I feel the same way, it doesn't feel like the EverQuest I knew.
Vanilla WoW suffers from the same problem. I try to tell my younger friends who aren't old enough to have played OG WoW that back in the day, the majority of people didn't min/max. Dual Wield tanking was unheard of. Warlocks had to deal low damage because they didn't have any way of dropping aggro (dual wield tanking solved this problem in classic launch).
No one cared if you were a Retribution Paladin. To be honest I didn't even know that Paladins were viable healers when WoW launched. Most Druids played cats or moonkins. But when Classic launched, only a handful of classes and specs are considered viable. To pretend like this wasn't always the case is a lie.
Feels the same with EverQuest. I wasn't used to having an enchanter CC everything during pulls, I remember our Druids regularly kiting the mobs around and rooting them and that was just the norm. Now people act like the game is unplayable without Mesmerize and Clarity, and in reality, that's not true.
The charm thing is even crazier. I remember my groups banning Enchanters from having pets in our group because it was simply too dangerous and unreliable; I remember a group in Karnor's Castle where our Enchanter had a pet anyways, a Drolvarg, and while the tank was busy pulling, the charm broke and the Drolvarg basically killed the entire group (except me, because I'm a little weasel who isntantly took off running).
Another thing that no one ever talks about is that the way Enchanters work on P99 is arguably different than the way they worked on regular EverQuest. This is still seen on the TLP's that launch today. On the official servers, all Enchanters build intelligence over Charisma. You can google this, but I'm sure a lot of you already know this. On P99 they build Charisma over Intelligence. So it's quite literally a completely different system.
Now I'm not saying Enchanters weren't known to be powerful while I played 20 something years ago. But I remember the first time I realized it, I had actually been playing for years, and was fairly high level. It was during a Plane of Hate raid where we should have wiped, and I was confused when we didn't, and realized that a single Enchanter easily kept us from dying by CC'ing the adds.
I do remember when PoP came out, I would beg random Enchanters for KEI and Speed of Shissar, so yeah, they were good. But this idea that Enchanter-quest was the norm is far fetched. I remember more Druids using charm successfully than Enchanters, and that's just a fact.
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