charm: some actual evidence rather than QQ

[Evilmog]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I still see QQing here.

[stormlord]

I played a chanter in the OMM missions on live and I play one on projectEQ. I have not played one on p1999.

But I can say from my experience that charming, as it was long ago, from my standpoint, probably wasn't fun. Its uses are too circumstantial. It's too sporadic. If you disagree, try playing a chanter sometime and charming and/or recharming a mob every couple minutes. It's dangerous and not practical. It's not fun unless you're the kind of person that like to do sh** like that over and over and over again like a maniac.

Secondly, my experience in the OMMs taught me that mezzing and crowd control are key factors in whether or not I'm having fun as a chanter, assuming charming isn't an option. It wasn't really an option in the OMM's, for example. It wasn't trustworthy and it was only useful in rare circumstances. So I ended up buffing and doing crowd control. Fortunately, CC was needed a lot in guk and nagafen's lair. It was fun. In those missions, particularly, versatility was important and knowing the dungeon was hte difference between living and dying. Chanters and necromancers were/are very powerful in those circumstances. I saved many groups in OMM's because I was playing a chanter. I wish that kind of gameplay could be repeated here on p1999.

If mezzing and crowd control are removed from the formula, charming, as it's right now, won't be enough to keep a chanter interested. This is my view. This may be the way it was in 1999-01 for chanters, but unless they're mezzing and/or doing crowd control I feel terrible that they have to experience this. I mean, other than crowd control, what is a chanter? A buff bot. That's not fun and makes you feel ignored.

My feeling is SOE or somebody who designed these zones forgot about making chanters useful when they were setting up spawn points and routes and so forth. If a chanter isn't mezzing or doing CC then the chanter is nearly useless. A lot of zones, I've noticed, have too few things going on and chanters are less useful in those cases. If you're deep in a dungeon, on hte other hand, sh** can go wrong fast and a chanter can save your life. This is especially true if you got noobs in your group. Anyway, I think that the CC part of being a chanter is a huge part of the fun and if you're sitting in a group as a chanter with no CCing going on then you're going to be bored and maybe the impractical charming becomes the outlet for the frustrations. I feel bad about this because I played long enough to know how much charming sucks balls.

If I could go back in time I'd increase the duration a great deal on charming, reduce the random breaks (or remove altogether), but cast a debuff on the mob that reduces its dps or hitpoints to offset the potentially game-breaking power of this feature. Bottom line, you can't have a class that's too powerful. You want a mix of things that're fair, but you don't want to have things that're not fun and/or more bothersome than worthwhile. Everyone wants to have their cake even after they've already eaten it. The key is to keep them having fun so they don't give too much attention to the missing piece(s) of cake.

The problem I see with charming is how do you measure whether it's too powerful or not? You have to look at the thing that's charmed, but mobs can be so different from one to the next. A designer might be encouraged to make a simplistic def/atk system to make charming easy to measure, but this would come at teh cost of making it uniform and boring by comparison. But if you have too much diversity among mobs then charming becomes a very non-linear thing which designers, most of them, greatly fear (hard to test it).

Ever seen an undercon? That's one example of the power of charming.

If you're wondering where I'm coming from, go to live and if the OMM's are still available in POK try them. Play as a chanter. You'll see what I mean. You have to mez and CC a lot. It was very fun when I did it in 2010. OMM's are a lot different than classic EQ, but in some ways they're similar. One of the big differences is the pacing and the goal. The goal is to finish asap, so you don't waste your time (try not to). You mez and clear aggro and run. The pace is faster because if you die you start at the zone-in so you quickly learn how to overcome mistakes you make. In old eq, a mistake was expensive. This doesn't mean mistakes don't bite, but the pacing mostly skips over the bite and you're left with the learning part, which I think is the fun part.

OMM's aren't directly transferable to old eq, but something could be learned from it maybe? That's why i've mentioned CCing being important if charming is impractical or not well implemented.