I see he's level 65 and he still hasn't beat Nalatos. I figure he's farming bosses to gear up for nightmare and playing it safe. How's it going in there Pons? We need in-game chat to pester you with questions. I bet nobody expected an enchanter to rocket to #1... in hardcore mode!

Enchanter? Guarantee he is doing epic charm chains in much lower zones for mass xp.

Holy crap.. he's destroying everyone... in hardcore... wat?

Edit: With an enchanter! Did I miss something? Because I thought enchanter was terrible and nobody is playing them in softcore?

Edit2: I take that back, enchanter would actually be amazing for a season. The auto attack chain and leech is enough to get through nightmare at least and chaining nightmare is more than enough to take you to 99. Pons you must tell us.

had the idea to farm nightmare for the final stretches but take a look at this xp needed for level 97... holy crap! the level 78s in nightmare aren't cutting it

its time to put the money on the line and do the quests on hell

glad to know hc ladder is being watched

Seems crazy, only an enchanter...

its certainly not without its risks, but enchanter may be one of the most powerful classes in the game (as was the case in classic eq!)

im hitting print screen if i get near death to save it for posterity.

here's the latest.. i survived this. but i really don't have many options but to just do the hell progression. i predict additional levels will not significantly add to my strength, but only items... and my itemization is about maxing armor and lifeleech which ive found is quite rare. its absolutely likely i die before 99

ps: for the record, there's a hard cap for earning bonus xp from mobs, else yea, it would make a lot of sense to farm lowbies, but it would quite a grueling grind.. im pushing forward

Looks scary. If that champion had AE buffs like frenzied aura you would have died.

HA. Arcturin crypt nightmare. Also my favorite farming spot. I don't think I could beat you to 99 at this point but this would be the way to go.

Honestly, you won't find anymore xp in hell, the lvls just slow down tremendously at 95. I also think you'll struggle in hell without enough hard casted heals (leech just doesn't cut it imo).

Best of luck man, getting to 99 in hardcore is an absolute feat, even moreso if you finish hell. You've convinced me to give enc another try.

well its over. got a little overconfident in the face of potential double ambush prefix mobs. the way is still open to race to 99. i think i just went too far. this occurred in hell: ashenflow peak 2

ive got a big cache of items to try again though!

.

I can't hate, that is impressive as hell (pun intended). I might just chain Arcturin now for the first to 99 title instead of going for first to finish hell.

Question, are bosses immune to sleep / mez? I honestly just can't see beating either of the last two dragons just trying to outleech their damage (you can't tell me Mystic Rune does much). The only way I could think to beat them would be to maintain mez and regen.

Also, holy crap that xp find. Did you screencap your other screens as well? I'm curious what your leech / status reductions etc were.

i didn't screencap the rest and kicking myself now because i cant get to it.

i never tried using mez on a boss, but they're certainly not immune to stun from color shift, gravity flux, and chaos flux. the latter two of these do percentage dmg (straight 20%) when the boss hits the ground. i might recommend the implementation of a cap on the dmg that can be incurred from that percentage dmg. i could effectively lock a boss while using his ambush mob or a manually added mob with charm + alacrity to tear through it, sometimes adding a stun of their own.

on that note i have a few ideas that may rebalance the enchanter class, but since i loved the class from the beginning, its really the only one ive played so i dont have any benchmarks to reference it against other end game strats... yet anyway.

BTW: that xp find was pretty greedy in hindsight. i should have decided to complete the game before i went that route, because i sacrificed a lot of other stats to obtain that

Ha, a flat % of the health on the drop is so OP. I didn't think about that. Hitting hell bosses for what, 50k?

What was your dps like against normal mobs (lets not talk about the OPness above)? I imagine it was pretty absurd, just about all my dps comes from charmed guy and I'm just slightly lower than other classes I've played. I imagine with chanter auto attack and spells I'd guess 3.5 - 4k sustained.

Where did you get most of your healing? Just leech? The rest of your survivability from rune and stuns? Perhaps there is a talent / skill I missed when I played it.

lots of things i didn't look at because i was racing through and didn't expect to die so suddenly, including dps readings on combos towards the end.

in terms of healing/survival, i started stacking more 'hp on kill' rather than 'life leech.' i kept a fully talented rune up on every cooldown, and every 2 minutes i could use the dark elf racial. i also fully talented the defense buff which gives flat 15% dmg mitigation, and opted to equip a fair bit of chain and plate + a shield despite of sporting what felt like 30-40% increased casting times. plus the fully talented charm increases the chance of mobs to target the charmed pet instead of me, which probably mitigated more than 50% of mob attacks.

the dark elf racial adds life leech. it does NOT heal on pet dmg, but combined with aoe stun+flux spells on 2 or 3 mobs, it was a great heal. however there is obviously a risk involved with loading the board with mobs to life leech aoe when you're already low hp in the first place. that's not exactly why i died though.

at low levels, i extended chains to use the level up complete heal to the best of its potential as well, ofc that wasn't an option later on

Yeah the whole casters can only use cloth thing was a huge turn off from enc for me. Also, yes, dark elf racial OP. Look at all them dark elves! If only they could do bard.

I'm surprised you used shield over something like mana stone but yeah it doesn't sound like you had a tremendous amount of healing. When all else failed you could just sit with your perma charmed mob until racial + rune was back up.

true, another balance implementation that wouldn't drastically change the class on top of implementing a cap to % dmg would be to implement a combo chain break when the charm mob is alone

anyway im rolling a warrior this time around. sticking to HC simply because i grew to be a roguelike kinda guy. grobb is born!

This makes me realize the game should definitely pause all the monsters in hardcore when you die. In any case, amazing run hats. I think you shocked everyone with your Enchanter play!

thanks maelfyn, was kinda cool to come to the forum and see a discussion about myself

i'll give it another go with enchanter after some experimentation with other classes for sure

Cheers! I'll be watching to see how it goes. I feel like we need a teamspeak, mumble, or someway to chat outside the forums!

That's because we do need it 8) Soooon....

Ominious.

Cosmos has grown to take up Pons' legacy.. but I'm going much MUCH slower in hell this time. I'm a little traumatized but back at it baby!

Oh found you (new to forums).

Just wanted to say, when I saw Pon go dark red, I cried a little. I was pulling for ya man.

all good. i woulda shattered records if i was normal but wouldnt have mattered imo

Pons is dead. long live Pons. Cosmos is life

lol... boobsislife bro *fistbump of joy*