Splitting the Enchanter into 2 classes

[Zuranthium]

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

Wizard and Magician both feel like 'half done' classes when compared to Enchanters and Necromancers. Mashing the two together and bringing in the overall power with a revised spellbook and values to those spells to be close to a Druid would have been a great move.

Mages and Wizards were pretty well designed for how the game played pre-Kunark (Mages were too powerful, but not the most OP). Unfortunately the expansions made their role as "Nuke" classes increasingly irrelevant, while skyrocketing the power of Rogue/Monk/Warrior/Shaman/Cleric. Enchanters got even stronger too, when they were already the most powerful class in the game, post Necromancer pet nerf (although people didn't quite realize it for awhile).

If I was looking to balance the game better without splitting the Enchanter into 2 classes, then I would nerf Charm (make it cost more mana / cast a little slower / have NPC's unable to dual wield if they aren't naturally supposed to), and move all of their Mana-related spells over to Wizards. They would still be crazy powerful with those changes, but at least it would tone down their insanely high Charm DPS, require more of an investment for the huge return they do still get, and level the playing field more in terms of how many ubiquitous buff capabilities they have.

[kjs86z]

Are you upset you don't play an enchanter?

[Legidias]

Take away buffs from enchanters, put them on wizards. Boom you have 2 full classes that are now balanced out

[Zuranthium]

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

Take away buffs from enchanters, put them on wizards. Boom you have 2 full classes that are now balanced out

That's bad class design though. Enchanters having a good number of buffs, pertaining to altering the characteristics of people, is inherent to their class identity. They enchant things. Similarly, a class that was built around doing nuke damage (Wizard) shouldn't suddenly be given Haste buffs and such to compensate for their nuke capabilities being poorly balanced in later eras of the game.

I think the current Enchanter class just has so many amazing tools that it would be enough to fill 2 classes. Ideally in a game, I would want Illusion type spells to be more powerful as well, because that's a really interesting mechanic. So that further pushes the concept of wanting 2 separate classes to house all of these abilities.

Originally Posted by kjs86z [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Are you upset you don't play an enchanter?

I've played all the caster classes to high levels; it IS generally upsetting to play characters that do so much less, and to have groups suffering so much because of the game revolving around certain busted mechanics, of which the Enchanter class has access to nearly all of them, and few other classes have access to any at all.

[Quizlop]

Additional balance suggestion: Swap Torpor and Nature's Touch.

[Legidias]

Maybe doesnt fit lore, but it fits a balanced gameplay design

[Raev]

The single biggest balance problem with classic EQ is doling out cheap 'control' spells that are hugely effective against what would otherwise be far more powerful NPCs. Since raid bosses had to be immune to those spells, they made them all fully MR, which made casters gimp on raids, so they give Wizards lures, and well, here we are. But this was more an issue in Classic/Kunark than Velious.

In Planes of Power they fixed this with specific immunities and being extremely stingy with the control spells, e.g. Enchanters don't get AE stun, AE mez, or even a 1 minute+ mesmerize, liberally gave out immunities to mez/stun/charm/snare, and made nukes harder to resist.

[loramin]

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

The single biggest balance problem with classic EQ is doling out cheap 'control' spells that are hugely effective against what would otherwise be far more powerful NPCs. Since raid bosses had to be immune to those spells, they made them all fully MR, which made casters gimp on raids, so they give Wizards lures, and well, here we are. But this was more an issue in Classic/Kunark than Velious.

In Planes of Power they fixed this with specific immunities and being extremely stingy with the control spells, e.g. Enchanters don't get AE stun, AE mez, or even a 1 minute+ mesmerize, liberally gave out immunities to mez/stun/charm/snare, and made nukes harder to resist.

Yeah, pretty much the same thing was true of slow.

In classic the slow spell line scaled nicely to higher percentages, but then when the game continued getting more powerful, they couldn't really make slow do any more slowing, because it was already a percentage-based effect (ie. it already worked just as well on a PoP mob as it did on a Kunark mob).

IIRC they maybe added one slightly higher slow before they pretty much just had to give up and stop adding to the spell line (although they did add disease-based slows ... again, differentiating by mob resists to keep things interesting).

[Zuranthium]

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

The single biggest balance problem with classic EQ is doling out cheap 'control' spells that are hugely effective against what would otherwise be far more powerful NPCs. Since raid bosses had to be immune to those spells, they made them all fully MR, which made casters gimp on raids, so they give Wizards lures, and well, here we are. But this was more an issue in Classic/Kunark than Velious.

Hmm, why do you think it's less of an issue in Velious? It's much worse there I think, with the raid targets having absurd health totals. Rogues and Monks are inherently doing more DPS than any caster can possibly do regardless of resists for those fights (except for maybe a Necro who could stack every single DoT they have), because mana runs out and melee costs nothing.

Some raid targets being immune to MR based spells isn't a big issue to me, so much as the overall resists in general. There are a lot of non-Magic Resist type DoT's and DD's that simply don't land, which means Mages/Druids/Necros/Rangers can't contribute much/any spell damage.

[Keza]

I feel like it's a bit extreme for balancing the class, but if you want to theorycraft splitting enchanters into two halves they already did it in EQ2. For classic EQ I just think slow/charm are brokenly OP. Could probably nerf mez as well, but it's the other two that make them gods. Shams with slow/canni/torpor as well.

In either case you would have to create new spells (or reappropriate future spells) to make it function as an entire class. Well.. a fun class anyway. I suppose there's an argument to be made that several of the classes are incredibly dull. You yourself say this revamped enchanter would be boring. In that case why split them instead of just nerfing it?