I'd like to expand a bit on the previous enchanter review from Hats, and talk about my experience leveling an enchanter up in Season 1. This is mostly my opinion as a higher level enchanter, but I also want to include a skill review and leveling plan to interest people.



Overview (from the wiki)


Enchanters are utility spellcasters that focus on charming monsters to fight for them in battle. They tilt the tables in battle by using mesmerize spells to control additional monsters and powerful stuns to keep them on the defensive. Slows and haste buffs help stack the odds in your favor. They can even enchant their weapon with magic to do additional damage.

Class orientation: Utility spellcaster, pet, cloth armor.



Races


Dark Elf - Personally I think Dark Elf is the best race. The ability to instantly heal yourself back up to full on demand is extremely useful for creating big chains.
High Elf - Mana regeneration is useless, since with a pet, you won't really be casting any spells that use mana.
Gnome - Silence immunity may be ok, but the ability to phase a mob out of combat isn't very useful for the enchanter since you already have similar skills in your arsenal.
Human - Possibly as good as Dark Elf. I haven't created a human to see how powerful or fast the healing is.
Erudite - Magic resistance is pretty useless, since you shouldn't really be getting hit by spells.

As to male vs female: the stats for male aren't important, while the regen from female may be of some use.


Stats


I may come back to this, or if other enchanters have opinions here, please let me know and I'll add them.
Since most of your damage is coming from your pet, I haven't found any of the stats terribly important. (This may be wrong if we find out if any of your stats have impact on the pet). While leveling, having some life leech is nice to help you keep your health up, but in Hell it isn't as effective. Int is obviously ok, but most of your damage is coming from the pet anyway, and not your direct damage spells. Charisma seems to be unnecessary once you have 20 points in Alacrity. The most useful stat seems to be Spell Haste.



Talents


Starting off, enchanters are not very strong. You really start to shine when you have a permanent, and very fast pet from the Alacrity and Cajoling Whispers combo. I will attempt to review the talents individually to give you an idea of what they can do for you. Keep in mind this is just my opinion based on my play style. Your successes may vary.

Chaos Flux - Improves Chaos Flux's damage. Level 20 bonus: 10% damage bonus.
Useful while leveling until the pet becomes a majority of your damage. You can take it in the beginning, but then spec out of it later.

Color Shift - Adds damage to color shift. Level 20 bonus: 35% chance to extend stun by 60%.
I took this for a while with my 'extra' points. I liked the added stun duration, and it would be VERY good if it always extended stun by 60%...but it does not. The damage bonus is fine, but you're not using color shift on rotation for damage...it's there to save you from dying. Not good enough to be a permanent choice.

Discordant Barrier - Improves Discordant Barrier's armor and health. Level 20 bonus: 15% damage reduction.
After trying 20 points in color shift with my 'extra' points, I ended up putting them here. The extra health is a nice buffer, and the flat 15% damage reduction is very good.

Mystic Rune - Improves mystic rune's shield power. Level 20 bonus: 20% damage bonus while shields are active.
This talent seems to be very good. I didn't use it much while leveling, and I probably should have. Your major limiter to farming fast as an enchanter is your health pool, and the fact that you don't have any way to get health back. This helps solve that problem. The only down side is the cooldown is pretty long. The 20% damage bonus while shields are up is good too...however I don't know if pet damage is affected by this, so it might not be that good since your personal damage won't be very much. Try to always keep the rune up.

Cajoling Whispers - Improve charmed mob's damage. Level 20 bonus: 16% pet taunt rate.
Very very good talent. Most of your damage will come from your pet, so the bonuses here are great. I don't really know how to quantify the taunt rate component.

Shiftless Deeds - Adds cold damage DOT. Level 20 bonus: hits 3 targets.
Not very good. While shiftless deeds is a great spell on bosses and elites, the 15 second cooldown is the limiter for burning through trash. Hitting 3 targets doesn't do anything, because I feel it's easier to just AE mez everything. Your goal is to take NO damage...not just less.

Enchant Weapon - Improves enchant weapon's damage. Level 20 bonus: Enchant weapon hits double.
I tried this talent out when I saw my autoattack damage was ~30% of my total (I was surprised by this since I haven't geared for melee at all). The 20 point bonus seemed to only add a couple % damage to my total. I ended up getting rid of this since I feel survivability is way more important than a few extra % damage.

Alacrity - Adds more hits to autoattack. Level 20 bonus: charmed pets regen and never break.
This skill is great. Probably the class defining skill. I'd say respec in to it ASAP.

Grasping Embrace - Improves Grasping Embrace's damage. Level 20 bonus: hits 3 targets.
Bad. Doesn't help pet damage, doesn't help survivability. No reason to take this.

Mesmerize - Convert Mesmerize to Jubilee. Level 20 bonus: 37% casting haste.
Putting 1 point in this talent turns your single target Mesmerize skill in to an AE direct damage. You have to put 1 point here to get to Gravity Flux (which is awesome), so this kills your single target mez. Oh well. I haven't missed it. The 37% haste from level 20 is actually very good, though. I don't currently have this skill (I took Discordant Barrier instead) but I might switch. More on why spell haste is really good later. You might want this.

Gravity Flux - Improves Gravity Flux's damage. Level 20 bonus: Adds psychic beam. Cooldown reduced to 12 seconds.
Extra damage and the beam are ok. The real reason you take this skill is to reduce the cooldown on Gravity Flux. This improves your survivability a lot by being able to throw mobs up in the air (and take no damage) almost twice as much. You'll want this.

Tashania - Adds magic DOT to tashan. Level 20 bonus: Magic ignores Sanctuary.
Doesn't help pet damage, doesn't help survivability. No reason to take this.



Early Leveling


I don't remember what order you get all of the skills in, but I'll review the important ones for your rotation.

Chaos Flux - Good damage early. Interrupts cast. Sometimes pops the mob up. This is great to help you not take damage.

Cajoling Whispers - You should always have a pet. Look for melee, since they'll not waste time casting relatively weak spells.

Color Shift - 6 second stun on 20 second cooldown. Very good if things get out of control. Use it to help prevent damage when necessary.

Shiftless Deeds - Slow. Great on elites that will live for a while, and on bosses.

Gravity Flux - Tosses all mobs in to the air. Great to keep you alive. Guaranteed to throw mobs in the air. You can use this as a finisher for your first mob if you want to combo in to another one.

Mystic Rune - Keep this up all the time.

Enthrall - Use this if you get adds or pets. It'll turn off your autoattack, so make sure to re-enable it afterwards. Lasts a while...usually long enough to clear everything.

Buffs - Keep them all up. They last a long time. Special note on Alacrity: from my experience, the haste benefit from Alacrity will bug out some times if you recast it. Just wait for it to wear off before recasting.



Leveling Talents


These are my recommendations. It's been a while since I leveled, so these could be debated.

1) Max out either Cajoling Whispers or Chaos Flux first. Depends which you like. Chaos flux might be good if you some have spellpower gear and/or spell haste.
2) Respec to 20 points in Alacrity ASAP. I think that's ~36.
3) Max out Cajoling whispers. Now your pet is a beast.
4) Max out Mystic Rune. I didn't do this while I leveled, but I wish I would have after seeing how much time the rune saves.


Current Talents

I feel that the current 'core' talents are (in order of importance):
Alacrity
Cajoling Whispers
Mystic Rune

This leaves us with the freedom to max out 2 more talents. These are our 'extra' points. Experiment with these as you like!

Here is how I'm currently spec'd




Gearing


I like looking for pieces with spell haste and survivability stats. While leveling, throw on whatever you get.



Advanced Tactics


End game, it seems that your pet is a majority of your damage. Your job is to not take damage while it kills things. That can actively be achieved a few ways: stunning mobs, slowing mobs, tossing mobs in the air, and your rune. Once in Hell and mobs start to live longer, you'll need to manage your cooldowns to achieve this.

Essentially you'll be chain casting Chaos Flux for the interrupt it provides. Every cast interrupts your target, and sometimes it'll throw them up in the air. The damage of Chaos Flux doesn't matter, but the damage that the throw does is good. It's a fixed %, and it doesn't look like it's affected by affixes like Tough or Magic Resist. While mobs are thrown, there is a small one second(ish) window where they can't damage you after they land. The more Chaos Fluxes you can do, the more throws you'll get. This is why spell haste is a good stat to have. It increases your survivability, AND helps your damage. My current Chaos Flux cast time is 0.8 sec and that seems pretty good.

If you want to chain in to another mob before the one you're on is dead, you need to plan to take no damage. You can do this by pulling another, and then casting a Gravity Flux. This will toss both in the air. If you did it right, the fall damage is going to kill the first when it lands, so you can switch targets mid-air to the new one. The small stun after the toss will save you some damage from the new mob. The 12 second cooldown on Grav Flux lets you do this more often. You can also use Grav Flux to quickly kill pets.

If you get an ambush, you can Grav Flux in to either a Color Shift or Enthrall, and pick the mobs off. If the mobs won't live much more than the 6 second stun, Color Shift is fine, but if they will, use Enthrall. Keep in mind, since you have 1 point in Color Shift, it now does damage and will break your enthralls. This sucks but is unavoidable. If things go really bad, hopefully you aren't instantly dead and Gravity Flux will come back off cooldown and buy you some more time.

If you do this all right, you shouldn't be losing any health. The biggest thing to watch out for is Iron Maiden and Martyr. Iron Maiden reflects damage for every attack that your pet does on to your health, and it is NOT absorbed by rune. Since the pet is attacking very fast, you might just instantly die if you're not sitting at 100% health. It ALWAYS seems to take you down to at least 50% health, even if you're fast. All of my deaths at high level have been to not reacting to Iron Maiden fast enough (within 1 sec). Sometimes you also get boned if you toss a mob off the screen and they Iron Maiden while in the air and you can't see it. Martyr is the other source of unavoidable damage...the mob will explode for a lot of damage, but it IS absorbed by rune, so you can plan to prevent some.

If you do take damage, you need to heal back up. The best (maybe only?) way I've found seems to be the Dark Elf racial. The human might be good also, but I haven't tested it. The reason the Dark Elf racial is very good at healing, is that the fall damage from tossing mobs heals huge chunks of health for you. If you get in real trouble, you can Grav Flux fast, and hit the racial mid air. When everything hits the ground, you should be full health. If you get a bad string of Iron Maiden's in to Martyr's and Grav Flux/Color Flux/racial heal are on cooldown, you're totally in last stand mode. Pray that Chaos Flux procs a throw. If you're low health at the end of a fight and can't continue, just run from combat and heal up and start again.

As to comboing, enchanter and bard seem to have an advantage here. Even when everything is dead, the combo counter does not reset as long as you have a charmed pet. However, you still won't heal during this time, so it doesn't do enchanters a lot of good. I've found its better to either run away, and break your combo streak, or keep killing mobs and hope that your Life on Kill, or Life Leech effects heal you up a bit.



Here you can see a pretty huge combo where I worked on these tactics. The important takeaway is how low my damage received per second is. This is the only way to get a combo this big. I didn't have any noteworthy gear to accomplish this, although it would have been a LOT easier if I had the 6-piece Satyr's set bonus (reduced cooldown on Mystic Rune).



Final Thoughts


I think enchanter is in a good place right now. Your kill speed is very good, but also checked by a few insta-death scenarios and lack of healing. Some of the talents are useless in their current form, but may be made fun with some tweaks. I'm also looking forward to the rumored set improvements, which will only make enchanters more fun I'm sure.

Overall, I've had the most fun playing my enchanter, compared to the other classes I leveled. I'd recommend anyone to try one out. Stick with it through the lower levels, and you'll have a blast.

Good luck, and see you on the leaderboards!


-Tezl


This guide written as of patch 1-0-24.