OKAY
I think I am ready to give real, informed feedback after incessantly reading this forum for a week and doing a 2 day 1-10 Ail'vorith Inquisitor run right before the end of Beta. I do not know what exactly was said on Discord about Charm, just that there was some acrimony on Discord regarding Charm, because there is always acrimony on Discord, because Discord is its own metagame for the socially deprived/depraved. Reddit works the same way. Thank for for giving us the forums for feedback without the middleman.
FULL DISCLOSURE: In my belief, there is nothing inherently wrong with a player introducing not only mana regen but 2-3x DPS to a party. Unlike in Kunark times, I am a grown man with a business and limited hours in a day. I play this game for fun of grouping, not for soloing. Solo is a fall back for sparse grouping or limited playtime. I am not trying to race through levels and content, if anything I am "racing" towards solvency with my spell costs and now reagent costs if/how/whenever this is balanced against single target casts. We play this to have fun, right? Not because of, in the words of @odz, "some kind of misplaced loyalty towards a fake dog in a fake world." Or at least we hope so, right? Do you really care how fast my charmed fake beetle is killing the other fake beetle in the fake world with the fake dog?
This was a weighty choice to make two weeks before EA. It wasn't as if nobody knew Enchanters were powerful. So be it. I will be your EA testing soldier in a way I wasn't able to be for Beta. I don't think there is a way to "balance" (dirty word) this that would make anyone remotely happy except for the few gloating that Charm was completely gutted. I want to get it out of the way here and early: There are players who say that CC is trivialized by the triviality of challenge of most camps in the game and that they can be handled by 3-4 players max. They're right. So keep that in mind as we go forward.
Calls to "split Enchanter into CC and a Charm Pet class" are underestimating how much work that actually takes (starter quests x4 unless you're proposing "just have AI write it" and that's a whole different riot) and I assume are speaking in terms of Platonic MMO Ideals.
The easiest way to fix Charm as it stands for EA is to massively lower its mana costs to reflect how frivolous it is. Who cares about breaks and damage nerfs and anything else if it's mana efficient for what it does? This is the most elegant solution I can come up with that doesn't involve Charm pet DPS debuff persisting after Charm break for 12s. Work outward from there, but really, it should have never been a problem considering the state of other classes.
Inquisitor was a lot of fun. Maybe even more fun than Enchanter at this point except I still don't understand how AC is supposed to work. I almost want to main Inq instead, but you really need Enchanters.
I also want to make a plea to anyone who decides to not subscribe to EA over deep dive/class/charm changes to really consider doing it anyway and continuing to play/test because you care enough to be posting here about it so I hope you'd care enough to help build this game in a positive direction.
