You have to remember I didn't even know P99 existed until 2020+. People act like everyone has been playing P99 for 17 years. In reality,
it's a very hot topic on the the Monsters & Memories Discord ATM and I keep seeing all of these people say Enchanter Charm was always OP, so I started digging around and doing research. During that time period I saw all kinds of debates on P99 ... hundreds of pages long, but literally no one presents evidence (and there's ton of it still out there). They just cite their memory, which I agree... is accurate, but unfortunately it isn't proof. So I decided to help these fools out and BOOM... oh that thread is locked.. I better not make another one... but then I see this thread and I can't help myself, lol.
I just feel like a lot of people could have done advanced searches from the years 1999-2001 and proved that Enchanter charm was not the meta. Not arguing that Charm wasn't strong at times, or that it was useless, but I think it's obvious that the population and most Enchanters themselves saw themselves as CC-bots (that's where the term CC-bot comes from), and not unstoppable demi-gods who are 60% of a group's DPS, and who can easily solo anything in the game. In fact, necromancer actually had that reputation back then, lmao.
Also I genuinely wonder how many people are mistaking later versions of the game as being classic? Because in talking to people on that Discord, I notice that they always begin citing instances of Charm being OP but it's PoP+ and honestly, I do remember charm being the meta in PoP. Even Bards were solo'ing with Charm.
I also recognize that you can make the argument that Charm was always strong, but we all sucked or were limited by hardware, and therefore this is classic. I still feel like it's unclassic enough to make the classic experience not feel classic. Granted I main an Enchanter on P99, and acknowledge that it's a lot of fun. I just get triggered by people saying that the game was always played this way.
World of Warcraft Classic suffers from the same exact problem. In 2004, people did not care what class or spec you were. If you were level 60 people would invite you to their guild because getting to level 60 was hard, and finding level 60 players to join your guild was hard. I remember a lot of my friends being balance druids, ret paladins, hunters being considered a top dps class. Flash forward to when Classic WoW actually launched and guilds were literally only recruiting 2 specs out the entire roster. Playing anything other than a Warrior, Rogue or Priest was forbidden. That's not a true classic experience. You'll never convince me it is.