Our guild did Hate last night. I decided I was hungry, so I gave everyone C2 and AQ and went AFK for 20 minutes to cook some dinner (mmm tostones). We had a shaman to slow, so I was not missed. I decided to push this for another 15 minutes, whereupon I got a massive slew of tells and noise on teamspeak for C2. The rest of the time I spent doing my crappy mage impression and tossing a nuke or two per mob, or occasionally cripple or gasping embrace when I got bored.
On the other hand, when you have a charmed, hasted, DW'ing pet, going AFK is always an adventure, group or no
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] After a while I had a longing for the good old days, so I decided to charm a Cleric of Innoruuk. I stripped the enchantments a few times (a lot of the time those stupid things have MR up), tashed (no malo though as our shaman was busy slowing), and tried Boltrans. It broke after 30 seconds. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. In fact my guild never even knew I tried to charm it because they were busy with another fight, and I just gave up and mezzed it after 4 charm breaks. This at level 55, where I am a solid 5 levels above the mob.
Would I be really bored playing a mage? Based on this I would say so. Are the new charm durations more classic? Maybe, I never played an enchanter on live. Are the fixes to whirl and lull classic? Almost certainly. Were we overpowered before? Maybe.
I'm just trying to explain that playing an enchanter nowadays is about 5x less fun without these things. The constant excitement of knowing your charmed pet could be beating on you in 2 seconds. The thrill of using bind sight and lull to solo the herbalist room in Guk (actually trickier than the King room IMO). Enchanters were like ninjas; we could use the back door to make impossible encounters easy. You can say it's better balanced or more classic, but it is sure as hell a lot less fun.
This is why you are seeing tons of posts from enchanters unhappy with the charm change (I'm guilty of this too). It's not so much that we are massively less powerful, its that we are massively less fun to play.
Anyway, maybe my skillz are weak and obviously all the awesome enchanters aren't having trouble, but I don't see how there is much skill involved in having charm break 4x in 2 minutes.