When are they Implementing the Charm Nerf?

[Kich867]

I don't think hyperbole is helpful either though, charm lasts like 20 minutes max. In my experience here on P99, grouping with enchanters who are charming pets for DPS, it seems to align somewhat closely with the posts from back then in terms of duration.

We always keep the charmed pet away from the party, we keep it snared if possible, it rarely ever lasts the full 20 minutes without breaking, but we put up with it because charmed pets are dope.

[Danth]

Hardly ever lasts a full 20 min--never, I should think--because duration is actually something like 7 min on P99 IIRC.

But on balance I concur that P99 is close enough to broadly agree with those old posts. That's why we have this thread at all--if it was more obvious we wouldn't need this discussion. That's also why I personally don't want to see alteration without very strong evidence and hard numbers. As I said, I don't want to see the pendulum shift too far the other way.

[Vivitron]

Originally Posted by Danth [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Hardly ever lasts a full 20 min--never, I should think--because duration is actually something like 7 min on P99 IIRC.

But on balance I concur that P99 is close enough to broadly agree with those old posts. That's why we have this thread at all--if it was more obvious we wouldn't need this discussion. That's also why I personally don't want to see alteration without very strong evidence and hard numbers. As I said, I don't want to see the pendulum shift too far the other way.

This depends on the charm and level; enchanter's duration cap starts short at 12, but then you're up at 15.7-19min duration cap on allure while you're leveling in the 50s, and back down to 7 min cap on Boltrans for level 52-53 pets.

IIRC when I checked logs from a few xp sessions I had ~6.5 mins avg on charm, whereas TAKP's researcher (sorry forget which) showed IIRC ~5.5 mins avg on his charms on Al'Kabor live. Not sure that my sample was large enough to really say there was a difference.

[loramin]

Originally Posted by Kich867 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Then I'm sorry, I genuinely don't get your point then. I've read all your posts and that was literally my best attempt at summarizing what I thought you were trying to say.

Fair enough. It's frustrating to have to keep repeating things when people won't read, but if you did you're genuinely trying to understand my point and not argue with a straw man, let me try again to explain it. But I have to go step by step so you don't pick one piece and try to ignore the bigger picture.

1. A good emulator recreates the original

First ... P99 is an emulator, right? The goal of any emulator is to recreate old software. If the emulator does that well, it will be indistinguishable from the original. If it does it poorly, the emulated thing won't be the same as the original.

Maybe you aren't a Street Fighter fan, so I'll use Mortal Kombat instead. If you make a Mortal Kombat emulator, and you don't hear "get over here" when people play Scorpion, there are really only two possibilities:

• people have since learned that Scorpion's trademark move is bad, and have stopped using it
• the emulator is not emulating the original well, and that move is weaker than it was in the original

Now, did you play the game P99 is trying to emulate, live EQ circa '99-'01? That's an honest/curious question, not an excuse to declare your opinion invalid if you didn't [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

2. Enchanters were a major grouping class in '99 (like Tanks/Clerics)

If you did, I truly expect you'd know that tanks, Clerics, and Enchanters were big grouping classes back then. Hell, I played a Shaman and soloed a ton, but when I did group (a fair amount) ... even as a class that was redundant (both Shaman and Enchanters are slowers) ... I still mostly was in groups with Enchanters (and also Clerics and tanks).

If you didn't play in classic, you might not believe me, and if so we can try and go over classic evidence, but I truly don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that most people who played in classic will remember certain classes as being core to the grouping experience.

3. On P99, everyone soloes more, but only charmers play differently in a major way

Here on P99 Clerics still mostly group: if you join a P99 group there is a high chance it will have a Cleric in it, and if not people will be looking for one. The same is true of the tanking classes. The same is also true (in reverse) for soloing classes: you mostly won't find Necromancers in groups, you'll mostly find them out soloing. And it's not because Cleric players like grouping more than Necromancers, it's that the game mechanics encourage different classes to play differently.

The only class where basic grouping/soloing preferences are different from '99 vs. P99 is Enchanter. Other classes used to (eg. Bards used to kite 100+ mobs, which was not classic), but our emulator has gotten more accurate over time, and now Enchanters are unique in this regard.

(But, as a side note, this isn't an Enchanter-only issue: they just exemplify it best. I leveled a Druid to 60 on Blue, and like many others I did it largely through animal charming ... but again if you look at classic evidence, you'll find root/rotting and quad kiting, not charm, were the Druid staples back in '99.)

Now again, if Scorpion players aren't throwing their spear and yelling "Get over here!", there are only two core possibilities: the players are different, or the emulator isn't emulating that aspect of the game well.

It could be the players! We do know things most live players didn't know ... not how to charm, as we've both seen plenty of evidence they knew how ... but more minor stuff like using -MR gear. Also, just generally all classes solo more here (one reason likely being that live servers were more crowded).

That's the crux of most arguments made against me in this thread: the emulator is perfect, it's just the players (the same argument was made for Chardok AoE, for combat bind wounds, for Whirl til You Hurl, for ...) But I don't find it convincing.

Again, every class soloes more ... but you don't see Clerics or tanks not grouping and spending their time soloing. The mechanics of the game encourage them to. And again, the mechanics of the game encouraged Enchanters to group back in classic, despite (us both agreeing that) they knew how to charm.

4. We know our mechanics aren't classic.

Thanks to Dolalin (although, again, I'm not trying to say his post has all the answers) we know at least some of the aspects of our emulator emulate things poorly. We know channeling (which makes a huge difference when charm breaks) isn't classic.

So, we know our emulator has one class not acting like it did in the original (Scorpion isn't pulling people in our emulator). We could ignore that our emulator has mechanics (eg. channeling) which are off, ignore the fact that Clerics and Tanks and soloing classes ... everyone but Enchanter ... still plays fundamentally the same (even as all clases do solo a bit more), and ignore that the whole goal of this place is to recreate '99.

Or we can say "it wasn't like this in '99, let's fix our mechanics".

[Kich867]

Originally Posted by loramin [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

1. A good emulator recreates the original

Maybe you aren't a Street Fighter fan

Now, did you play the game P99 is trying to emulate, live EQ circa '99-'01? That's an honest/curious question, not an excuse to declare your opinion invalid if you didn't [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I am, but I wasn't going to comment on the shoryuken thing. I was going to joke that it's actually not that surprising since as you get better at...basically any fighting game really, the invincible anti-air (shoryuken) is used far, far less because the first thing you learn about fighting games is to stop jumping. Until you actually learn how to jump properly. And if you're jumping properly you're not getting shoryu'd that often. Not to mention, its far more likely that if you're getting jumped in on, you're using a normal that covers that jump distance better than shoryuken does.

I'm not sure if fighting games are where you want to approach that from, fighting game metas change drastically over years and strategies that are employed at one point in time--especially in the early "ignorant" meta when no one actually understands how you're supposed to play the game--eventually shift as character knowledge and matchups are further understood. With absolutely no patches, no changes to any mechanics, there are massive changes in how people play and what overtakes the meta. In fact, fighting games are a phenomenal demonstration of how the status quo often keeps certain characters down, perceived as low-tier, bad, and until someone shows up to demonstrate how good they are to change prevailing theory.

I mean, just look at SSB Melee, the game looks absolutely nothing like it did when people were competing in the first couple years when it came out. Or even the modern Smash Ultimate--I was trying to tell people Roy was godlike from day 1. He was consistently labeled a bad character, clearly worse than Chrom or Lucina because they _had_ to be better and they had better results. Lo and behold, with no changes to Roy and a ton of buffs to other characters, Roy is solidly top tier because people finally learned how to play him, how to recover properly, and his incredible damage output. That went on for years. For years. People thought he was bad, the entire "community". Until Kola and to a lesser extent Goblin showed up and started absolutely fuckin destroying with him. Same thing with Cloud and Spargo.

Or Starcraft: Broodwar, which came out around the same time, the meta is eons different than it used to be. People thought for years that Zerg dominated Protoss until Bisu invented the Corsair DT opening to establish map control. Absolutely nothing changed, except that given enough time people finally understood how to use what was available to them. And we're talking about people who played the game for a god damn living, it took them a long time to figure this out. Are we really going to hold some nerdy 40 year olds above professional gamers? I don't buy that. The average person isn't that good and if one of the answers to this question is: "The players didn't know" then I'm picking that answer. It's ubiquitous that ignorance and adherence to the status quo dominates games like this and can maintain itself for years despite being wrong and even being shown their wrong.

Regardless though, yes, I played through Kunark and Velious, admittedly not at a high level though as I was like 13 or something. I wasn't really a coherent human being until towards the end of Velious when I started progressing on my cleric.

2. Enchanters were a major grouping class in '99 (like Tanks/Clerics)

If you did, I truly expect you'd know that tanks, Clerics, and Enchanters were big grouping classes back then. Hell, I played a Shaman and soloed a ton, but when I did group (a fair amount) ... even as a class that was redundant (both Shaman and Enchanters are slowers) ... I still mostly was in groups with Enchanters (and also Clerics and tanks).

I don't dispute this and I don't understand why this matters. This is still true today, enchanters are an amazing group class, they're highly sought after, and I group with enchanters all the time.

Those two things aren't mutually exclusive, they can simultaneously be primarily a solo class and a pinnacle staple of grouping.

If anything, they're less required now because the average player has insane gear and over pulls are a lot less scary, but yeah, totally, enchanters are extremely sought after group members. They offer amazing buffs and amazing utility.

3. On P99, everyone soloes more, but only charmers play differently in a major way

The only class where basic grouping/soloing preferences are different from '99 vs. P99 is Enchanter. Other classes used to (eg. Bards used to kite 100+ mobs, which was not classic), but our emulator has gotten more accurate over time, and now Enchanters are unique in this regard.

(But, as a side note, this isn't an Enchanter-only issue: they just exemplify it best. I leveled a Druid to 60 on Blue, and like many others I did it largely through animal charming ... but again if you look at classic evidence, you'll find root/rotting and quad kiting, not charm, were the Druid staples back in '99.)

It could be the players! We do know things most live players didn't know ... not how to charm, as we've both seen plenty of evidence they knew how ... but more minor stuff like using -MR gear. Also, just generally all classes solo more here (one reason likely being that live servers were more crowded).

That's the crux of most arguments made against me in this thread ... But I don't find it convincing.

Again, every class soloes more ... but you don't see Clerics or tanks not grouping and spending their time soloing. The mechanics of the game encourage them to. And again, the mechanics of the game encouraged Enchanters to group back in classic, despite (us both agreeing that) they knew how to charm.

So, a couple things here. Personally, when I leveled my druid to 56 or so, I did it through quadding and root-rotting on P99. I tried charming, I found it incredibly unreliable, and I gave up on it because I personally found it annoying and risky. It broke too often, I didn't have the tools to easily drop my charm, I quadded spirocs and wyverns for ages, it was so much simpler and I personally think faster.

And for me, personally, I'd absolutely solo level a cleric. I solo leveled my warrior to 43 in banded armor and a couple weapons I quested for at level 10 or so. I streamed it, I had viewers regularly commenting about how embarrassing it was that a nearly naked warrior was leveling faster than they were by a lot. They didn't understand that warriors have nearly zero downtime if you can kill a blue mob with 50% of your HP, or that your crits do quad damage below 40% and your DPS is fucking stupid high.

And so that's why it's hard for me to not look at this situation as "its the players". It's completely reasonable, and convincing to me, that people took the easy way out and grouped because they thought it was the right thing to do and they were told it was the right thing to do.

And maybe they had the same experience I did on my druid, charming is fuckin annoying.

The _average_ EQ player wasn't actually that good at the game, both in-era, and today. There's something like 1800 average players on P99, probably under 100 of those people regularly visit the forums and takes the game seriously. Does the average Cleric realize that their undead line of nukes has nearly identical DPM as Wizard nukes and they could solo undead the same way wizards root nuke things? They probably know they have undead nukes and they're good, but in their head they're like "I'm a cleric so I should group", instead of thinking, "There's a lot of undead I can solo pull here, I am a wizard in platemail.", no? So again, it just does not surprise me that back in the day people, collectively, did not embrace or understand charming to popularize it at the time.

As for other classes all playing the same except Druids/Necros/Enchanters (via charming) -- yeah, again, this is incredibly reasonable to me. Most classes are exceedingly simple and one dimensional.

4. We know our mechanics aren't classic.

I would never claim that P99 has anything absolutely perfect. I just genuinely believe that if enchanters weren't mostly soloing in '99, it's because they were ignorant, because basically all of gaming history and my own personal bias points to that being the case.

It is simply inevitable that in any stagnant meta, new strategies will always be found. Starcraft: Broodwar hasn't mechanically changed at all in like 20 years outside of Valkyrie's finally being fixed (they didn't deal damage due to the original game having a max sprite count and they produced so many sprites when attacking their projectiles were deleted mid-air). And SC:BW, today, has a constantly changing metagame where new, dominant strategies are being constantly innovated.

I find it hard, with things like that in mind, to believe that Enchanters in '99 had it all figured out. I find it exceedingly likely that the stigma around charm breaks dissuaded people from exploring it as an opportunity.

I would be interested to know, when P99 started, what the sort of class distribution was early on. I bet you there were more enchanters out of the gate than you would see in era. I wasn't there, I joined in 2013 or whatever, but I'd be interested to see that data.

[loramin]

Originally Posted by Kich867 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I am, but I wasn't going to comment on the shoryuken thing. I was going to joke that it's actually not that surprising since as you get better at...basically any fighting game really, the invincible anti-air (shoryuken) is used far, far less because the first thing you learn about fighting games is to stop jumping. Until you actually learn how to jump properly. And if you're jumping properly you're not getting shoryu'd that often. Not to mention, its far more likely that if you're getting jumped in on, you're using a normal that covers that jump distance better than shoryuken does.

I'm not sure if fighting games are where you want to approach that from, fighting game metas change drastically over years and strategies that are employed at one point in time--especially in the early "ignorant" meta when no one actually understands how you're supposed to play the game--eventually shift as character knowledge and matchups are further understood. With absolutely no patches, no changes to any mechanics, there are massive changes in how people play and what overtakes the meta. In fact, fighting games are a phenomenal demonstration of how the status quo often keeps certain characters down, perceived as low-tier, bad, and until someone shows up to demonstrate how good they are to change prevailing theory.

I mean, just look at SSB Melee, the game looks absolutely nothing like it did when people were competing in the first couple years when it came out. Or even the modern Smash Ultimate--I was trying to tell people Roy was godlike from day 1. He was consistently labeled a bad character, clearly worse than Chrom or Lucina because they _had_ to be better and they had better results. Lo and behold, with no changes to Roy and a ton of buffs to other characters, Roy is solidly top tier because people finally learned how to play him, how to recover properly, and his incredible damage output. That went on for years. For years. People thought he was bad, the entire "community". Until Kola and to a lesser extent Goblin showed up and started absolutely fuckin destroying with him. Same thing with Cloud and Spargo.

Or Starcraft: Broodwar, which came out around the same time, the meta is eons different than it used to be. People thought for years that Zerg dominated Protoss until Bisu invented the Corsair DT opening to establish map control. Absolutely nothing changed, except that given enough time people finally understood how to use what was available to them. And we're talking about people who played the game for a god damn living, it took them a long time to figure this out. Are we really going to hold some nerdy 40 year olds above professional gamers? I don't buy that. The average person isn't that good and if one of the answers to this question is: "The players didn't know" then I'm picking that answer. It's ubiquitous that ignorance and adherence to the status quo dominates games like this and can maintain itself for years despite being wrong and even being shown their wrong.

While I appreciate the engagement with my post, you are taking a simple analogy way too far, while missing the main point. Whatever the changing meta of any fighting game, if you see players not using technique X, or vastly overusing technique X ... while every other character/technique is used the same amount, or the same amount adjusted for meta differences ... X is probably not being emulated well.

Originally Posted by Kich867 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Those two things aren't mutually exclusive, they can simultaneously be primarily a solo class and a pinnacle staple of grouping.

I disagree. Again, Clerics can solo, but you find them in most groups (on live or here). Again, Necromancers can group, but because soloing is generally better for them, you rarely find them in groups. A player has a choice (and their class will heavily influence that choice) to spend their time grouping or soloing: they can't do both.

Originally Posted by Kich867 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

If anything, they're less required now because the average player has insane gear and over pulls are a lot less scary, but yeah, totally, enchanters are extremely sought after group members.

They're sought after here. But on live you expected to see an Enchanter in your group, just like you expected to see a Cleric and a tank. Here on P99 (we both agree!) Enchanters are great group contributors ... but it's clearly better for them to solo than to group, and so you see far more soloing than in groups.

Originally Posted by Kich867 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

So, a couple things here. Personally, when I leveled my druid to 56 or so, I did it through quadding and root-rotting on P99. I tried charming, I found it incredibly unreliable, and I gave up on it because I personally found it annoying and risky. It broke too often, I didn't have the tools to easily drop my charm, I quadded spirocs and wyverns for ages, it was so much simpler and I personally think faster.

Look, I won't say from 1 to 60 a Druid should be charming the whole time, but honestly, it does sound to me like maybe you were doing it wrong. I mean, forget your or my experiences: we've both heard about the huge popularity of the polar bear caves in Everfrost, right? That's not a quadding camp.

Originally Posted by Kich867 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

And for me, personally, I'd absolutely solo level a cleric. I solo leveled my warrior to 43 in banded armor and a couple weapons I quested for at level 10 or so.

Again, we both agree: for various reasons all classes solo more here on P99 than on live. For instance, a Cleric soloes a lot better with a fungi (that's how I did mine) ... but on live very few people even owned a Fungi for their max level toon. The gear on Blue is much better than on live, our server population is lower than live's, and there are various other factors make soloing more popular for all classes here.

So yes, if Clerics maybe grouped 95% of the time on live, they maybe only group 85% of the time here ... but the point is, they still spend the bulk of their time grouping. And the same is true for tanks, because the mechanics of the game encourage it. You generally get faster XP in a group than soloing as a Cleric/tank ... just as it was on live.

The same is true for other classes as well: they all solo a bit more here than live, but the basic role of their class, as a soloer or group member, has not changed ... except Enchanters.

Originally Posted by Kich867 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

It's completely reasonable, and convincing to me, that people took the easy way out and grouped because they thought it was the right thing to do and they were told it was the right thing to do.

But why did just one class switch? By your logic most tanks and Clerics were only doing it because "they were told it was the right thing to do", and so they too should be soloers here, right?

Originally Posted by Kich867 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

It is simply inevitable that in any stagnant meta, new strategies will always be found.

What new strategies? You yourself provided a wealth of evidence that Enchanters knew how to charm in classic.

You can't on one hand argue "there's all these huge differences in the meta" ... while every other class plays basically the same way they did on live (again even here, with every class soloing more ... the fastest way/the way most clerics level is still in groups).

Likewise, you can't argue "Enchanters only grouped in classic because they were told to" ... while at the same time arguing they knew everything about how great charming was.

You are right: Enchanters knew how to charm on live. I think I'm right too: most live Enchanters grouped (and as a side note, on live it was almost unheard of for an grouped Enchanter to keep a charmed pet ... which is the standard here).

The far simpler (Occam's Razor) explanation of that seeming discrepancy is not "the meta changed massively for just one class while the emulator is perfect" ... it's "the mechanics here aren't the same as live".

[Elizondo]

If anything those old posts from 2000 in regards to charm confirm it's working as intended on P99

Players back then were charming mobs of roughly equal level and it was holding just fine

Players on P99 charm mobs far lower level (barely blues) which is why charm holds more reliably

Move thread to resolved

[Kich867]

But why did just one class switch?

My point about the meta changing was more that the meta itself changed, because people understand better how to charm today than they did in the past and its more mainstream, my point is that its natural that given enough time optimal strategies arise and people eventually flock to it.

The fact that it took awhile for Charm to become mainstream is normal. And it wasn't just one class, it was every charm class. Why did every charm class come to P99 knowing that charming was the thing to do?

[Vivitron]

Originally Posted by loramin [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Bigger picture though, I think we're talking past each other, so let me try a different tact. At that same forum you provided, I happened to find this interesting post about ... Chardok AoE. As that link clearly shows, people did AoE in Chardok in classic! There is zero doubt: Chardok AoEing happened in the classic era.

Thanks for sharing that, interesting link. Suggests an alternate approach to nerfing new metas like chardok ae: consider following the later era live nerf. (Are rooted dragons following a later era live change? I didn't raid on live, so I don't know about that.)

[Videri]

Hey guys, I'll tell Rogean and Nilbog to read this thread right away.