Is Shaman the BEST all-around class in the game?

[Vexenu]

I think the reality is somewhere in the middle: charming was more difficult on live, mostly due to a combination of more frequent charm breaks and less effective channeling skill. But there were players successfully utilizing charm back then. It was just much riskier than on P1999 (especially with worse hardware and internet) and therefore wasn't nearly as common as it is here, and that isn't just due to the knowledge gap. Charming here already requires a lot of attention and care, and on the live servers it probably felt like walking on a knife's edge the whole time, with very frequent charm breaks that were difficult to recover from, making the process dangerous and inefficient unless you were very skilled and attentive. That being the case, it would be far easier and preferable for most Enchanters to just group for XP, which most of them obviously did as we all remember.