[ziahh]

Originally Posted by Rilen

To harp on a bit of what Throb said. I think most people are misleading themselves in thinking that charm is as it was on live. How many ench did you know with 255 charisma that constantly ran malo/tash on their pets? How many did you know that kept -MR items bagged specifically to give to pets to lower their break chances?

Like many things here, they seem OP'd because everyone knows the name of the game already. On live MANY things simply were not done the way they are here because of a lack of general knowledge of such things. I distinctly remember enchanters doing duo/trio work in Kunark, and I remember when my group of friends first got started in Velious charming giants in the arena. My little collective of friends would have been incapable of doing anything were it not for the ench holding a lieutenant in the arena as a pet.

The reason I remember for charm and pets in general not being as prevalent in the experience scene is that pets ALWAYS took a percentage of exp; even if you did 5 damage or whatever. Also, like Throb said, people had a stigma about people not controlling their pets, or a paranoia about pet pathing that over-rode whatever assistance they might have given on raids.

And to reiterate some of what I said, even after the charm nerfs on live I ran a PLing service for 60+ characters using druid charm as my primary method of xp. This was on a DRUID with approximately 200 charisma, no dire charm. I had no problem keeping pets for 10 minutes to kill 3-5 mobs before the charm broke and then I'd DD/DoT and kill the pet.

As it stands now, between not being able to retrieve items from pets, and the charms seeming to be entirely level based, the charm line for all classes involved is nearly useless. This isn't the way it should be for a character with 255 charisma, malo, and 5-10 levels on the mob being charmed.

It needs to be recognized that while people may not have their own anecdotal evidence of charm being powerful (or any "overused" ability here), 90% of that reason is because this server has MANY players with MUCH higher skill than any of our live servers had. The worst guilds on this server are still 10x better, and more knowledgeable than most of the population of any live server. Most people here flat out play at a higher skill level than what was seen normally on live. We don't all deserve to suffer, or be forced into some niche of mediocrity simply because we know what we're doing or understand how to play the game.