were doing it wrong.

The first time I really remember charming being a popular thing was when Dire Charm came out. Enchanters would be running around in PoP zones looking for a level 46 mob to use for the day. I might be fuzzy on the details, but that's when it seems like it really became a thing.

I was in VT before the first week of luclin was over.

The post was made in response to one at this time, because now its even easier than when I did it.