Game Mechanics: Classic bugs with charm

[Dolalin]

Charm was less desirable in classic, in part, due to the myriad bugs associated with it. I thought I would post a thread I found that summarizes them, in case there's a desire to tune charm in the future:

http://web.archive.org/web/200006082...ML/001072.html

Charm didn't always stick:

2. I hit the monster with charm and nothing happens! I don't get a resist message. Nothing. It just as if the mob didn't get charmed at all. One time I charmed a gargoyle in Mistmoore who proceeded to attack me while his intiate familiar friend beat on him. That sounds pretty bugged to me.

Pathing was very bad for charmed pets (and pets in general, tbh):

3. You charm your mob and it amazingly disappears! Goes off somewhere and vanishes from sight. You get the 'Your Charm' has broken message. I just tell my party to zone, because you know it pulled the whole damn place down around your head. Usually a minute later, the whole zone shows up in one mass mob, your screen goes red with damage and you die.

You would occasionally take melee hits that were meant for your pet:

Once in Kedge I charmed a piercer and sent it after another mob. As the piercer was valiantly killing off the mobs I was getting whacked along with it. Talk about symbiotic connection! However it was able to kill one of the 4 on it so I got exp right before I swam like a girly-man to the zone.

Pet would attack groupmates, e.g. if it were DoTed by a groupmate, even while charmed:

the worst is when it gets bugged, but the charm goes off so you have a pet that it attacking groupmates, not attacking mobs, and your group cant fight back root/etc.. you also cant mez it because its your pet, rechaming is useless.

so you have to sit down, flip from quick access spells through 4 or 5 pages to get to invis. mem cast, get bashed.. mez.

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If your charmed pet is attacking a group mate it is probably because they DoT'd the mob before you charmed. It still feels the DoT even though it is now under your control. About the only thing you can do is constantly issue the /pet back off command or just break the charm since the pet is pretty useless now.

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Also, I'm not quite sure this works but in guk I had a druid get whaled on a few times by my pet because he had a dot on it.

/pet guard here and /pet sit down were bugged:

/pet sit down and /pet gaurd here do some really funky things to my charmed pets.

They both do the same thing. I'll use one of the commands and my pet will stand still for a few moments. As soon as I back off a bit though, the pet will start wandering off in a different direction... I have to catch up to it and command it to follow me.

Charm break message seems to have often arrived late and been unreliable/bugged:

Another buggy aspect is when a group member casts inviso undead on me to break the charm and I don't get the charm break message until a few seconds after.

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Mixilplix, I have one better. I had a mob break charm, due to "natural" circumstances, and the message finally popped up 3 seconds AFTER my party had killed the loving thing (about a 15-20 second fight).

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Root is in the same slot as charm, so i got the "you may only have one pet at a time" message, slapped myself in the forehead and rooted him. About 30 seconds later, I get the break message, and wait for the pet to come beat on me. But he doesn't, so i hit F1 twice, and sure enough, he still shows up as my pet. Later I got his break message. I'm guessing that even though the second charm didn't go through because I already had a pet, it still got counted, and so i got a break message for it.

So really there was a lot wrong with charm in classic. P99 has too many of these 'bugs' fixed [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]