Charm, viable when?
 

When, to your experience, did charm become a viable spell for your enchanter? I have just gotten the spell at 12, and I know I cant charm anything blue for over 5 seconds...

I started charming at level 12 in lavastorm, and continued to charm off and on until the 30s when I gave up on groups and just soloed with charm exclusively.

The 2nd time leveling up an enchanter on EQlive, I knew enough to take advantage of some game quirks. Mobs don't automatically get magical melee attacks until a certain level, and willowisps span that level, meaning the higher level wisps can be charmed and sent to attack their lower level variants while remaining immune to damage. I remember white cons at twelve being immune to the blue cons, but allakhazam lists the level range as 9-11, which contradicts those experiences. /shrug. At the very least, they should be able to kill snakes and spiders without trouble.

Somewhere between 14~16 I started charming girffawns in north karana, which I believe are levels 14 to 16. I could solo scythe beetles with them, but the problem is they were so high level I couldn't do so much as one point of damage (all spell resists). The point there being you can easily kill things 6 levels higher than you, that's how effective charm is at that level. It was dangerous, but on EQlive the beetles ran slower than everything else, so I only had to worry about mezzing then charming the griffawn.

Dersk what's your charisma at?

Erudites with base 80 cha. I did a lot of jewelry making back then, but I doubt that ever got my cha above 90.

Where? Here or on Live?

I was describing charming on EQlive, though I do see that it may appear as though it didn't apply to everything I said, aaaand that's probably not as helpful. Heh, my enchanter is kinda parked here at level 10 for a few reasons. I won't be charming any time soon.

This past Sunday, after the server was done patching, Glowstix charmed an LDC in Sol B. Hasted, that thing could do some crazy dps for the group. Charm usually lasted several minutes

I guess the only real way to answer this question is to give a level 12 enchanter enough charisma gear to get the stat up above 200 and see if you can keep the pet charmed for anything remotely close to the max duration of the spell.

If you can then the answer is 12 (with heavy twinking).
OR
and any level at which you can afford the gear you will need (without heavy twinking).

Do we have any level 12 super twinked (and by twinked I mean with charisma gear) chanter available for testing?

In my experiences, this server's charm is not really that close to how it was on live back in early 2000. On live I decided to give an enchanter a try after playing my wizard (because I was addicted to clarity). What worked exceptionally well for me was charming griffawns in North Karana and sending them after Borer and Scythe beatles. I did this at lvl 14ish. I had no issues keeping charm on anything. I had an identical enchanter then as I do now.. (an Erudite Enchanter with the same stat points spent). When I hit 12 on P99 and headed to North Karana, I got my ass handed to me. I tried charming beetles instead and had the same bad failures. Added to this is that the beetles run faster than they should (this was brought up in a previous bug report). I used to be able to jump / run to gain some good distance but can't now.
This is exactly as Dersk stated.
So, I decided to skip on charm for now as it is most certainly not what it was on classic. IT's a shame really because I REALLY loved the charm aspect of playing an enchanter.

agreed charm is much more unreliable on P99 than it was on live with low charisma. it's basically unusable for an untwinked enchanter. the problem seems to be i either have an extremely long charm, or an extremely short charm, no in between. on live, increasing charisma seemed to increase the average length of the charm, but having low charisma did not mean all your charms lasted < 1 minute.