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few thoughts from grinding enchanter
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Author:  hats [ Tue Apr 21, 2015 5:37 am ]
Post subject:  few thoughts from grinding enchanter
These are mainly balancing ideas which I've come up with by romping the HC ladder with enchanter. Sorry other enchanters but this truth may hurt us. I understand this is a single player game, and therefore individual classes can reasonably possess unique strengths/weaknesses that do not inherently imbalance the game, however below you will find reasoning which I consider makes enchanter outshine virtually every other class in the game at present:

Alacrity
Alacrity should be looked at to check if working as intended. It says 35% increased melee speed with multi-attack but it appears to turn charmed mobs into absolute killing machines. That may be working as intended, but it should be checked for the following reasons:

-It appears to increase mob melee speed by more like 200%, but I am visually inspecting this. Some mobs, such as vicious/frenzied mobs, perhaps should be more affected by alacrity but at present it seems even the lowliest of Orc Pawns can be turned into a whirlwind of destruction.

-Player melee speed does not appear to be as drastically affected (albiet, player speed is much lower due to zero other contribution of melee haste :: caster attempting to melee).

-Occasionally (sometimes once per stage) the melee speed of charmed mobs will drop unexpectedly, yet the multi-attack will remain. The melee speed reduction occurs without any influence of slow from crippling aura or shaman/enc type slow spells. Sometimes this is fixed by direct reapplication of alacrity (although it has not worn off, as exampled by multi-attack remaining). Other times, it can be fixed by ditching the mob and acquiring a new charm, but this does not always work. Sometimes the "slow" carries to the next charmed mob. It appears to fix itself randomly. This may be a function of the alacrity offering a haste that is too fast normally, which momentarily reverts back to normal.
 Again, just visual inspection. I can't imagine what 35% increase should look like.

-Occasionally charm mobs stop acting entirely as if perpetually stunned. Breaking charm and attacking them does not re-activate them. This may be an issue with charm in general but I only ever noticed with heavy alacrity grinding.

-The level 20 talent bonus which makes mobs never break charm completely nullifies the need for charisma on enchanters. It also presents a situation of very low risk when using charm+alacrity as a main source of dmg, which is arguably the undisputed best method at the moment for enchanter dps (more on this in Cajoling Whispers assessment below).

-Minor: I believe that the absolute max level Alacrity (level 24) should offer a unique benefit. At present the breakdown of max level alacrity bonuses is thus:
level 20: +5 auto attacks
level 21: +6 auto attacks (achieved by 20 talent points in alacrity + 20 cajoling whispers)
level 22: +6 auto attacks (achieved by 20 talent points in alacrity + 20 cajoling whispers + 20 shiftless deeds)
level 24: +6 auto attacks (achieved by 20 talent points in alacrity + 20 cajoling whispers + 20 shiftless deeds + 20 enchant weapon)

Therefore, the alacrity talent achieves max benefit at lv 21, and no benefit past that. Its possible that one could leverage the lv 21 capped benefit to simply drop the extra spending points and achieve lv 21 with 17 points spent (assuming lv 20 cajoling whispers + 20 shiftless deeds + 20 enchant weapon), but there is no benefit for acquiring all of the above.

Just a personal assessment, but I think it would be very appropriate if lv 24 alacrity earned +7 auto attacks.

Chaos Flux
Effect: Interrupts your target's spell. There is a 25% chance that your target will be launched into the air and take falling damage upon landing.

It is my opinion that this is an overpowered spell. The reason why is because spamming this spell (with zero added talent points), I have never ever had a problem with a single boss in this game. I feel like this must be addressed because when I read discussions about how hard this or that boss is in nm/hell, I can't help but scratching my head... well I got by those hurdles without taking damage.

The launching referred to in the tooltip which has a 1/4 chance of occurring delivers a ~3 second stun + flat 10-20% of maximum mob health in damage which can hit upwards of 30k dmg on hell bosses. Bear in mind this spell is free of mana to cast, and without armor penalties/spell haste, it is a 1.5 second cast. With 6.67 casts per 10 seconds, you are very likely to earn that launching effect. If it procs, you gain 2x free casts (~3 sec) without worry of the mob attacking. Now factor in spell haste and the cast time can drop as low (in my experience) as about 1.2 seconds, or 8.3 casts per 10 sec.

Additionally, factor in your 100% launch component from gravity flux (about ~3 sec stun) and stun from color shift (without talents a full 6 sec stun), both full-board aoe, as well as an increasingly powerful slow effect from shiftless deeds (currently 53.9% slow debuff at lv 97), and enchanters have some serious potential for repeated barrage of chaos flux procs destroying bosses without taking any damage whatsoever.

I recommend to do one or both of two things: implement a dmg cap that bosses can incur, and/or drop % chance to launch mob in air drastically (possibly to 10%). Alternatively you could require this spell to cost mana, but that solution would severely hurt low level enchanters while not affecting higher level enchanters self-buffed with clarity.
Author:  hats [ Tue Apr 21, 2015 6:15 am ]
Post subject:  Re: few thoughts from grinding enchanter
Cajoling Whispers
I believe this spell is low-moderate power at low levels, and absolutely gamebreaking with level 20 alacrity at high levels simply due to the 'never breaks' feature from alacrity.

When it is combined with the level 20 alacrity talent bonus that reads "Charmed Pets Rapidly Regenerate. Charm Never Breaks," enchanters find themselves in a position to create endless combos with very little consequence. The image shown below represents far and away the greatest combo from season 1 at time of this writing, and mind you this was arbitrarily cut off at 1034 kills because I got bored. I could have taken this combo to many more thousand mobs (this is in final stage, nightmare difficulty). This singular combo took me from lvl 96-97 (approximately 4.5 million xp).

I recommend implementing a fix to make combos break when a charmed mob is the only remaining object on the field. This would affect both enchanter and bard charm mobs, but would bring it more in-line with other pet users who do not benefit from this. At present, an enchanter can continuously sit on a charmed mob and allow cooldowns to reset to avoid breaking a combo.

Attachments:
1034 combo.JPG
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Author:  hats [ Tue Apr 21, 2015 6:27 am ]
Post subject:  Re: few thoughts from grinding enchanter
Reserved - more to come. If the above nerfs are implemented, I also have a set of recommended buffs that may balance out the enchanter class further.
Author:  TadaceAce [ Tue Apr 21, 2015 12:58 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: few thoughts from grinding enchanter
hats wrote:
Cajoling Whispers

I recommend implementing a fix to make combos break when a charmed mob is the only remaining object on the field. This would affect both enchanter and bard charm mobs, but would bring it more in-line with other pet users who do not benefit from this. At present, an enchanter can continuously sit on a charmed mob and allow cooldowns to reset to avoid breaking a combo.


I would hope we get our regen back! I use this pretty commonly on bard, however, our charm isn't permanent so I can't go eat a sandwich and come back and have my chain still going.

Also, 3.5k dps, in nightmare, doing single pulls, is really high. Since a lot of your damage scales with charmed mobs / mob hp enchanter has got to do some serious dps endgame.
Author:  TadaceAce [ Tue Apr 21, 2015 1:53 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: few thoughts from grinding enchanter
hats wrote:

-Occasionally (sometimes once per stage) the melee speed of charmed mobs will drop unexpectedly, yet the multi-attack will remain. The melee speed reduction occurs without any influence of slow from crippling aura or shaman/enc type slow spells. Sometimes this is fixed by direct reapplication of alacrity (although it has not worn off, as exampled by multi-attack remaining). Other times, it can be fixed by ditching the mob and acquiring a new charm, but this does not always work. Sometimes the "slow" carries to the next charmed mob. It appears to fix itself randomly. This may be a function of the alacrity offering a haste that is too fast normally, which momentarily reverts back to normal.
 Again, just visual inspection. I can't imagine what 35% increase should look like.

-Occasionally charm mobs stop acting entirely as if perpetually stunned. Breaking charm and attacking them does not re-activate them. This may be an issue with charm in general but I only ever noticed with heavy alacrity grinding.



I can confirm these issues. Originally I thought it was an issue with anthem de arms but it appears its just something charmed mobs do.
Author:  crimsonchaos [ Fri Oct 16, 2015 4:51 am ]
Post subject:  Re: few thoughts from grinding enchanter
The setup I went with my enchanter is a bit different. 30k sustained DPS is very strong.

Its not pet reliant for damage.

Here is my setup:

https://nevergrind.com/nevergrounds/ind ... er=Solaros

The setup I noticed a lot of people are using is a full melee enchanter, with a 2h while giving up cast speed. I'm not convinced its stronger than the one I got.

What keeps this build alive is leech + gravity flux every 12 secs. If I take 111 DPS, then my bar will only go down a bit before it gets topped off with gravity flux. Cannot be killed unless I just go AFK and quit attacking. And I can still survive without using the stun or mez. The strategy is to pull mob, make it a pet, then pull 4 more and start spamming chaos flux + gravity flux + jubilee while attacking with a weapon at the same time. Cast speed on chaos flux is .47, or x2 per second.

Weapon damage is 229-1193 x6 hits and then add enchant weapon on top of that. 1013-1193 arcane damage per hit + 1 of the other elements.
Speed: 1.4 secs w/alacrity up

That's using a Warlock's Nemesis dagger, which happens to be a good casting 1h as well. This weapon has a delay of 22, which is really fast, and 26 damage is good for a dagger. That's near 15k DPS with just the auto attack.

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