PvE Class Design: Enchantress

[Tojansen]

My second topic focuses on what I found out while playing my Enchantress from 1 to 33:

- Make more M/s gear available early in game. Rack up M/S in general, because mana is infinite by definiton in a world of mana potions, so 2 m/s on low level items are not going to unbalance the world. Another way would be to let regen scale way better with Int. It does not evoke unbalance later, as there's not a great diffrence between having 20 m/s at 45 or 25.

- Reduce Threat of AoE Spells or give the Ench a good Panic Button when she draws aggro. In a world where there is no designated tank at some times, things can get pretty ugly. A short cooldown while preventing damage almost completly for a short period of time would be nice.

- The Enchantress currently has to be healer and AoE Dps at the same time. In my opionion, people should more actively choose what they want to play:

A lot of Players like to heal, but pressing one button every few secs is not really fun. Give out more Healing spells that are situational and let the Ench target players (maybe once targeting is implemented better). Give out a fast heal that does not heal for much, a big heal that takes long to cast and a group heal with a medium cooldown. This way your design team can design more challenging group interactions by adding AoE enemy spells.
--> Support Enchantress

The other players like to deal heavy AoE Damage, so let them have a better rotation. Most of the skills are balanced around a far too long cooldown. Having nothing to do after hitting 4 buttons and wating 20 secs while spamming heal and revive is no fun at all. Edit or implement a skill rotation that you can press and once the last spell has been cast the first one comes available again.
--> Damage Ench

Both Enchantress Models should be able to do the others job if needed, but not as good as the respective niche-enchantress.

I hope my points become clear. :-)

[Pilates]

I am tremendously fond of the end-game enchantress class and its set of spells. We have heals and debuffs that help the party greatly, and a powerful rotation of spells that can do tremendous damage. That said, we suffer greatly from a number of problems. Most of all, is our survivability as a class. A large percentage of enchantresses in the game play as paladins, due the need to surivive. We do great AoE damage, but without the hp and armor protection, we get annihilated. While magic shield provides protection for a short time, it is useless unless we run away since a few hits is all it takes to render us completely useless due to lack of mana, or dead. The class needs some way to prevent it from being destroyed so early, be that reduced aggro on our spells (such as healing), or decreased rate of mana reduction on our magic shield.

While Nightmare and Weakness are really great spells, they require the enchantress to be in the middle of the mobs (which tends to be a dangerous place!). I would suggest changing them to make them targetable area spells, like firestorm. It would REALLY help our rotations too if the cooldown on Weakness was reduced by 1 second.

As far as early-game enchantresses go, Tojansen nailed the biggest problem...not enough mana regen gear until level 40. Before Thoth gear is available, the enchantress class is almost unable to do its job due to lack of mana.