Spells: Enchanter Mesmerize does mem wipe too frequently

[Dolalin]

Possible that more things will pop up in the eq-archives index (still 3 million files to go...), but it's gonna be another month or two till it's done.

[Gustoo]

Good research. Obviously a problem with current mechanic. I really love these threads not to nerf characters but to just dig up the classic deets.

[Gustoo]

Can we make enchanter nerf changes after red 2.0 comes out so I can PL with an enchy buddy first?

[azxten]

Thanks Dolalin. A list of those resources and how to search would be great. The most interesting thing I saw so far in your links is that mem blur as an effect seems to have more nuance than it does on P99.

A "mem blur" apparently has two components. One is the reset of all damage done to the mob but no change to the aggro list itself. The other is the actual change to the aggro list which is apparently random in terms of how many people it removes and who it removes. Ranging from a complete wipe of all aggro to wipe of a single person which may not even be the caster.

There is a lot of discussion about how many times to cast mez or mem blur to be sure aggro was wiped. There is no mention of using the level 4 mez to mem blur mobs. It's like using Enthrall twice or Mez + Mem Blur + Mem Blur and so on. Lots of discussion about the best way to ensure you wiped aggro and none of them involve casting one spell let alone the level 4 one.

Tons to read there but so far it's pretty obvious P99 is a shell of how this worked on live and it's OP in the current state. Most of it reads similar to my feelings on charm and channeling. The mechanic is similar to live but it works way too well at lower levels. It's like the emulator team figured out how mez seemed to work in general for a spell like Enthrall or Dazzle and then made that the base mez function ignoring that the level 4 spell didn't work that way.

[azxten]

So far I see...

1. Mem blur always resets damage if successful but randomly removes from the aggro list from all to none as a separate effect.
2. Mez will never mem blur on a recast.
3. Possibly once a mob is mezzed no change will occur to it's aggro list until it has broken mez or been casted on. No social aggro, etc until mez breaks.

October 30, 2000 12:03 AM Click Here to See the Profile for Gemen Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote I recently did a test on this one myself, while hunting those rabid Spirocs in Timorous Deep. I had the level 4 Mesmerize and the level 34 Entrance spells. I'd just tashania one of the buggers, run a ways, and mez it with Entrance first. (This was before I became KOS with 'em, btw.) In the 4-5 nukes it took me to take one down, I never noticed a /con change with each entrance. Next I tried mesmerize, and easily 50%-75% of the time, the /con message changed back to the original, on 33-40+ mobs. So far as I can tell, as was earlier stated, that the longer the mez lasts, the less of a chance it has to blur. I suppose this is why I always thought Enthrall was broken, when it would almost never blur aviak guards in Lake Rathe, when Mesmerize would blur stuff all the time before then.

October 16, 2000 08:50 AM All of the mesmerize spells have a memory blur component, but past the low levels, it's extremely rare for the blur to actually work.

Feb 2000 nerf list

- Memory Blur Level Capped 35+ mobs/ Memory Blur
Chance with Mes Series Reduced

More proof Enchanter pet HP was laughably low as proven already:

Now as for our pets, in ALOT of cases they are a liability more than a
tool. Their damage output is only moderate and their HPs and AC are a
joke.

There is a bit of a timeline established there. Someone did "recent testing" posting Oct 30th saying the level 4 mez spell was blurring TD Spirocs ~50-75% of the time but Entrance never blurred. This supports the current P99 mechanic somewhat. Possibly Spirocs are higher leveling resulting in the lower success rate compared to the log I posted of level 25-30 mobs having ~100% success to blur.

Mem blur is capped for 35+ mobs and mem blure chance on the mes series is reduced from this nerf list presented Feb 2000.

It seems like mes did work similar in live to P99 but it was nerfed during classic and well before Kunark. One of the many broken functions of true classic. On that list it also mentions that you could do DOT damage to a mezzed mob and it wouldn't break. They mention having to "choose" now between dot or mez. Sounds like a lot of these were unintended effects the devs worked to fix after release.

I'd really like to hear more about that mem blur cap to 35+ if that is what they're saying. No mobs should be mem blurred if they're high level?

Oh ya, and where are all these enchanted items we were 'supposed' to be
able to make ??? Enchanters seem to be the most overlooked class in the
game .. maybe that's why there's so few of us ? I've been doing player
counts lately and found that the ONLY class that is less popular than
Enchanters is Shadow Knights .. even the rogues have us out-numbered =(

When's the last time the Enchanter was given an upgrade or had a spell
made more effective ?? (I'm not talking about the ability to make a
useless vial of mana either)

From least played class in live to most played on P99? I wonder why...

Enchanter was a broken as fuck completely shit on class in real classic and wasn't made viable other than being a buff bot and doing group mezzes which frequently resulted in death from aggro until Velious. They made a vision of this class and quickly realized it was overpowered. Nerfed it down and forgot about it. We know from past threads Charm was so broken in various ways as to usually result in dying from bugs. Prove me wrong.

Ha ha! I can't tell you how many times I have had to sit down in
the middle of a horde to memorize Mesmerization FAST while the
tanks keep everything taunted off of me. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] Nowadays I keep it
ready, even if I can't really cast it because of the LOS bugs,
because it is still the group's "Get out of jail free" card. We
rarely have anyone who can evac.

Enchanters didn't even mem mez normally it was so buggy. Amazing. Multiple people mention not memming it and having to quickly mem during a pull and risk its various horrible aspects.

No kidding. If you catch yourself with your Mesmerization, you are
going to fall down dead in approximately 24.5 seconds, and the rest
of your party will soon follow.

The spells through the wall bug is a killer. Any AE spell, like
Mesmerization, is going to wake up whatever is above you, below
you or through the wall. I wish Verant would fix that so that if
you can't see it or affect it, it doesn't notice the spell.

AE Mez ignored Z axis and walls. Apparently was also extremely high aggro if resisted.

Enchanter is so OP on P99. Fascinating reads here.

[DMN]

Here is how mez/hate wiping spells worked.

At low levels they both worked at near 100%(95% as the devs liked the D&D system of always having at least 5% failure no matter what). Around mob level 30(im not 100% sure here but I'd guess it was around 30 were it started to become notable) the mez line started to slowly have its mem wipe component reduced. Memory blur (level 12 spell)still retained the near 100% memory blur chances for awhile even after the mez-blur chances were significantly reduced, so it did indeed have better memory blur but it just wasn't noticeable at low levels.

Because of the level scaling the people posting stuff in the forums of that time period may have completely different and "true" vies about how the spells worked,

[DMN]

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.

[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.

[Dolalin]

DMN has some wise words there. 95% of the work in trying to research stuff like this is separating the truth from the fiction/whining/lobbying-narratives.

As for how I do research, you can go to groups.google.com and search alt.games.everquest yourself. You can also add filters to the search by adding, say, "before:2002-01-01" to the end of your search to only return in-era threads.

I search the eq-archives git repo with a semantic indexer I've got going locally (Open Semantic Search). When it's ready I'll make it publicly available, it speeds up searches a LOT and gives contextual searching. You could also build your own against the eq-archives repo, might take a few months, or you can wait for mine to be done up to you [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] It gets through about 40,000-50,000 docs a day on a good day. 3.2 million left to go, ~6 million total.

[xmaerx]

Mez does blur very often. It's definitely not 100%. Probably closer to 60 or 70%. Actual blur spells, however, blur more often.

https://wiki.project1999.com/Memory_Blur

Whatever that modifier is gets adjusted significantly. If mesmerize is a 1% chance and works 60% of the time, a 10% chance might work.. 66% of the time. Or perhaps it fails a tenth as often. Perhaps there are calculations taking place that are not immediately obvious. Perhaps there's no perhaps involved, and enchanters have known this for some time.

It's definitely *not* a 10% chance. Nor is Blanket of Forgetfulness a 20% chance.

https://wiki.project1999.com/Blanket_of_Forgetfulness

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Blanket might apply its blur chance twice by that descriptor, which is why I've had it fail *MAYBE* once, ever.

All blurs are performing well beyond the listed percentage.

Furthermore the blur on Mesmerize might be powerful, but that is often a DOWNSIDE also. Spamming mez to interrupt or lock things down while soloing, for example, can give mobs health ticks. It also doesn't blur mobs that are immune to mez, as far as I can tell.

Memblurs are also beneficial spells. Not hostile. They do not resist, and are significantly more useful as a result.

No, I don't need proof, because I'm right, and so is the server config for memblurs. Evidence from the past likely doesn't realize that the "blur" effect is significantly more noticeable on pacified or far away mobs. The "Higher level less effective" commentary is likely a symptom of larger aggro ranges, or closer quarters.

EDIT: If you want to know the real reason enchanters are batshit broken, see: the exploit known as GCD resetting.