Most of the advice contained herein is intended for a newer player. At higher levels, game play changes, and some of your strategies will change as well. I will update this guide with information for level 60+ enchanters some day when I have time.
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The puller goes out to get creatures and comes back with some. When the puller gets back to the group, the main tank chooses one creature and announces it:
At that point, everyone except you hits their assist macros and starts pummeling the target of choice. Then you, as the enchanter, attempt to target each of the other creatures and cast your mez on them. When they are all mezzed, take a moment to survey your handiwork. If you didn't need to cast Tash to mez them, then Tash them while they are mezzed. Slow them while mezzed, unless there is a shaman to cover that task.
Cast memory blur on your mezzed creatures to keep them from eating you when they wake up. Mez spells include a memory blur component, but it becomes less reliable when you confront higher level targets, so additional blurring is desirable. On raids, blur creatures mezzed by other enchanters as well.
Rooting your mezzed creatures also helps keep you alive. If it can't get to you it can't hurt you. Some clerics will root things for you without being asked. If you have a ranger or paladin in your group, ask them to snare or root everything before they wake it up. Ranger roots do damage, so those can be cast to break the mez or after the mez is broken.
Use stuns to help you. Your point blank color stuns work very well
to buy you a bit of time to cast a mez. You should always have one of
those memorized and you might find that you like to have two of them
because the recast times are long. A common mez attempt sequence
against a tough creature looks like this:
Mez (resist)
Stun (no resists)
Mez (resist)
Stun (no resists)
Tash
Stun (no resists)
Mez (should be no resist with Tash)
Clerics and paladins can help you by stunning or rooting the thing
you are trying to mez or anything else that is beating on you. Keep
your eyes open for those spell messages and suggest it to them if they
don't seem to be doing it.
Time your mezzes. Figure out how long your mez lasts. It will always have the same duration unless it is broken by damage or dispel. When you cast a mez, time it either with the /time command, an egg timer, a wall clock or counting "one-thousand one one-thousand two ...". Before the mez is about to run out, recast it. If the creature never wakes up, you will never get hit. You are usually better off refreshing a mez 2/3 of the way through its duration than you are waiting until it hits you.
Use auto-target to mez quickly on pulls. If your puller is very friendly and clever, they can let you pick the current target on a pull. Targetting one out of a number of creatures in a pull can be very hard. (See the section on Targetting.) As they run to camp with a bunch of bad guys, you use your Target Nearest NPC button and mez whatever you get. The puller clears their target, selects whatever hits them, then calls the rest of the group to assist. That knocks out one targetting task out, leaving the rest of your job a little easier.
Choose the next target. You know which of your sleepers is closest to breaking mez, which has been Tashed and slowed, which is most likely to resist you when you try to refresh, so you choose who dies next. Make yourself a nice hotkey that says "Kill %T next" and use it whenever you have more than one thing mezzed. If you don't care then just say "Pick any of them" so the tank knows they don't have to wait for your selection.
Learn how to avoid interruption. One of the most frustrating things that can happen is being continually interrupted until everything wakes up and your group dies. Two factors affect interrupts: damage taken and total distance moved. Rune and Berserk spells will help prevent interrupts due to damage taken. Most of the time, however, creatures interrupt your spell casting by pushing you around. If a creature pushes you backwards, try to take a tiny step forward to counter the motion. If many creatures are hitting you at once, try spinning in place; this sends constant motion requests to the server and helps maintain your position.
Raids are about the only time you will work with another enchanter. It's a good idea to talk to the other enchanters on the raid so that you can coordinate your efforts. If you are all trying to do the same thing at the same time, you will waste a lot of mana and cause a great deal of frustration as you overwrite each others spells and miss targets.
Most of the advice in this section is intended for people attending their first large scale raids, like Hate and Fear. Some things will change as you gain higher levels; most importantly, your resist rates will go down a lot, so you will be able to try trickier things.
You may need to Tash most creatures to make your mez stick. If you see another enchanter having difficulty with a mez, try Tashing the creature. If it stays on them, mez it. If it charges over to you, they can mez it. If it is too hard for you to mez it, Tash it again or cast a memory blur to make it turn from its target.
In order to keep a raid moving quickly, the main tank may not taunt creatures very much before breaking mez. It's very handy to cast memory blur on every mezzed creature. This is a very useful, if not glamorous, role for an enchanter who is not really high enough level to land mezzes. Neither taunt nor memory blur is 100% reliable, but both help.
If your raid is using a special chat channel, you may wish to rewrite your socials to announce things in that channel. It is probably easier to write one set of socials for a specific channel than to edit all of your socials for each raid. You may have to /join and /leave channels to make the raid channel show up at the appropriate number for your socials.
Basically, you get all of the enchanters present to cast their best Rune as fast as possible on the main tank until the foe is dead. Depending on the situation, you may need to cast a Rune on every tank, just in case the creature turns and hits them or ripostes.
If at all possible, have your main tank forego any strength buffs so that you can use the Berserk line as well. The damage absorption will deplete one spell at a time, so if you can use one spell from each line, you have a much better chance of preventing damage from getting through.
This technique is expensive to use, because of the 10pp cost of peridots. Rune is also a very high aggro spell, generating a lot more hate for you than would be generated by a heal for the same amount of damage. For these reasons, it is not normally advisable to Rune in every fight. Leave the healing to the healers except when the special properties of Rune are required.
Normally shamans will take care of slowing creatures, but you should be ready to step in when there are no shamans present, when they are being resisted, or when they are dead. Forlorn Deeds is nearly as effective as the best shaman slows, reducing attack rate by 70% compared with the shaman's 75%.
It is useful to cast Cripple on creatures that can Rampage or have other special melée effects. Cripple lowers the creatures Agility and Dexterity, which makes it less likely to get its special combat abilities. Be careful when casting Cripple, since it generates a very large amount of aggro. Shamans can cast this spell as well.
Charm is a useful tool for controlling adds that cannot be mezzed. It is particularly useful when you have an unmezzable healer prolonging a battle. The other normal solution to that problem is to put a fighter on the add to keep it busy while the main battle is completed. If the creature can be charmed by a bard, it's probably better to let the bard do it. It is much easier for a bard to recover a broken charm than it is for an enchanter. Our advantage over bards lies in the range of creatures we can charm.
When you have Dictate or Dire Charm, charming becomes a much more interesting option on raids.
If the raid is using an area effect strategy, then your strategy will be the same as for a single AE group.
You will die on raids. You will die a lot. Try not to let it bother you.
Be careful when using charm against precious targets. If your charmed pet goes wild at the wrong time, it can get the kill as an NPC and cause the body to poof. If the body of some rare and mighty beast vanishes due to your use of a pet, you will feel really bad.
You also want to try to Tash the creature before you charm it. To keep it from beating on you while you do this, try mezzing with a 24 second mez or rooting it.
Lower level charm spells are generally cheaper and faster to cast. The only major difference between them is the level cap on the targets. Charm goes up to level 25, Beguile goes up to 35, etc.. Try to use the lowest level charm spell that will work on your target. At very high levels, the charms become shorter and less resistable, up to the level 60, unresistable, 48 second Dictate.
When your pet goes wild, try to mez it with a short mez before you recharm. This gives you an opportunity to refresh your Tash and collect your wits.
There are two ways to break charm: Invisibility or Dispel. If you have buffed your charmed pet, you should probably break charm with a huge dispel to take off the buffs. If you charmed a pet that had been debuffed, then you probably want to use invisibility to break the charm. Unfortunately, your charmed pet cannot be debuffed before you break the charm.
If you have an item that casts Invisibility or Dispel or if you have the innate Hide ability, you should use that to break the charm. Then you don't have to wait for your spell icons to refresh and you can react immediately to your now wild pet.
Attempting to charm %M - Charm is the one class of spells that is actually important to announce. People can get bent out of shape when their spells suddenly stop taking effect or their weapons stop swinging. So give people warning when you try it.
I have charmed %M - I usually include a "/pet who is leader" in this social. When the monsters say, "My leader is Xymarra", everyone takes notice.
/pet back off - This command clears your pet's aggro list. You should probably hit it immediately after you charm the creature. This will prevent your pet from running over and whacking on people while charmed or from running off to slay perceived foes in random places in the dungeon.
/pet guard here - Your pet will follow you around unless you explicitly tell it not to. I like to have my pet guard some distance away from me so that I will have some warning when it breaks charm.
/pet follow me - It may or may not be worth putting this on a macro. You use it to put your pet back in follow mode when you are ready to move elsewhere.
/pet kill - Send your pet in to kill your current target. I like to keep an /assist macro on the same page as my pet commands so that I can have my pet help on the correct target. Again, I put a "/pet who is leader" in this command so that people don't panic when it comes running into battle.
My pet has gone wild! - Make this one loud and bright. When your pet goes wild, you are probably going to die fast, especially if you were so bold as to buff it.
Chain casting color stuns is a good way to keep a monster from even thinking about casting, or doing much of anything else for that matter. This is a useful strategy in several situations and some enchanters use it in every fight everywere. However, it is a bit wasteful of mana and can bring you unwanted aggro. Not to mention that it's really tedious; if we wanted to be tapping keys continuously, we would be playing bards.
Alternatively, you can wait for the casting message and stun to interrupt it. This is not quite as effective at preventing casting or damage, but it brings less aggro on you, takes less mana, and allows you to do other things during combat.
Our direct damage spells have an instantaneous stun component which has no purpose other than interrupting spells. We pay for this effect with a high resist rate and increased taunt value for the spells. I often keep the level 8 Chaotic Feedback spell memorized when I will be confronting stunnable casters.
Lagarn's Lamentation has a real stun effect (8 second duration) and is single target, so it can be used in many situations where color stuns cannot, but it is expensive to cast and has a long refresh time (24 seconds), so it would have to be used in conjunction with other spells to prevent casting.
Some creatures cannot be interrupted with stuns. Unstunnable giants and level 60 monsters are the main examples. They can be interrupted if you actually knock them back, but this is difficult to do and impossible for you as an enchanter.
Sometimes the creature will do this for you by casting itself nearly oom. Then you can steal the end of its mana with a single timely Theft of Thought or Mana Sieve.
For creatures that are not that obliging, you will have to drain away all of their mana. After the initial probing Theft of Thought to refresh yourself and identify the target as a caster, begin casting Mana Sieve. If the monster dies too fast, you may not be able to steal all of its mana in time, so you may need to ask that certain kills be slowed down to prevent gaters.
Torment of Argli is very effective at stopping casters, because it continues to drain mana over its duration, which prevents the creature from regenerating more mana. I find that one cast of that and one or two casts of Theft of Thought often render a creature completely incapable of spell casting.
When your puller shows up with three or four creatures, you will need to put all of the extras to sleep. You have a number of options for accomplishing this task.
The easiest choice is to use an area effect mez: Mesmerization or Fascination. Mesmerization is a very efficient spell. It only keeps the creatures down for 24 seconds, but it can affect up to 5 creatures at a time and it is quite inexpensive. The downsides are that you can mez yourself accidentally, it is annoyingly ineffective when you have more than 5 targets, there are places where you cannot use AE, and you generate a lot of aggro. If you try it on creatures close to or above your level, you will almost certainly get resists and die very quickly. Some enchanters like to use AE mez to lock down a pull of 3-5 and then root the creatures so that they can be moved over to single target mez as they awaken.
If AE mez is normally partially effective, or if you get more than five things to mez at once, try casting AE mez and then hitting Escape to clear your target. The next thing that hits you will make itself your target and you will be able to mez it.
The auto-target commands are very useful for selecting creatures. Selection with the mouse is tedious. EQ often freezes up the mouse cursor or moves it to strange places, so unless you are using it constantly, you'll have to find your cursor before you can use it to select. The "Target Nearest NPC" command ignores players and pets, automatically selecting only NPCs. You should bind that to a nice handy key instead of the default F8. I use "x".
If auto-target doesn't give you a creature you can mez, then try moving around to get a different target. Alternatively, you can switch through various camera positions to quickly get different angles on the battle and see if any of those give you something better. I generally set up my third person camera views to get useful angles on the battlefield if we are going to be sitting in one spot for a while.
If the creatures are all standing right on top of each other, try standing behind the main tank and using auto-target from there. The fighter's target is probably going to be pushed backwards by the force of his sword blows, leaving mezzable targets closer to you.
A considerate tank will move the fight after you mez something. All of the awake creatures should follow the tank, allowing you to separate them from the sleepers.
In an AE battle, your role is to use the Color Stuns to keep everything immobile while the rest of the group kills them. Color Flux lasts four seconds. Color Shift lasts six seconds. Color Skew and Color Slant last eight seconds. You will probably want to keep three stuns memorized and cycle them as fast as possible. You may want to keep all four stuns ready, since the longer ones are generally more effective but the short cast time on Color Flux makes it useful for regaining control after resists. The other casters should stand close by you so that their AE spells cover all the targets and so that they don't pull creatures out of the radius of your stuns when they get aggro.
On raids, you may wish to tackle certain areas with AE and others with the more traditional main tank and mezzed adds. Make sure everyone knows which battles will be fought with AE and which will be fought traditionally. An AE spell on top of your crowd of mezzed creatures can spell disaster.
In single group AE hunting, your group will generally be killing everything with AE blasts. An AE group generally consists of: one cleric, one enchanter, one puller, and three AE casters. Wizards make the best AE casters, but druids and magicians are quite respectable. Any class that can get back to the group with fifteen or more creatures in tow makes a good puller. Bards are often favored because they can contribute to the AE damage output. The puller is often left to melée down the last creature standing while everyone else meditates.
If the group is making very large pulls (40-50 creatures), you will want a second, or even a third, enchanter in the group. With only one enchanter on so many opponents, you are almost certain to get a couple of resists on every cast. Then you get interrupted and the whole thing falls apart.
Rumor has it that when you take on Ogre form, you cannot be stunned from the front. This would be very useful in AE situations, but it has never been shown to be true for certain.
There will be deaths when things don't go quite right, but even with the deaths, AE fighting is probably the fastest way to gain experience.
In the following, I use these words to describe groups of classes:
Normally, you shouldn't have too much trouble keeping a basic set of buffs on everyone. This includes (ignoring spells beyond your level):
You should expect to get some basic buffs from other casters in your group.
Also, if your buff box is getting full, ask them to refrain from casting stat buffs on you. They don't help much and are worse than useless if they displace necessary buffs. You can cancel unwanted buffs by clicking on them. The only stat buff that is really useful for an enchanter is Stamina.
It is important to keep Clarity on the clerics, the main healers for each group, and the main slower. If you have someone pulling with spells, they should have Clarity as well.
You will want to keep your best Haste on the main tank and on any high level Monks and Rogues who aren't off pulling all the time. If you are in an underwater zone, then Augmentation is useful to keep everyone's stamina up. Use a lower haste that has a longer duration on all the lesser tanks, if mana permits.
On most raids, you should also cast Group Resist Magic on everyone. This spell gives more resistance than regular Resist Magic, and it is very efficient in terms of mana.
If there are multiple enchanters on the raid, you may want to split duties by groups or by spell. I generally prefer to split by spell, since then I can keep my most requested buff memorized. I find it useful to write down a list of names for each buff I need to cast. Usually, I generate this list by running through all the appropriate classes and typing:
For example, when building a list of people who need haste, I type and write down the names for each class. You have to warn people to turn off anonymity first, but people should know that they need to turn off anon if they want buffs.With the addition of the new /targetgroupbuff command (which can be abbreviated /targetg or /tgb), it is now quite easy to keep group buffs on a whole raid. This command toggles your current state of buffing other groups. When it is on and you cast a group buff, your buff affects all members of your current target's group and yourself. If your target is not a player character, then the spell affects your own group as usual. Every time you zone, this toggle is reset to OFF, so remember to type /tgb before you start your buffing ritual. Because you are affected when you cast spells this way, it is not possible to time your group buffs by casting them on yourself. Either someone will have to let you know when the spell is wearing off, or you will need a timer for it.
Ducking while casting cancels the spell. Due to a recent change, ducking now immediately cancels your current spell cast. If you find yourself in the middle of a long cast, you can rapidly hit your duck key twice and be ready to cast another spell or sit down to meditate.
Enchanter healing is Rune and Berserk. We don't get any healing spells, but we do get damage absorbing shields. Both the Rune and Berserk spells absorb a fixed amount of damage before falling.
Obsolete: After level 35, you don't need to stare at your
spell book to meditate.
Now, nobody has to stare at a spell book
to meditate. Once you have trained the Meditation skill at level
4, you will automatically meditate when you sit down.
Normally, I do not cast Tash before mezzing. That gets the monster so mad at you that it will come over and beat on you, preventing you from casting the mez. Once you have been resisted once, the monster is probably beating on you already, so you might as well Tash it while mez refreshes.
I also don't normally Tash before slowing. Enchanter slows are less resistable than shaman slows, so I rarely need it. If there is a shaman in your group, you should Tash fairly quickly in every fight so that the shaman can cast their slow spell. Make sure the shaman knows that you will be Tashing right away, since some of them are skittish about getting hit. Your Tash is a fast enough spell that you can cast it when you see the shaman start to cast their slow. That way you take at most one hit from the monster before the shaman's slow spell takes hold.
When you are fighting some really nasty creature that takes 30 people to kill, someone will have to Tash it, unless it is completely immune to magic. That person will probably die, so figure out who is going to take the Tash death before the battle starts. Also, the battle is likely to occur wherever that enchanter was standing, so make sure you are positioned properly when you cast.
The point of socials is to let your group or your raid know what you are up to. If they know what is mezzed, Tashed and slowed or what is giving you trouble, they can act appropriately. It is your responsibility to give them the information they need to make everything work smoothly. You can also use socials to automate commands that you want to use repeatedly, such as /loc or /corpse. Anything you can type in your chat line can be placed in a macro for easy repetition.
You create a social by clicking on the Socials button in your main window. Right click any of the buttons in that menu to edit its contents. There are ten pages of socials, so you should have plenty of room to make more. Edit the name at the top of the dialog box and then edit the five lines of the social. Hitting Escape leaves the dialog without saving your changes. When you are happy with your social, press Done. Left click and hold the new social button to pick it up. A square button will appear on your cursor. Drag it to your hot box and drop it in one of the slots. Now you can activate your social by pressing the number key asssociated with that slot.
I found that when I did try to cast spells through a social, the spam was really annoying. I had to keep mashing the key waiting for a refresh, which repeated the spell message each time. Some people get around this by making their macro cast the spell multiple times:
You can attach an arbitrary statement to an animated emote by adding the word "say" after the emote command. For example:
Examples of my actual socials:
I generally prefer to use common words for effects rather than spell names. Most people don't know or care whether I am using Dazzle, Entrance or Mesmerize to control creatures, but everyone knows what "mez" is. Similarly, if I shout that a creature has been "Recanted", I won't get the immediate recognition that I would see if I used the word "Dispelled" instead.
Attempting to mez - I generally only use this if someone is hitting my intended target or if there are multiple enchanters and a big pull. I also have a Stop attacking %T so I can mez social that I pull out when someone is really ruining my day.
%T is resisting mez - Actually, I usually just type out "/g RESIST" while Dazzle refreshes. I tend to forget about my hot keys under pressure. I don't actually bother announcing resists until a creature has resisted me two or three times. If there are other enchanters present, they are probably alert to my situation already.
%T cannot be mezzed - Usually you will know before you try whether a creature is mezzable. Giants, for example, can't be stunned in any way, which includes mez. There are a few places where some creatures of a particular type are mezzable and others are not, due to some wacked out level restrictions. In those cases, you will probably need to try the mez to find out if it works, then shout this if it doesn't. I use /shout for this message to make it stand out from my normal "mezzed" message which is in /ooc.
%T is mezzed - I use this for a while every time I join a new group. After a while, everyone gets the idea that all the targets except the current one are mezzed and I can stop spamming them. On raids, all mezzes should be announced. It can be hard to tell the difference between a slowed creature and a mezzed one unless you look for a very long time.
%T is slowed - Again, I use this for a while in a new group so that everyone knows I am slowing things, then I stop telling them about it. It is very rare that I am slowing things on a raid, since there are nearly always shamans present.
%T is Tashed - I only use this on raids, and then only against big bosses and highly resistant creatures. It is particularly important against huge nasty creatures who will kill you instantly after you Tash them. There's no sense having all the enchanters killed that way. If you really want your normal hunting group to hate you, tell them every time you Tash something.
%T is dispelled - I normally tell the group that I will be dispelling at the earliest possible opportunity, as soon as the incoming message is announced or in advance. For example, "I will always dispel necromancers." Then I use this macro so they can start their debuffs.
Sieving %T - I use this when there are other enchanters on the raid and I want them to help me. You can use Theft of Thought to identify which creatures have mana that needs to be sieved.
Kill %T next - I use this all the time. See the Strategy section.
Attempting to charm %T - This one I could see attaching to a social, but since I don't always memorize charm in the same slot it would be annoying. I don't charm all that often, so all my pet commands and charm socials are on a separate panel.
%M is charmed - This is critical. Everyone needs to know when you have charmed something. See the Charm section for pet command socials.
By default Alt-1 through Alt-8 cast the spells and Shift-1 through Shift-8 select hot key panels. I think it is better to move that functionality to a single keystroke wherever possible.
Don't use the keys in your hot box for things you can map directly. You will be casting spells a lot. It is possible to drag your spell icons down into your hot box, but resist the urge. The same is true of opening your spell book or sitting and standing. Just practice using direct mappings for a while until you are used to it. You will be glad to have room in your hot box for all the socials that you will want to use. Also, if you switch hot box panels a lot, you'll be sad because you'll have to put the same commands in more than one of them.
One consideration when choosing key bindings for commands is that you can use the numeric key pad without interrupting your chat. If you talk as much as I do, it's very handy to be able to do things like sit, stand or enter attack mode without interrupting your conversation. Here is a subset of the key bindings I use:
| 1-0 | Ten hot keys in the hot box |
| qwerasdf | Eight spell slots |
| F1-F6 | Six group members |
| x | Target nearest NPC |
| g | Target/Use center screen |
| c | Target nearest PC |
| z | Open inventory |
| v | Auto-run |
| ` and F7-F12 | Select hotkey panel (gets 7 of the 10 panels, which is enough for me) |
| Numpad 0 | Sit/Stand |
| Numpad 3 | Open spell book |
| Numpad 4568 | Moving and Turning |
| Numpad 172 | Pitch up and down and center camera |
| Numpad . | Duck |
| Numpad 9 | Switch cameras |
| Numpad * | Switch window mode |
| Numpad + | Auto-attack mode - Having this key on the numeric pad lets you enter or exit attack mode when you are editing your chat line. |
Whenever you change a key binding, give yourself some practice time before you dive into a dungeon.
Mesmerize spells put creatures to sleep. They are the heart of the enchanter's ability to control crowds. Most of our strategies are based around the properties of the Mesmerize line of spells. We call them mez spells. When a creature is under the effect of one of these spells, we say it is mezzed.
The effect of a mesmerize spell is a long lasting stun that is broken if the creature takes damage in any form. Creatures that cannot be stunned, such as giants, also cannot be mezzed. While mezzed, a creature cannot attack, move or cast spells. Other spell effects, such as snare, stun, weaken, or resist debuff, will not break a mesmerize. It can be dispelled. It is important to communicate with your group to let them know what creatures are mezzed so that nobody wakes them up.
These spells also have a blur component. Often a creature that has been mezzed will also be blurred, meaning it will not come attack you when it wakes up. This effect becomes less reliable as you and your targets get to higher levels. I often used the mesmerize line of spells for the memory blur component up to about level 40. A couple of the higher level spells have a bonus to the blur component, making them somewhat more reliable.
It's not necessarily a good idea to use your highest level mez spell. The basic improvement, as you gain levels, is in duration. It is nice to have the creatures sleeping for a longer time between recasts, but mana costs are higher and recast times are higher. It is a lot easier to get three things mezzed with a fast recast like Entrance than with a slower one like Dazzle.
| Level | Duration | Mana | Level Cap | Cast Time | Recast Time | Blur | |
| Mesmerize | 4 | 24 sec | 20 | 55 | 2.5 sec | 2.25 sec | |
| Enthrall | 16 | 48 sec | 50 | 55 | 2.5 sec | 2.5 sec | |
| Entrance | 34 | 72 sec | 85 | 55 | 2.5 sec | 3.75 sec | |
| Dazzle | 49 | 96 sec | 125 | 55 | 2.5 sec | 5 sec | |
| Glamour of Kintaz | 54 | 54 sec | 125 | 57 | 2.5 sec | 2.25 sec | +30 |
| Rapture | 59 | 42 sec | 250 | 59 | 2.5 sec | 24 sec | +40 |
| Mesmerization (AE) | 16 | 24 sec | 70 | 55 | 3 sec | 2.25 sec | |
| Fascination (AE) | 52 | 36 sec | 200 | 55 | 3 sec | 2.25 sec |
Mesmerization and Fascination are AE mez spells whose effect is centered on your current target. Fascination has a lower resist rate than Mesmerization, but costs a lot more mana. These spells are fantastic for disaster management, but they can be tricky to use.
Both spells can affect up to five targets. It is entirely possible to catch yourself in the area of effect, which is one reason to keep your magic resistance and shielding buffs on at all times. You also take up one of the five targets when it hits you.
When creatures are running all over the place, it can be handy to target a group member with this spell instead of an enemy. This gives you a known fixed point for the spell of someone who will not charge over next to you when you cast. They won't be mezzed by the spell, but they will count as one of the five targets.
You cannot overwrite a single target mez with an AE mez or vice versa.
It is often desirable to root your mezzed creatures, especially when using the AE versions of the spells.
The color stuns are all point blank area effect centered around you. It is a good idea to keep at least one of these memorized at all times. Once you have two or three available, you can keep a large number of creatures permanently immobilized by chain casting them. Be careful that you don't try this with creatures that are higher level than you, because you will die if you get too many resists.
The casting times are shorter than the casting times of your mez spells, so you can use them to stop creatures long enough to mez them.
| Level | Duration | Mana | Cast Time | Recast Time | Area | |
| Color Flux | 4 | 4 sec | 20 | 1 sec | 12 sec | 20 |
| Color Shift | 20 | 6 sec | 40 | 1.5 sec | 12 sec | 25 |
| Color Skew | 44 | 8 sec | 60 | 2 sec | 12 sec | 30 |
| Color Slant | 52 | 8 sec | 125 | 1.5 sec | 12 sec | 35 |
These are single target stun spells. Whirl til you Hurl and Dyn's Dizzying Draught can be broken by damage or stuns, and are generally considered completely useless. Originally, Whirl til you Hurl was an uninterruptable 12 second stun and was used by enchanters all the way to level 50, but that was deemed too powerful, so the spell was nerfed into uselessness.
Lagarn's Lamentation is a nice, eight second, single target stun that also drains mana. It is good for stopping casting creatures, but its high cost and long refresh time reduce its usefulness.
Charm spells turn the target into your pet. For more insight, see the Charm section.
Blur spells attempt to clear the hate list of the target(s). The higher level ones are more effective than the lower level ones. Blanket of Forgetfulness is an AE blur, which is necessary when you want to blur two adjacent creatures at once. The AE version affects PCs, causing everyone in the area of effect to blink.
These spells temporarily raise your faction with one group of creatures. The spell lasts until you leave the zone. Only one faction can be raised at once, so new castings overwrite old ones. The spell does not cause any aggro when cast.
These spells can be used in conjunction with illusions to allow you to move through dangerous territory or to complete quests that require a certain level of faction. Be sure to /consider everything when you are traveling like this, since cities and dungeons often contain creatures on separate factions.
Tash, in all its forms, lowers the magic resistance of your opponents. It is very handy for overcoming magic resistance. However, it also causes a lot of aggro. In general, I would not Tash before mezzing unless it is absolutely necessary, because the Tashed mob will come clobber you and interrupt your attempts to mez it.
Tash is completely unresistable and is poison based. Dispel magic will not get rid of it, but Cure Poison will.
If someone else is slowing or debuffing creatures, you should Tash everything to help their spells stick. Shaman slow spells seem to have a higher resist rate than enchanter slows.
The Wind spells are AE Tash. They are also called "Get Nekkid" spells, since they generate the same aggro as a regular Tash on a whole bunch of creatures at once. There are very few instances where you would want to use them, but they can be handy for large pulls in critical situations or in situations where you are expendable.
Slow is great. It slows the attack speed of your opponents. This keeps the group from taking as much damage, which saves your healers mana and saves you grief. Slow creatures while you have them mezzed, then cast Memory Blur.
Shamans get better slows than we do, but if there is no shaman around you should probably expect to slow everything your group fights. If there is a shaman around, make sure they slow all creatures while they are mezzed.
Slow spells can be removed with Cure Disease spells. They are not removed by dispels.
Fear causes things to run away. Unfortunately, without a Snare spell of any kind, they usually run away pretty fast. It is possible to fear creatures and have your pet hit them from behind as they run, but players have a hard time keeping up with creatures that are running at full speed. Using Fear in a dungeon or any crowded area can be hazardous, since the creature will eventually come to its senses and return to you along with everything it met in its flight.
As an enchanter, about the only time I use Fear is when I am outdoors soloing things that are really too tough for me or when grouped with a druid, ranger or necromancer for classic Fear kiting.
Eye of Confusion actually causes blindness rather than fear. If you cast it on another player, they will experience this effect. However, blindness is implemented very strangely for monsters and often causes them to flee.
Root spells prevent a creature from moving, but still allow it to attack anything next to it and cast spells. They do not always last their full duration. There is a small chance for the creature to break root on every tick and there is a substantially larger chance to break root whenever the creature is hit with a direct damage or stun spell.
Root can be used as a poor man's mez on melée creatures. Just root them out of range. It is not nearly as effective as mez, since many creatures can have a deceptively long melée range and many players seem incapable of moving out of range of rooted creatures.
| Level | Duration | Mana | Cast Time | Recast Time | |
| Root | 8 | 48 sec | 30 | 2 sec | 2.25 sec |
| Enstill | 29 | 96 sec | 60 | 2.5 sec | 2.25 sec |
| Immobilize | 39 | 60 sec | 80 | 1.75 sec | 3 sec |
| Paralyzing Earth | 49 | 180 sec | 100 | 2.5 sec | 2.5 sec |
| Fetter | 58 | 180 sec | 75 | 1.75 sec | 2.25 sec |
These spells lower the target's STR. There isn't much point to them, since strength doesn't affect melée much. The only real use is to encumber people in PvP.
These spells reduce AC, so they are actually useful to cast against really tough creatures. Shamans get the same line of spells, so they will usually have this responsibility.
This spell lowers INT and WIS. However, since that only lowers mana capacity rather than actual mana, this doesn't help a whole lot. The primary use of this spell is that it makes your target "look stupid".
These spells increase or decrease the amount of hate generated by the actions of the target. It is useful to cast Haunting or Horrifying Visage on the main tank in a battle to help them keep the monsters attention. Similarly, casting any of the others on yourself before you Tash, on a cleric before they heal, or on a wizard before they blast will help prevent your target from gaining the attention of the foe. None of these spells has a particularly strong effect on hate, except the self-only Beguiling Visage.
| Haunting Visage | +5% to hate |
| Horrifying Visage | +10% to hate |
| Calming Visage | -5% to hate |
| Glamorous Visage | -10% to hate |
| Beguiling Visage | -50% to hate, self only, 15 minute recast |
Mana Sieve takes mana away from your target. It is completely unresistable. You will find yourself casting this spell over and over when you face a caster that can't be stopped with other spells.
Torment of Argli drains mana from your target over time and has a few other cute effects. It is very efficient at removing casting ability from your opponents, but it is resistable. It also has a DoT component, which means you cannot cast it on mezzed creatures and you need to use caution when casting it on creatures that you may later want to mez.
Wandering Mind and Theft of Thought both steal mana from caster creatures and give it to you. Both spells have a very long recharge time and can only be cast on creatures that have mana. Wandering Mind steals the mana and gives it to you over time. Theft of Thought is instantaneous. You can use either of these spells to determine that a creature has mana to sieve. If Theft of Thought cannot be cast on it, then there is no point casting Mana Sieve.
Dispels remove magic-based spells from your target. The higher level dispels remove more spells and more reliably, up to a maximum of four spells removed at once.
Our direct damage spells are reasonably efficient in terms of mana, but they have a very long recast time, they generate a disproportionate amount of aggro, and they are very resistable. However, they also have an instantaneous stun effect that is great for interrupting casters. I often keep Chaotic Feedback memorized even now for that purpose.
Gravity Flux is an area effect spell, centered around your current target. It flings the creatures up into the air with a damaging blast and they take extra damage on their landing.
Our Damage over Time (DoT) spells include very nice debuff components, reducing the AC of the target among other things. Unfortunately, several other classes have a line of spells that is better and doesn't stack with them (Necromancer Heart Flutter line and the Shaman and Druid epic DoTs, at least).
Also, if a creature has a DoT on it, you can't mez it. The next tick of damage will wake it up. For that reason, be very careful when using your DoTs on creatures you may want to mez later and caution others about the same.
Lull spells, like Harmony, reduce the radius of response of the target to a fraction of its original value. Once a creature is Lulled, you can walk quite close to it or attack creatures nearby without aggroing it. Unlike Harmony, however, the Lull spells are resistable and will cause aggro when resisted. It is possible to use Lull to pull single creatures from a group, but if one resists, you will probably get the whole group.
Wake of Tranquility is an AE Lull. Due to its high resist rate, it is not particularly useful. We usually call it "Wake of Trainquility".
Spells in the Clarity line all give increased mana regeneration. The amount of mana is insignificant compared to normal meditation rates, but it is a huge improvement over your standing regeneration rate of 1 mana/tick.
| Breeze | +2 mana/tick |
| Clarity | +4-7 mana/tick |
| Boon of the Clear Mind | Group Clarity |
| Clarity II | +11 mana/tick |
| Gift of Pure Thought | Group Clarity II |
| Koadic's Endless Intellect | Group spell, +14 mana/tick, adds INT and WIS |
Insight, Brilliance and Enlightenment raise the target's Wisdom, Intelligence, or both, respectively. The amount of mana capacity added by these spells is well worth the effort as long as their mana stat is not above 190 unbuffed.
| Total mana | replace INT with WIS for priest classes |
| (INT/5 + 2) * Level | up to 200 INT |
| (INT/10 + 22) * Level | over 200 INT |
The Gift spells add to your maximum mana and the later two add a small mana regeneration component.
| Gift of Magic | +50 max mana |
| Gift of Insight | +100 max mana, +1 mana/tick |
| Gift of Brilliance | +150 max mana, +2 mana/tick |
According to Verant, Charisma affects the resist rates on mind spells, which includes our Charm, Mez and Fear lines. In testing, the difference between high charisma and very high charisma gives only a few percent improvement in resist rates. However, since we care a lot about those resist rates, it seems worthwhile to put some effort into maintaining a high charisma. I generally try to keep my Charisma about equal to my Intelligence with buffs and gear. I keep my best Charisma buff on myself and on anyone who is charming things, which is usually bards and some druids.
Shielding spells increase your maximum hit points, give you some AC and some magic resistance. You should keep it up at all times. Shaman Talisman spells will overwrite our shielding spells, giving more hit points, but no AC or magic resistance. In any situation where I care what my magic resistance is, either because I am facing caster creatures or using AE mez, I ask shamans not to cast Talisman on me. You can cancel the Talisman and recast your Shielding, but then you will need a heal.
These spells increase AC only. Clerics have better AC buffs, but they are a lot more expensive, so you should probably keep your AC buff on yourself and any other casters in the group. When there is no cleric in the group, keep your best AC buff on everyone.
Magic resistance reduces the chance that magic-based spells will take effect on you. Keep these up all the time. Magic resistance saves you from your own mezzes. It also saves your puller from Fear and Root. Only if you are certain that your group will face no casters should you stop giving magic resistance to the other members of your group.
The Rune spells have a very long duration, but take a gem component. Rune spells can be used to compensate for bad healers, but it's a pretty expensive solution to the problem. It's much nicer to find a better healer.
The Berserk spells last only a few minutes and they also raise STR and lower AGI. Don't fret about the lowered AC from your reduced AGI since the damage you take is being absorbed anyhow. These spells are very useful when you are grouped with tanks and have no healing at all. Between Berserk and bandages, you should be able to fight nearly continously.
The pure haste line raises attack speed with no other effect.
The Augmentation line raises attack speed less than the pure haste line, but also raises AGI and regenerates stamina.
You should keep your best haste spell on the tanks at all times. Make them tell you when it wears off, since the spells are generally too mana intensive to cast on yourself for timing.
Illusions change your external appearance to other players. They also change your apparent race to NPCs, which affects their reactions to you. It is possible to travel many places under illusion where you would be slain instantly in your normal form. There are a few cautions though:
Some illusions let you get spell effects without a component, which is very handy when you are recovering your corpse and without any spell components at all. Some effects can only be achieved by illusion.
| Air Elemental | levitation |
| Water Elemental | water breathing - has the advantage that it warns you before it drops |
| Fire Elemental | damage shield (9-16 points) |
| Earth Elemental | +10 strength |
| Imp | +15 fire resistance, levitation |
| Boon of the Garou | life tap proc, +100 DEX - good for skill gain. This illusion spell can be cast on others. |
| Trickster's Augmentation | aggro proc, +30 fire resistance, levitation. This illusion spell can be cast on others. |
| Drybone Skeleton | +25 fire resistance |
| Skeleton | some creatures are friendlier with skeletons than other forms |
| Minor Illusion | neutral faction with many normally hostile NPCs |
| Gnome | shrink - auto target on short creatures works better if you are short, and gnomes can fit through things that other races can't |
| Troll | tiny regeneration effect, +1 hp/tick |
| Dark Elf | ultravision |
All illusions have a duration of roughly half an hour, except for Boon of the Garou. Boon of the Garou lasts for six minutes and takes three minutes to refresh (which we call a three minute "hold time"). If you are going to keep Boon of the Garou on someone, you will have to devote a spell slot to it.
The animations are your pets. They are stupid and don't take commands like other pets. For charmed pets, you will need the full set of commands and practice using them, but the animations pay no heed to such things. An animation will attack anything that attacks it or you and it will keep attacking until it is dead or its target is dead.
For this reason, animations interact very badly with mezzing. You can use memory blur to make your pet forget that it is mad at something, but it is nearly impossible to get it off a target once it is hitting it.
Each spell gives you a pet within a small range of levels. For the most part, the pets range from green to blue when you first get them and are all green by the time you get the next pet. At certain levels, they gain new abilities: Double Attack, Dual Wield, Bash, etc. Your pet will not Dual Wield unless you give them a weapon, but it only takes one since they come with one weapon.
Reclaim Energy kills your pet and returns you some of the mana you used to cast it. This is a useful spell when you are trying for a pet at the high end of the level range. It does not return your tiny daggers.
Summon Companion calls your pet to your side from wherever it has run off to. The spell will not work if your pet is aggroed on anything or in combat.
These metal enchantments turn an unenchanted bar of metal into an enchanted one for Jewelcraft.
This spell turns a block of clay into an enchanted block of clay for Pottery.
These enchantments turn an unenchanted brick of ore into an enchanted brick of ore for cultural Smithing.
These enchantments summon a vial of mana of some description. The spells require a lined vial and a gem or gems. The resulting vials of mana are used for Tailoring and possibly other crafts.
Gate transports you to your home point. Bind Affinity sets your home point to your current location. You can cast Bind Affinity on others, but only within town zones and a few specific other locations.
Invisibility hides you from most creatures and players, other than undead and creatures with the innate ability to see invisible things, such as giants. See Invisible allows you to see players or creatures that are Invisible.
Invisibility vs. Undead hides you from the undead, such as ghosts and skeletons. You cannot have both regular Invisibility and Invisibility vs. Undead at the same time.
If you are attacked while invisible or if you enter attack mode or cast a spell of any kind, you will become visible. Invisibility also has a chance to drop before its duration has expired. When this happens, the icon will not blink, but you will get a message that you are about to become visible. You have about five seconds to find a safe spot when you see that message.
Improved Invisibility can only be cast on yourself, but it never drops early. It is still broken by attacks or spell casting.
Strengthen increases your STR by 10, which can help with encumbrance.
Enduring Breath lets you breathe underwater; it takes a fish scale. Levitate lets you walk on water or float down safely from heights; it takes a bat wing. If you are short on fish scales or bat wings, use Water or Air Elemental Illusion on yourself instead. The Enduring Breath and Levitate spells will hold across zone boundaries and can be cast on others, so they do have some benefits over the elemental forms. Also, the elementals are regarded with hostility by many creatures in Norrath, particularly town guards. With Luclin, upgrades to Levitate and Enduring Breath were added that do not take components. Levitation and Everlasting Breath are difficult to find, but very handy if you can get them.
Feedback gives the target an 11 point damage shield. This is pretty nice when you get it, but becomes relatively useless later on.
These spells replenish stamina. Pretend you don't have them, since you will rarely have the spell slots, mana or attention to spare to cast them.
True North points you to face due North. It's main purpose is to practice Divination skill, but it may have some application to navigating if you don't have a good Sense Heading skill.
Sentinel is intended to warn you when a creature is approaching an area, but in practice it just causes spam and sparkles. Casting Sentinel in a crowded area can cause people or whole zones to crash, so it is generally considered antisocial. It might even get you petitioned.
Identify returns additional Lore information about an item held on your cursor. You can cast it on others, but only they receive the information.
These spells give the target night vision, either red tinted infravision from Serpent Sight or a somewhat brighter, blue tinted Ultravision. If you are night blind, you can use illusions to give yourself night vision. If infravision is not adequate, try turning up your monitor brightness; it should be plenty.
These spells change your camera to the view point of the target. The later ones add infravision and ultravision. In principle, you should be able to use them to see what your puller is doing. They all make me really queasy, so I don't use them much.
Keep your Defense skill maxed! At any given moment, you don't
want to be getting hit. However, in the long run, you will want to
have been swung at a fair amount, because that is the only way to
practice Defense. The longer you go, the harder it is to raise,
because the only way to practice is to be hit by things that con light
blue or better. When you get Dodge at level 22, you will practice
that as you practice Defense.
The maximum value for Defense is
(Level + 5) * 3.
The rest of your combat skills are not generally important to an
enchanter; you will not be swinging a weapong to any great effect
after about level 16. It's fun to keep them all maxed, but it won't
really affect your performance in the long run.
The maximum value for Offense is (Level) * 4.
The maximum value for weapon skills is (Level + 1) * 3.
Sense Heading and Swimming are general skills that are useful to
have. The easiest way to practice Sense Heading is to put it in a hot
key and bind that hot key to a commonly used key, such as the key you
use to walk forward. Every time you walk forward, you will practice
the skill, so you should be at max value in no time. Swimming can
only be practiced by doing it, so step in every pool you find. Spend
some time dipping in the nearest ocean or lake whenever you can manage
it.
The maximum value for these skills is (Level + 1) * 5.
You will get some specialization skill in each of your five schools of magic. When you put one point into the skill at level 20, you will begin with a skill of 20. The first of the five skills to break 50 will be allowed to reach 200; the rest will be capped at 50. No skill will be able to break 50 until you have trained all five skills. The skill that breaks 50 is called your Primary Specialization. It is possible to change your primary specialization after this, through a quest in the Temple of Ro, but it's very tedious and costs a ruby, so you are better off choosing the right one first. Here are the five schools ranked in the order I would choose them for primary specialization:
| Alteration | Clarity, Haste, Charm, Slow, Root, Enchantments, Damage over Time, Berserk, Mind Buffs, Debuffs |
| Conjuration | Mesmerization, Animations |
| Divination | Color Stuns, Illusions, Invisibility |
| Abjuration | Shielding, Resist Magic, Rune, Tash |
| Evocation | Direct Damage |
It has been my experience that I spend most of my mana casting Alteration spells at all levels. Haste and slow both use a huge amount of mana. Keeping Clarity and other desirable buffs on a group can consume a large amount of mana as well. This mana is not normally spent during combat, but it will affect your overall performance. If you have to spend a lot of mana buffing, you will have to wait longer to be ready for a combat or you will have less mana going into the combat.
My advice to an enchanter considering their specialization is to choose Alteration. Your Alteration skill will rise so much faster than the rest that it is safe to put a single training point into all five skills as soon as you reach level 20. Your Alteration skill will probably hit 51 and be locked in before any of the others hit 40.
Some people prefer to specialize in Conjuration. The reasoning is that the mana you spend on Conjuration spells is spent at critical times. When you are casting a mez, you really want it to happen NOW. Also, there can be battles that rage so severely that you can actually run yourself from full mana to empty, casting only mesmerization spells.
This is the spell book layout I use:
This command opens up the spell book to page 9. On the same hotkey panel, I have shortcuts to all of the major offensive spells and buffs in slots 1-6. I put illusions, enchantments and the twink spells page shortcuts in 7-10 since you can't see the labels on those when you are in the spell book. You can still use the hot keys even when you can't see them, but I don't want anything to slow me down when swapping spells in combat. So, with two key presses, I can select that panel, select my spell book page, and be looking at the spells I want to memorize.
In general, you probably won't keep a buff memorized unless it has an extremely short duration, like Feedback or Boon of the Garou. When buffing your group, you will want to memorize each spell, cast it on everyone who needs it, and then forget the spell. It might seem that you are wasting mana by refreshing a buff long before it is going to wear off, but it will make your life a lot easier if you don't have to memorize all your buffs again for each person.
I always keep one AE stun and one AE mez handy. Those two spells can thwart a disaster instantly. You will feel really silly if you get annihilated by a train that you could have stopped if you had kept those spells up. Alternatively, you can keep two stuns up and memorize AE mez between casts if you need it.
If you have a shaman in the group or if you are fighting extremely weak creatures, slow is unnecessary. Otherwise you should expect to keep it memorized and cast it on almost everything.
Depending on what kind of foes we are tackling, I may replace the second stun and the slow with other spells. Sometimes I remove Theft of Thought if I know I will not be facing casters. Generally I will choose the replacements from the following:
Root is very nice for nailing down mezzed creatures so that they don't charge you when they wake up. It's also utterly necessary if you are fighting in a group with no taunting fighter. Rooting the creature in place while everyone else kills it allows you to sit and regain mana much sooner.
Berserk (or Rune if you are rich) is nice to have if your healer is not prompt about healing you. It's necessary if your group has no healer. If you can afford the mana, keeping some kind of rune spell on yourself will help you channel spells, because you don't take any damage until it wears off.
Charm is a great solution for unmezzable creatures. There are whole strategies based on Charm, so I'll talk about it in its own section.
When you are fighting for a long time in a place where mez is useless, your entire spell lineup will probably change. Giants and dragons are immune to mez, so charm and root become a lot more important. When fighting such creatures, I replace all of the mezzes and stuns with charm, dispel, root, and mana stealing spells.
When you die, think about what happened. If you find yourself dying with tons of mana left because the cleric couldn't heal you fast enough, consider some +HP items. If you find that you run out of mana and the situation gets away from you, consider +Int and +Mana items. If you are getting blown up by wizards or stunned and rooted by clerics, work on your resistances; resistances are relatively easy to raise and very effective. If you are having a terrible time with mez resists, even after Tash, you might consider raising your charisma, but raising your HP is often a better choice. You will have mez resists, no matter what your charisma is, but more HP will help you survive them.
It is very hard to raise your AC to a level where it will do you any good at all, but it is not impossible. For any given creature, there is a wide range of AC values where your armor is irrelevant; the creature will hit for maximum damage nearly every time. Then, there is a small range over which increasing your AC substantially reduces the damage you take. Then it levels off again into a realm where you have achieved as much as you can with your armor. With effort and sacrifice, you can eventually get high AC items that will help you survive combat. You will only really see an effect when you are being pounded by things that con blue to you, but that becomes more common as you gain levels. In melée, it is better to reduce the damage you take by 10% than it is to raise your HP total by 10%, because you require less healing and your spells are interrupted slightly less often. However, don't take that logic to extremes because you will also face casters that don't care what your AC is.
Raising your Intelligence (Int) gives you mana in proportion to your level. As described with the Int/Wis buffs, each point of Int up to 200 gives you Level/5 points of mana, each point of Int from 200 to 255 gives you Level/10 points of mana. So, at level 60, you will get 12 mana for every Int up to 200 and 6 mana for every Int after 200. For example, if you were to choose between a bracelet that gave you 15 mana and a bracelet that gave you 3 Int, the 15 mana bracelet would be preferable until level 25. If your Int were already at 200, then the 15 mana would be preferable until level 50.
Intelligence has a small benefit beyond merely giving you mana. It also affects the rate at which you learn non-combat skills. This is actually governed by the larger of Int and Wis, but as an enchanter, your Int will be larger. This is most important for craft skills, so you may want to hold onto your Int items for crafting.
Charisma (Cha) has a barely measurable effect on resist rates for Charm and Mez spells. Counted as a fraction of all casts, it is not worth mentioning, but counted as a percentage reduction in resists, it is noticeable. You should make your own decision about how much you value Charisma. My advice would be to consider it a nice bonus on an item, better than Dexterity or Wisdom, but not something that is worth sacrificing other useful stats for. The line of Charisma buffs is quite powerful and will probably be adequate to keep your Charisma at a reasonable level.
Stamina contributes moderately to your hit point total. At level 60, you get about 2.25 hit points per point of Stamina, and it varies linearly by level. At 40, you get about 1.5 hit points per Stamina and at 20 you get about 0.75 hit points per Stamina.
Agility contributes to your total AC in a very minor way. Each point of Agility gives you only about 0.2 points of total AC. By contrast, each point of raw AC on an item gives you about 1.2 points of total AC. Relatively large changes in Agility are barely noticeable, so don't give up much to get Agility.
The other stats have no appreciable effect. Strength will affect how much you can carry without being slowed down. Dexterity will affect how quickly you raise your combat skills, so get it buffed when you are working on your Defense. Wisdom does absolutely nothing for you.