Test Update 05/19/14

Since PoWar is the main arguement here, I'll throw my two cents as an enchanter as well.

Pre Rune adjustment in the first Field of PoWar, I was able to molo with my wiz mercenary, a heal pot per mob, and our rune unity - only hitting it when it dropped. Veil of Mindshadow, our heavy absorbtion rune aa that is built to absorb a portion of hits rather than all of them, will take most of the blows. 90% of the time the aa refreshes before the absorbtion is depleted - if I am pulling single mobs like in this case. I'll basically still be able to do this, and while I agree it's a bit absurd it is in fact doable, I don't believe the entirity is based on my runes so much as it is the first field is extremely low tuned, understandably so. Can I "tank" in the second field? Kind of, but it's incredibly risky and not truly worth it.

Now as for how this personally affects me as a raiding enchanter, I'm at a loss for how I'll spend my time now. There are no real raids that require true crowd control. There's Bixie 2, Neriak 2, but even then this is still incredibly mindless cc, or in the case of Neriak 2, incredibly short. The last raid I can think of that required true performance ability was the Pillar of Arcane in Alra, or maybe even Rubak Oseka. In RoF, I'd say probably Heart of Fear 2 being the closest thing to requiring some ability. When I say ability I don't mean standing there mashing two buttons, I mean something that requires thought and precise action, as well as proper gearing to survive.

Because of this I took on the roll of a defensive speedbump if you will. Heavy agility, ac improvements where it makes sense etc. I can sustain a few hits and be fine if my healer is good, even if my runes are not active. I used my runes like a taunt to help tanks reposition if things hit the fan. 95% of the time I'd die unless I hit Armor of Experience veteran. Many times my contribution has helped in this way as it doesn't mean the next tank up has to go chasing things down and hope taunt doesn't fail. It's in their range, it's waiting for them. I also considered this control. But again, I'm speaking as a raider.

As for the group game, not much will change for me in terms of pulling or "tanking" things. Throw a few more spells into the lineup and it should still be somewhat sustainable, though maybe not as severe as 2-3 mobs at a time in terms of tanking. But this is because of more than one single line of runes. The recast time is not going to prevent the issue of chain casting runes and surviving, there's plenty of subsitutions, it just means more casting time and more mana sadly which means less survivability, but it's still there.

Personally I believe simply adding more ranks of Spell Casting Subtley would have removed some of the aggro problem. We haven't gotten any since VoA and they've padded the crap out of runes, makes zero sense to me. I don't see why they dropped the aggro AND raised recast, AND raised mana, AND dropped the amount they absorb all at once. There really aren't many enchanters left and this is incredibly harsh on them, especially in the group game where they don't have the full benefit of heavy defense. We're not wizards and mages, we're supposed to take hits and control the situation. These runes are used to fill the gap between cc like it has been mentioned, and in my case it's used to snap things to me to get them bundled together. These changes aren't really going to ruin our survivability in doing these things people think is overpowered, it just makes it harder. I can see a few of the changes, but doing ALL of them is completely unnecessary and not going to fix the problem of us being able to "tank" a few things. Instead it puts group enchanters at more of a risk for death and one like me in a position of a glorified bard that can't carry a tune. I can still tank and survive group game, because I'm heavily geared. This is fact for most classes. Our way is just different and entirely based on persistency in casting. A tank will drop without heals, an enchanter will drop with interruption, happens more often than not. .5 is not instant, and is still interruptable if there's enough things trying to hug you.

I'll shut up now~.

^ this is a good post

You're not making any sense, sorry. Please explain to us why your runes are only effective in ONE ZONE? They work everywhere!

I think the main point here is that runes are a defining part of the enchanter, but less so than mezzing. Runes are meant to be a stop-gap while mez works or between mez breaks or stuns, not something to replace mezzing completely. However changing them may well have a major impact on how the game works so the devs do obviously need it tested. Eg a big mix of mobs with some mezzable, some stunnable, some neither - do AE mez/stun and those others will be whacking you leading to a quick death. (WK1 springs to mind, our chanters were dying a lot last night).

Perhaps the solution though is indeed lower aggro and let the knights with AE abilities grab and tank the non-mez non-stunnable mobs. Not everything has to be enchanter achieveable!

After forcing the rune nerf down our throats without even an attempt at a discussion (despite the community pointing out that dropping the hate from the runes would achieve everything that SOE seemed to want to prevent runetanking), there will be one fewer enchanter around, as it's given me the final nudge needed to cancel two accounts. This is not a ragequit, but more of a tootiredtocontinuefightingquit, and my stuff is all NODROP, so no, you can't have it

This is very close to the point trying to be made, yes. In a perfect world, the Shadowknights would mass aggro and mezzing would be the most defining thing of our class still. Truthfully the heavy aggro made that difficult on them. I know for a fact the heavy aggro can compete with knight aggro and almost certainly overpower it from situations where I've done it for a chuckle. However, with the way things have progressed in the recent years, there is very little that truly requires enchanter mezzing. You use WK1 as an example, that is a good one, the random mixture of jerk mobs etc. What we do here is split the job between mezzing/stunning and a warrior kiting. Often the warriors can sustain kite on a big part of the wave if they're getting healed well. We have to do this because of our raid make up many times. Another that comes to mind, though not as severe as a big cluster of death such as WK1, is the Evantil raid. Many times I end up having to snap an add that aggros the casters that I am sitting up top with at the molars and bring it back down to the raid - but truthfully that is more the fault of the tank assigned to that area, imo, The point is, most things, sans a few raids, can be completed with kiting/offtanking.

The thing that gave us an edge in terms of control, when almost everyone these days has some form of splitting/cc tool and aggro ranges are very minimal in a lot of places, was our durability, meaning runes. What's not being considered are those random loose cannons that like to break mez and not pay attention to what they're doing. On raids we do end up casting runes for this reason, resulting in aggro problems for tanks, and probably death for the enchanter eventually. Really they could have cut down the absorb amount on the runes and we could still have the durability and the aggro amount would be reduced, without group-geared enchanters tanking things they shouldn't be able. I also have the issue of not having enough block buff slots to keep DS's off me, and sometimes our clerics have been known to intentionally or accidentally cast Blood on mobs. So because that still doesn't work right, often mez is immediately broken right after it lands if it's hitting me and I missed a DS on myself from a lower rank bard song or what have you, or someone else (if Blood is on).

The tanking issue is more the fact that content is spread out so thin that things really aren't that hard. A lot of the group gear is very good, and if an enchanter is going for the right augments they can survive to perform whatever control job is required - even if that means off tanking a little. It's not really intentional. I do believe a lot of the issue is zone tuning and I think the fact the PoWar raid is extremely painful supports that. They keep things at a steady pace, then WHAM right in the face with some huge phallus of a zone/event while the rest of the expansion is like a Bob Ross painting with happy little trees and clouds.

The tradeskilled item Crown of Clarity should have its effect looked at (and boosted). For a 3 hour reuse timer, getting back 2k or less mana is pitiful (and in many cases less than one spell cast's worth of mana). I was hoping it would at least be the quality of the large mod rods without the hp reduction. Even then, at a 3 hour reuse it still wouldn't be worth equipping (and you must equip to click).

For a long reuse ability like this one to be a functional tool for casters, I would recommend a mana return in the neighborhood of 10,000 mana. This equates to about 10% of a raiding caster's manapool...which is still a low amount for a 3 hour reuse ability imo.

Edit: Compare to the horn from the anniversary events, which is basically 1k mana regenerated over its duration and useable every 5 minutes and its a group buff, and you'll see what I mean. The horn is right in the sweet spot for itemization. Its not overpowered, and its not useless. This crown is very underpowered and verges on useless.

I'm making perfect sense to the people that are in the know on this...people saw an Enchanter go into PoW (the ONE ZONE with a special mechanic), tank Judicator with a pet on it and were all "OMG HAX CHNTURR TANKING NERF THOSE !". So idiots came running here and complaining or just bypassing all the attention stuff and went right into pm nerf mode with devs.

If you, a CRT member didn't understand that, or are just playing stupid, that I don't know what to say to you.

I was surprised to see the Crown of Clarity even existed, considering the amount of mana flying around ® previously resulted in a developer panic and kneejerk nerfs.

Still, as long as the druid class is yet again the only mana class excluded from the latest mana boost tricks, I suppose that's all that really matters.

I've had people call for nerfs when I solo/tank content as a Cleric in Chapterhouse, when I ramp tank raid bosses, or when I swarm content with little-to-no chance at death. I recall Necros soloing nameds by DoT/flopping and letting their pet do a fair share of work, and people throw their hands up. I also recall the days when 6 Warriors would get together with their Earthshakers and clear a zone of mobs.
Every time a class finds a way to be effective, everyone else whines about it.

I was glad when they brought the other changes to an open discussion. Although, it's quite apparent that there's others here who have no problem throwing one class under the bus if it ensure that their class is taken care of.

People are saying it isn't a big deal; well they must not have been around for as long as some of them claim. The changes to rune are the last in line to the fundamental things to the class; mez, stun, rune. Now, all three have been changed/reduced/nerfed. NO OTHER CLASS has had the fundamentals changed as much (really, please show me differently). Most of the abilities have been farmed out due to request or to monetize them (with calls for the ones that are left once a month or so). The class isn't even the same it was two years ago, and the differences from a decade ago are astounding.

All Enchanters want is the same thing other classes get when things like this come up, and have only gotten a discussion like that ONCE. Basing the changes off of PoWar blows my mind. Even the first patch where they buffed them up baffled me, and here we are the very next patch worse off then before. Remember the exodus after Mez Mastery? I know most don't care but the same talks are now flying around again because of this. That isn't enough to have an open discussion? Apparently not if it can keep the rogues or warriors or berserkers from getting changed...

Shrug, I understand fully that you can tank in PoW (with or without a pet infact - I saw it myself without pets and aggro really wasn't an issue), but the skill also works elsehwere just fine and has also been used elsewhere. It's NOT just a one zone trick. It just happens that PoWar was the zone flavour-of-the-month when they made runes stronger. Had it have been during Tower of Rot then you'd have been saying it ONLY WORKS IN ONE ZONE (Rot), which would be equally untrue.

Thank you, devs, for listening to feedback on the mana and endurance ability changes. Some dialogue about the chanter nerfs would be great.

So these changes will be a big improvement for what you are wanting to achieve.

You will be preloaded with close to 500k of HP's and runes. And you got another 170k of runes ready to go in a 0.5sec cast time (+ the 200k of AA runes at your disposal).

Your first port of call when doing CC is CC rather than casting runes. You have Beguilers, Beam, PBAE mez all with low casts times and 6+ targets.

Go try it for yourself.

Beguilers banishing is 6 mobs max.
Beam of Slumber is 8 mobs max with very little range
Perlious disorintation rarely leaves my bar unless I realy dont need to mez multis

I am curious as to how you come up with 500k Hps w/runes total
im at ~120k hps fully raid buffed
Etherial adds 100k
Lv 100 now nerfed rune adds 70k
Epic adds 2k
Veil of mindshadow 95K
120+100+70+2+95 = 387
VoM is technicaly another 95k however that requires you to not have any runes up to be used
i guess you can include
reactive rune 55k and
Glyph spray 50k
umbrial rune 44k
However you typicaly dont have reactive or spray on in a raid setting as you save them for the "well fk" moments, or i do at least. And umbrial rune is "meh" fluff.
you then have 160k of runes within a 0.5 sec cast time if you can get it off when being beat on.
this assumes good stacking on everything and doesn't include the conditional runes (DD or DoT only)

What does any of the conversation about rest/harvest have anything to do with enchanters?

The only class I see less of than rogues at raids is enchanters. We're both getting hosed. The things that define both classes have gone the way of the dodo. Rogues have numerous things we used to do that aren't done at all now, while the major enchanter roles have been pushed aside as well but do still happen, some. At the same time they have given you major ADPS abilities, and your own personal dps abilities have increased. But quite frankly we've both been vastly ignored.

Because in this update several rune spells were changed as well.

Enchanters aren't class defined by ADPS. They are defined by Mez, Stun, Rune, Charm and Auras. Yet I've had multiple groups invite me as an enchanter and say 'we dont care what you do just keep XX & XX auras up'

Anyone that just invites enchanters for auras or just boxes them for auras, is missing out on the most powerful things a chanter can do lol.