Game Mechanics: CHA seems to be impacting charm durations on P99 far more than it did on Live

[DMN]

Those dev comments are strange, were they made pre or post AA's? Did snares suddenly start getting chances to break every tick sometime ater velious? Druid and necro snares certainly never had random durations through velious(during vanilla there was a brief period of time ensanre did have a tick based break chance) which nakes me think that something was changed-- perhaps to make AA's more balanced and/or appealing. Would also suggest they might be messsing around with the % and break chance formulas for similar reasons.

Getting back to the charm duration and testing, sadly, like I mentioned already. the base randomness of charm is so high that trying to find any signal amongst the cacophony of noise would certainly take many hundreds of hours of data, maybe even over a thousand, and in this case, for any factual conclusion to be drawn, we'd need them both from then AND now.

[Dolalin]

I've shelved this issue for awhile to be honest. I agree DMN, there's just not enough evidence to say one way or the other. Maybe someday I'll stumble on some though.

[xmaerx]

It's likely just that the formula has a small window for Charisma to be useful. Mobs significantly lower level probably get squashed by the caster's CHA + resist mods versus their level, mobs with innately higher resist probably squash the CHA mod entirely, and anything outside of a specific range is subject to the goofy resistibility mods P99 deploys for anything with a stat-based resistibility modifier.

Then again, it seems like charm (and pacify) have initial-cast modifiers outside of the intended "secondary" check, with charm being virtually irresistible, and pacify resisting like mad.

I feel like resistibility in general on P99 is wonky, and different level spells should have different resist rates (low level stun versus high level stun, etc) per the "resist mods" in the spdat file. Higher level spells are Magic(0) according to the SpDat, but lower spells are almost all Magic(25).. except for charm, which is all over the place resistibility wise.