I have a dirty little secret: I used to be an Everquest player. I played “back in the day”, on both PC and Mac servers. For those of you who missed it, EQ was a special game at a special time. MMORPGs were relatively new, as was the Internet, and being able to play a co-operative game on such a scale was really quite marvelous at the time. I played a few characters and had fun with them all .. but there was one that towered above the others.
My most powerful character was a 65 Enchanter on the Al Kabor server. I was top 10 on the server for the class, in terms of equipment and progression. I was part of the second most powerful guild on the server, and we were just shy of the Plane of Time (the last stage) when Sony, being the gigantic pricks they are, shut the server down. So ended my Everquest adventures, and actually all of my gaming, for the most part. Nothing has ever quite compared.
Of all the games I have ever played, I never had anywhere near as much fun as playing this class, in this game. To start with, the game itself was very punishing. When you died, all of your equipment stayed where you died: if you could not retrieve it, you lost it. The death penalty also included a significant experience hit.. a poorly timed death could result in two or three hours of lost time! Though rare, six or eight hour corpse recoveries were possible. Today’s games do not punish you like this .. the danger is not there. Any time you were playing the game seriously, you had to be “on”, because death was usually only seconds away.
A map of a rather dangerous dungeon, the dead side of the infamous "Lower Guk." It is a dungeon filled with tonnes of great loot but death awaits at every corner.
Classes
The general classes of the game were as you would expect in a fantasy setting: warriors, clerics, wizards, druids, rangers, beastlords, necromancers, magicians, shamans, paladins, shadowknights, and more. You could be a good race, a human, elf, dwarf, or go evil mode, and pick a dark elf, ogre, iksar, or troll.
Typical Play Session
A typical playing session might involve finding a group, moving to an area, and killing monsters (with the goal of gaining experience, finding a unique drop, stockpiling gems, or something else.) Parties were composed of certain classes, usually a minimum of a tank, healer and DPS (damage dealers.) Depending on the location, a “puller” might also be required. This is a player who is able to skillfully bring one or two monsters pack, rather than ten, using a variety of techniques. A typical encounter might go like this:
(1) Puller goes out and finds a mob.
(2) Puller tells party “mob is coming.”
(3) Puller aggroes the mob, brings it to the party.
(4) The tank gets the attention of the mob, and the mob starts hitting the tank.
(5) Other players start damaging the mob.
(6) The healer heals the tank as necessary.
(7) The mob dies. Its treasure is looted. Everyone gets XP.
(8) Repeat.
That is an example of a fairly basic encounter (one that goes properly.) Often, things would go wrong, in any number of ways. Maybe the puller accidentally brought three monsters instead of one. Maybe he brought the wrong one, so you have to fight a much stronger monster. Maybe he timed it wrong, and on his way back, attracted a roaming monster. Maybe he hit a trap on his way back, which spawned more monsters.
Enter the Chanter: Crowd Control
The enchanter has the ability to put monsters to sleep, temporarily. So, in the case of two monsters being pulled, the enchanter would simply put the second one to sleep .. and keep it sleeping, while the tank and cleric dealt with the first one. Once dead, they would proceed to the second one. Something similar could be done in the case of three mobs .. and maybe four, or five.
Of course, as an enchanter, you had flexibility with how to deal with them. Rather than put them to sleep, you could root them to the ground, and freeze their movement. Or, you could charm them .. basically make them your pet! Or, you could send them fleeing in terror, by casting fear on them (of course, this was very dangerous to do in a dungeon, as they could attract more monsters!) A feared monster in a crowded dungeon was a very, very scary thing. Perhaps a little less so with a good chanter on tap! But even then, scary...
But wait .. there’s more.
Beyond crowd control, chanters had some of the best buffs (beneficial spells that help other players) in the game. The biggie was clarity, which was a mind buff that regenerated mana. Haste was huge too: these spells made melee characters swing faster. Both of these spells made the enchanter highly desired in groups, as their presence could radically improve the effectiveness of said groups. The difference between the fighting efficiency of a hasted, mind buffed group vs. an unbuffed group cannot be overstated, particularly at higher levels. Horse vs. thoroughbred. Ferrari vs. mustang.
Here are some examples of how situations would be handled, depending on whether or not you had a chanter with you.
Without: “We’re going to have to pull these one by one.”
With: “BRING THEM ALL!!!!”
Without: “We are not strong enough to tank these guys!”
With: “Let me charm one of them, and they can TANK THEMSELVES!”
Without: “Oh my god, ten monsters are running at us. FLEE! FLEE!”
With: “Let me just put them ALL to sleep. Stand by.”
There were other characters that could do some impressive things, but for many parts of the game, none could really compare to the chanter. The class allowed strong players to turn average groups into powerhouses, and gave you the ability to do really jaw dropping things .. things that no other class could touch. Good enchanters were ALL arrogant: it went with the territory. For awhile the enchanter was considered overpowered compared to all other classes. Damned right it was!
There was a dinosaur cave, for example, with high level, hard hitting dinosaurs. One of these dinosaurs would could kill an average player in under a minute. Groups usually started at the beginning of the cave, killed one at a time, and if they were good, work their way through the entire cave. A decent group was required (say three or four people), as the dinosaurs hit hard, and had lots of hit points. It was good experience, but a bit of a slog. Kinda boring.
If you were a chanter, however, there was another way. Near the cave was a group of NPCs, one of which had a huge amount of hit points, and hit very hard. You could put his friends to sleep, and charm him .. take control of him, basically, and use him to fight for you. Because of his huge hit points, you didn’t need to worry about him dying. So, as a chanter, you’d grab this guy, charm him, and basically walk through the cave (alone.) Your hasted pet would just DESTROY the dinosaurs, killing them in just a few seconds. You would kill MUCH faster than full groups, because your charmed monster was hitting much harder than any player could .. much harder than any THREE players could.
Now, the DANGER to this is that the charmed mob could turn on you at any time .. the charms only lasted a few minutes .. meaning that both the monster you were attacking and your formerly charmed mob both charge at you at the same time. If you had applied a haste buff to your charmed mob (which the cool kids tended to do), your pet could kill you in under 2 rounds. Basically if it hit you, you were dead. So, the trick was to keep the mob and your charmed pet away from you, so that if charm broke, you could re-charm before it got to you. If you did it right, you would never get hit, and have your charmed pet do all the fighting for you.
Of course, it never worked this way. For example, your pet could be engaged happily with a monster, and you could get jumped by a third monster. Or maybe a fourth. You could deal with them by rooting them or putting them to sleep .. but then you had to watch that. They would wake up eventually, or the root would break. Maybe as you were watching that, you got jumped again.. so you dealt with that.. but then your pet decided to uncharm itself, and came running at you (with ANOTHER monster in tow.) So you had to stun them .. and put one to sleep, but maybe your earlier root breaks at this point.
This was the power, the fun and the glory of the class: the shuffling of mobs, running across rooms, rooting mobs, charming mobs, mesmerizing them .. direction of the flow of battle. Like chess, you had to compose while performing: come up with ideas for how to deal with situations on the fly, and implement them. No two encounters were the same, and although there were definitely routine ways of handling many situations, wrinkles always cropped up.
Not much room for Mistakes
It’s worth noting that Chanters had very low health and I believe they were the physically weakest class in the game. It did not take long to die, and mistakes were punished brutally. The trick was to never let mobs get close enough to damage you. That actually changed in later parts of the game, as our equipment and self-shielding abilities enabled us to tank things that made everyone ask:
“HOW IS HE DOING THAT!?”
My best memory of the game was deep in Chardok, an evil castle. Some groupmates and I were there in pursuit of an item for one of our guild members, something they needed to help them complete their epic quest (which yielded a very powerful item.) Something went very, very wrong, and rivers of monsters started streaming towards our group. At first there was ten, then twenty, then fifty, then more than a hundred. It was ten of us versus a hundred of them. We didn’t realize this at the start, so rather than evacuate, we decided to engage: we were stuck in a battle that we had no apparent hope of winning.
Well, let’s try it.
Not knowing precisely what to do, I began casting an area of effect mesmerization spell. Six of them fell asleep. Then twenty. Then thirty. Then fifty. Waves kept arriving: I kept putting them all to sleep. Of course, the spell was short duration .. so I had to keep re-casting it.. and given how many monsters there were, I was never quite sure which ones needed to be refreshed. The odd one would make its way to me, doing it’s best to kill me. Never happened! Doing the best I could, I rotated the spell around the ever growing sea of monsters, and kept them all asleep. My mana was draining at a steady rate, but my buffs and equipment were regenerating it adequately. At one point, we had well over a hundred mobs in camp. I kept most of them asleep while our small group killed them, one after another. Against all odds, we lived, and at least one person exclaimed it had been the greatest unexpected battle victory he had ever experienced in any game, ever. I concur.
As an enchanter, moments like this were not rare: although that last story is an extreme case, it is no exaggeration to say that on a daily basis, you held the life and success of your party in your hands. If you performed well, riches and success flowed, and people showered you with praise. If you were having an off day, maybe more time was spent retrieving corpses than doing any actual adventuring. If you were known as a strong player, group invitations were never a problem: you were sought out. And if the groups were not there .. no big deal at all. For enchanters, groups were optional. We were our own group.
BEST CLASS EVER
For those reasons and more, I posit that the EQ enchanter is the best class ever. It is incredibly powerful, wonderfully diverse, and yet demands a high level of skill and an ability to think rapidly on your feet. Heaven help the group stuck with a poor enchanter. But a good one? Well … just stand back and try not to get killed.
If you have an interest in checking out the EQ enchater as discussed here, you’ll want to go no further than the Planes of Power expansion. The modern game is very different and does not offer a comparable experience. But I’d suggest you don’t. It’s a time sink, and you have more productive things to do with your time. Don’t you have some writing to do?
Image Credits
watch?v=LrNUlSlnXdQ on youtube.com
Eqatlas
Chardok: Allakhazam
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Love the screenshots and a walkthrough of being an enchanter in old school EQ... Some of the best gaming memories are from EQ and some of the most brutal. Corpse runs were the worst.
It's never been topped, as far as I am concerned. I guess it was the newness, the wonderment at this entire, unexplored world.
And you're right, CRs were no fun, especially raid CRs, which mostly involved sitting and waiting for a rogue, or a summons. At least single group CRs had some activity.. not so when you got into Vex Thal and whatnot.