For my trio I have a 53 Sk, 54 Enc and 52 Shm. Nuking things down with the Enc is a little slow and inefficient I am finding. I am hoping for some advice on how to add charming into the mix with relative safety. Is it just to bring 2. Charm the add, use it to help kill the first and then break and kill the add? Obviously the chanter should have rune up etc and the SK can taunt the pet on charm breaks. Any tricks I am missing? Or is this just not a viable approach?
I typically always am using the charmed pet in my trios as the tank. So in that trio you have Malo+Tash to help extend the duration of your charms. I would say Tank as normal on your SK, slow as normal on Shaman and use charmed pet on Enchanter. It's important to stand far away from your charmed pet during regular group charming (there are some times you want to stand under your pet for reasons not relevant here). This way you have time to cast and channel a PBAE Stun before your charmed pet gets to you and starts beating you up. When charm breaks cast Color Slant. Immediately use JBoots or Rod of Insidious Glamour twice. Spamming instant clickies twice forces your spell gems to refresh instantly rather than waiting 2 seconds. Then instantly cast Boltran's to recharm. This should land the charm before Stun ends. The alternative is cast level 4 Mesmerize instead of Boltrans here. Then you recast tash+Malo and recharm. Allowing you a 24 second grace period to debuff and recharm rather than the 8 seconds Color Slant provides you. Once you get Affliction Haste 3 (Falinkan Circlet), you can actually Stun->Tash->GCD->Charm before the Stun ends. Before you get a hang of it, I suggest not using dual wield on pet and not hasting the pet. It makes the breaks far more forgivable.
I was going to reply to this, but Darchon already said everything you need to know. Only thing I'll add, is that casting rune gets expensive. An alternative is using Bedlam. No reagent required. Edit: Also, I prefer Allure to Boltrans IF your pet is low enough level for it to land, as Allure lasts longer. The downside is Allure takes longer to cast. With Affliction Haste III you can still stun + allure, but I'm not sure if there's enough time to Tash + Allure during a stun, even if you refresh your spell gems with the rod. If you need to re-tash, just Stun + Level 4 Mez.
One other thing I forgot to mention. If the geometry allows keep your Enchanters back to a wall or solid structure so that pushback is less extreme. The amount your character moves is related to your FPS and typically your FPS is lower when you are boxing and even lower on toons in the background window. So if you're casting and tabbing to another box you will be subject to more extreme push allowing more chance for an interrupt.
Good advice! Grab an insta-clicky (rod of insidious glamour is easiest) and affliction haste item (33% faster charms and slows) when ya can, they make a world of difference.
I find rooting the mob is helpful as well. It is much easier to deal with one angry mob after charm breaks early rather than two.
Instead of 1v1 charm vs mob. try 1vMany. Reverse Charm. Pull and root your 3+ mobs (not all at once) all within hit box distance of each other. Charm one. Attack, back off, and hit the other two. We don't want root break sending the mobs back to your camp. Maintain roots on mobs. Use invis/gazughi ring to lose pet when it's within nuking range. Nuke it. Bring in another pull, root it next to the others. Maintain root and repeat. Your set up of the pull can differ. 1. You can find a charm pet having it do your pulling and use /pet_back (or w/e) to bring it to camp and root there. This allows hit box range to be nice and set. 2. Described above. Single pull and root (enstill or higher). Got to gauge hit box on your own and time root correctly and/or get hit by currently rooted mobs. The key is obv. the 2x or more mobs hitting on your pet acting as your DPS and then claiming the exp from your un-petted mob. Gazugi ring works best because it's instant. but invis, timed right works too just gotta time it and not lose the pet (and thus the XP!). All your typical crowd control applies. Root could breakso re-apply from range or if you're getting hit use stuns. Dont forget Air Ele/ Levitate suffers from movement push. Charm can break. Charm and root or multiple roots can break. So, run, snare, root, etc. Large open spaces help. Entrance to Chardok in BW I think I did around 52. I went inside solo after but mostly did 1v1. Pretty sure i grouped as an Ench for the majority of early-mid 50s to 60. The hole entrance this method worked solo w/ earth ele's and Calm-ing the static spawns and pulling back to zone in.
Oh, one more thing that might not be common knowledge, especially for folks coming over from P99 or other emus. On TAKP, as on AK and PoP-era Live, all you need to get full exp with a charm pet is to deal one point of damage to each mob you fight. (If the pet does 100% of the damage, it steals half the exp.) Blue Ceramic Band is super handy for that. The bands can usually be found for a couple hundred plat in the bazaar.
Lots of good advice here already. Here's my take from a 57 Pal/Dru/Ench who considers the enchanter my 3rd string character but still charms for the DPS. If the mob type that I'm charming flees on low health, I'll beat it down and then try to maintain it at 10% health or so while charmed. Now if charm breaks while I'm pulling, the mob just sits there (it's ensnared) instead of beating down my ench. This is a little less applicable to you without a long duration snare, but still an option if you can keep pet at such low health that it very slowly runs away. This even works during combat on certain mob types. For example, undead frogs in lower guk will flee at low health even if there is another frog in combat close by. Pain free charm breaks, unless the mobs happens to get away and trains you. To add to this slightly, right angle corners are your friend if available. Back the your enchanter into the corner so that there is no pushback at all. Personally, I don't bother with color slant. With the spell haste II mask, the level 4 mez spell casts quickly enough that I haven't had any major issues channeling it off during a charm break. The 24 seconds gives plenty of time to redo tash and snare and then recharm. Most of the time, I'm too cheap to bother with Rune and I don't want to waste a spell gem on Bedlam. On charm breaks, after I start casting the level 4 mez on the enchanter, I'll switch to the druid and hit my "heal enchanter" hotkey. Often it won't be needed and I can duck out, but if mez gets interrupted there is already a heal about to land. In regards to when to haste/weaponize the pet, here's my general guide I follow. Inside a dungeon with humanoid mobs, I weaponize but don't haste. If fighting non-humanoids, I'll haste depending on their difficulty (ex: in velks I'll get a rogue spider and haste it). If outside with plenty of room to work with, I weaponize and haste (ex: geonids in WL). Pay attention to mob types, rogues make great pets. Casters are usually not so good. To save mana, I'll use the lowest level charm spell that will work. My typical spell line up on my ench while charming is this: Tash, Charm, level 4 mez, long duration mez, slow, nuke, boon of the garou, buff (clarity/haste/GMR).
I have the same set up with SK/Ench/Sham. When I charm a mob I generally don't put haste on him because my enchanter is such a bitch he dies pretty quick and I don't use rune very often. If charm breaks I usually will start a heal on shaman first thing then switch to enchanter to deal with it.
Use any instant clickable item twice in a row. So if you have Rod of Insidious Glamour for example, put it in a hotkey slot in your hotbar, mine is in 8 personally. Cast Stun, then cast Tash, then hit 8 twice in a row, then cast charm. It allows you to skip the 2seconds of downtime between spell casts. This allows you to cast an 8 second Stun, wait 2 seconds on global cooldown, cast 1 second Tash, immediately use your instant clicky twice, cast Boltrans Agacerie (6s Base cast time but 4s with Affliction Haste 3 focus) which is a total of 7 seconds from Stun landing meaning the mob shouldn’t be able to beat on you unless you’re too slow with the instant clicky or followup casts. The reason you don’t also use it on Tashan immediately after Stun is the game requires you wait 2 seconds before landing spells even with GCD. However with GCD you can immediately start casting another spell but it has to have a cast time such that you’ve waited 2 seconds between spells. Pro-level strategy is to wait 1.1 seconds after Stun use GCD, then cast Tash which would have Tash landing 2.1s after Stun and would therefore work. Being able to reliably do this though is tough, so it’s generally not worth trying to buy yourself that extra fraction of a second and risk the spell failing because you went too early.
Whether or not you're grouped, if your charm pet does 100% of the damage to a mob, it steals some of that mob's exp (I believe half of it).
All good stuff. My chanter charms for Dps and my warrior tanks, so it’s a reliable strategy! If these posts make you feel like it can all be a bit much, it’s because some of these folks have honed charming as a strategy for a long time. It can be as efficient or easy as you want it. To share, I have never cast rune on myself or used the global cool down clickie things and I rarely retash a mob unless I schedule it’s break. It seems to work fine enough for me. You’ll find what works for you. Do get the Affliction Haste item for sure, though. To add, my only suggestions would be: I stick to level 29 Augmentation unless I have someone to snare/a bard. Noticeable faster, still channel-able. Pick up a Wand of Allure for the back pocket if the mob is 51 or lower. I don’t have a corpse summoning toon yet... Kill undead? Get a Dawnfire and protect the pet.
Dire charm has a weird mechanic where % if xp gets taken based off of damage done if less than half done by hooman. Can find the post somewhere in these forums.
