Spells: Enchanter Mesmerize does mem wipe too frequently

[azxten]

Originally Posted by DMN [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

You have to very careful when reading these old forum pots by people, doesn't matter the class or time period. Back then, the players were actively lobbying verant to nerf other classes and buff their own. That's hidden under the majority yo "this sucks" and "this is overpowered" type posts.


As far as enchanter in particular they are even more problematic. The way the class/abilities worked was complicated and especially complicated back then when the vast majority of players understood little of the mechanics. But more complicated yet in that the class was majorly revamped/changed all thought the first year. Many of the changes never made the patch list.

1. Most class/ability/spell sucks/overpower are essentially people lobbying verant to nerf/buff things, not actually accurate assessment of the class/ability/spell. it was well beyond the scope of typical grass greener behavior as they actually believed, perhaps corrrectly that by crying enough they could accomplish their agenda which was usually getting their own class buffed and other(s) nerfed.

2. Enchanter had a lot of issues when it was first released, as it was the last class added to EQ. It was virtually unplayed in the open beta and didn't exist in the closed beta until they very end.

3. Because of its rough state, it got a bad rep for "being bad" early on. This became a self fulfilling prophecy in some regards, and generally drove people away from playing it even more. "A bad workman always blames his tools".

4. It was considered a purely grouping class, similar to cleric. So many of the people inclined to play them naturally preferred to sit in a group in a supporting role. More importantly, none of them picked enchanter to push the envelope of soloing or duo type situations using the animations or charms. This meant that 99% of enchanter sit in groups with no charm, no animation, they purely buffed/mez'd for CC, and occasionally debuffed and generally had little graps on how anything worked outside of these parameters of play, and even then, as mentioned above because of the quirks of level scaling altering power effectiveness it would give an even more confused picture of what was going on.

A great encapsulation of all of this is seen on the "enchanter nerf list" link that Dolalin gave. He of course wants enchanters buffed, so the strategy is to make them look as weak as possible. He lists, for instance, that DD spells becoming partially resistant was actually a nerf, when in fact that was a huge buff -- particularly to soloing enchanters, and virtually irrelevant to grouping. He's either intentionally lying to hopefully gain a buff for his class, or he was simply completely ignorant of enchanter solo play.

I think that is fair but I also there is a lot of downplaying how broken Enchanter was. Enchanter in my mind was like a framework for a class that was never finished or tested as you said. These classic quotes show that and it's not just one person. Enchanter in live was broken. It wasn't broken as in OP it was just broken. Past evidence of this already exists for charm including warping pets, trains, etc.

If P99 was truly classic Enchanter basically wouldn't exist as a class. It would be so buggy as to be extremely undesirable. Only useful in groups to buff and mez and would almost as frequently wipe groups as save them. The player would die regularly due to a combination of bugs, resists, channeling, etc. This was the classic live Enchanter experience and why most people didn't play it.

Charm and pets are a good example. In actual classic pets alone let alone charmed pets would often result in your death in dungeons due to bad pathing, falling through the world, and so on. P99 by not having these bugs has created an OP unclassic class in Enchanter.

You can read post after post from those links above and see some clearly very knowledgeable people about spell mechanics at the time still talking about how shitty their class was. Literally no one was talking about charming and the "they just didn't know how to use it" argument is getting old. Same with the mez mem blur. From what I've read it seems pretty clear something changed. It worked like it does on P99 and then it was nerfed for exactly the same reason as I'm bug reporting it here. It's OP and never worked this way for most of classic through Velious. It should be about the first 1/2 of classic and then reduce success percentage. There are about a dozen posts spread throughout those links which all allude to this having happened and a major change taking place.