I played a mage on live and I always seem to remember giving my pet weapons. Although that was a LONG time ago and the abovementioned sword of runes bug made for some decent extra damage. IIRC I was still able to solo the Allizewsaurus in OOT by chaining the 49th earth pet and Lava Shield.
If any class gets the beat down in this patch though its clearly enchanters. Every time we mez a >50 mob we have to memblur or root now, and both of those options suck: even paralyzing earth barely lasts at all on ~50 mobs, and even recurring amnesia only works 85% of the time and has a 30 second recast. Not to mention when charm breaks I am usually at the top of the hitlist (I've done the parsing and rogues and monks do outdamage the pet, but they are evading/fd'ing), so without taunt that's basically a 'pray for color slant' scenario.
Speaking of charm, the duration is reduced in this patch, although I don't know whether its a large or small change. Seeing as how Haynar said charm has been completely recoded from live (I read the eqemu code and charisma is worthless there among other things) this is pretty much a developer decision and I'm not sure why they changed their minds. One enchanter claimed that people were charming nameds and owning the zone with them, but its kind of hard for me to believe that. I tried charming the King once and he was only able to kill about 3 of his guards before dying (berserker spirit came too late and cost me a Crown of Froglok Kings!) Should enchanters be able to solo the king room in Guk? Probably not.
But that won't be a problem any more, because I see 'Critical Resists for Lull' changed. IIRC on live Harmony and Lull were all worthless because Sony realized that the ability to fight mobs one at a time made the game about 30 times easier. So while I understand this is classic, I don't understand why it wasn't done a year ago.
So over the past month my poor enchanter is a shell of his former self. Some of the changes are unquestionably classic but its going to be hard being a buffbot. Unfortunately I think part of the problem is that when you design a game to be hard, with the monsters stronger than the players, then by definition you cannot include cool abilities which significantly manipulate the super-powered mobs.
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