we had visible proof of mana regen effects on dicho when it was unnerfed seeing a mana bar go from zero to 1/2 to 1/3 full was really great as a bard now its just moving 1% What you fail to grasp is that we lost a major role with this ability nerf. If they left us alone id agree yes we had other things to compensate for lack of dps now not so much. It sucks when i get asked now ingroup to refill mana stam and be like oh sorry cant do that any more.... if i cant contribute like i did on others dps or extended burns then id like to be able to increase my own burns more.
I guess I was unclear on my stance and it really holds true for all classes. Instead of asking for a boost in one area that your class is not really suppose to be great in you should ask for boosts in areas that relate to your class identity. In this case bards are the ultimate support class. If they are no longer providing viable support to a group then bards should be calling for improvements in these areas instead of trying to be like every other slasher class. Honestly it would be nice to see actual instruments make a return to the game for bards that provide significant boosts to bard songs. This would provide a little more complexity to the class in terms of instrument choice based on songs being played vs using weapons and slashing. I think this has been one of the biggest flaws with the overall development of the game though. There are abilities that are not even taken into consideration when new content is released. For example when is the last time a rogue actually had to pick a lock to get a group or raid force into an area or sneak past mobs in a raid zone dragging a mage corpse so they could use a rez token on them and coth people to a safe area. We should all advocate for improvements to what seperates our classes instead of trying to be more like the other guy and ask the devs to make content that actually makes every class matter.
I get what you are saying Aurastrider but here's the thing. Bards week always able to contribute some dps, it was never a ton or anything, but over the course of time mobs hp and other classes dps has raised exponentially meanwhile bards dps has been stagnant for many years. Meaning that if at one time they were 50% of a dps, in today's game they might be less than 10%. It's not unreasonable to ask to be kept in line with all the other classes, or to maintain your relative position as it was in years past.
this is it exactly it as % of overall dps our overall contribution dropped they the developers tried to focus us on our support role as mana end battery with dicho. Then did a 180 withour really giving us anything meaningful to replace it. Bards use to dps better as the % of mobs hp increased all other class dps increased at a rate that was a in line % based on the mobs hitpoints. This is also true of bard tanking ability where we were ok oh crap tanks for a few minutes when real tanks died. Again mob dps increased past our tanking ability. Like you said ask for whats normally in line for our class we did even giving feedback on how to give us back a reasonable replacement to dicho that would be scale-able and better implemented as a duration proc tap ability It was ignored we got zero feedback thats why we are asking for DPS. Its a easier fix for them as they dont seem to want to give us bards back our mana end regen role. I dont understand why when many classes still have there own regen effects that were close to what ours did. Wizards harvest berserkers blood pact thing sham canni necros have one iirc ... If they had a problem with the stacking they could have done a better fix.
It doesn't show. They're invited in a group as a support, not whatever fancy definition you give them. If they're so bad in dps that you better invite another dps instead, there's a problem.
It may be interesting to see parses from Aurastrider or general dps numbers that his mind has in this area. That might help to illuminate where he's coming from for better or for worse.
well lets get one thing out of the way "Bards are jack-of-all-trades adventurers who use music to create a wide variety of magic effects. Though they often use melee weapons, bards are primarily a magic-using class, with the ability to wear plate armor and wield many different types of weapons and instruments. Bards can do a little bit of everything. Their songs can regenerate health and mana, increase attack speed and accuracy, momentarily charm angry enemies, help friends resist many types of damage, and even directly damage enemies. Bards are perhaps best known, however, for their ability to greatly increase the foot speed of their group." that is the direct class description which is basically what I summed up in a sentence. No fancy definitions here. I don't know if I am being clear and obviously you have this watered down idea that there should really only be the 3 primary roles in a group and that's all that matters. If that's really what EQ has come to without any sense of class identity than that's pretty sad. I have said bard dps is horrible. Also as a plate wearing class they take damage way to easy. So lets say they increase a bards dps. Is this going to be enough to make bards happy? I mean honestly to what degree are they going to have to increase it before people don't complain? Some people above have mention a % increase like the other classes get as the mobs scale and their HP increase. I don't object to the idea but what I am saying is the primary focus should be on what a bard is suppose to be great at and that is support. They really are the ultimate support class that makes everyone else shine. If they lack at doing this the devs need to fix that first to make them useful at what they do best and then they can look at increasing dps, ability to tank and so forth. But why not just increase dps now and fix the other things later? This is how you end up getting nerfed in the first place. Either they never fix what a bard is intended to be and they go in a totally different direction or once they fix those things they start scaling back because other classes complain that one class can pull, boost everyones dps and do the same amount of dps as them. I guess the fact that I am thinking in terms of long term class stability and preventing the nerf bat from ever coming out of the closet makes me out of touch with the game.
This is the problem they dont have anyone left to fix update create or improve bard songs 99% of our upgrades for the last 7 expansions have been cut past with numbers tweaked slightly.. Most of our good songs were never upgraded past level 90's Our charms are capped at level 103 chanters at 104 99.999999% of mobs in eok are higher than 105. We have been promised a balance upgrade going on 5+ years now that never got implemented because at the time they didn't want to to go over or redo bard code... That was before most of the programmers left.... See the problem now because they kept back burnering the issue so long now they dont have the staff to really do it now. Its why we want a quick fix on dps thats not related to bard code. stuff can be easily cut and pasted from the aa list.
compare enchanters (essentially the caster version of a bard) to a bard since you don't want to separate roles into 3 groups. notice any disparity?
Bards are kind of stuck right now due to a few issues: They have a reputation of being extremely powerful If bard ADPS increases, other classes might become unbalanced Other classes don't want to be reliant on bards to perform at their best Over time, bard ADPS has stagnated and other classes have gained abilities that make it less important to have a bard. I enjoy trying to parse well on my bard in a raid, and I know how it feels to not have the right ADPS in my group. If I don't have a BST, BER, RNG, SHM it makes a noticeable difference in my DPS. At the end of the raid, when you see the parse, people have strong feelings about how they place. It sucks to rely on ADPS classes to do well, because your overall performance is not as good without a specific group makeup and without having support who coordinate effectively. That being said, ADPS classes need to be desirable in their own right. What makes EQ a multiplayer game is going out and needing a healer, needing a tank, needing other classes to get things done - including, needing ADPS classes to do your best personal DPS. Bards do not generally get improvements to out ADPS abilities. If you look at our AA and songs from EoK, none of them are improvements to ADPS. The only personal DPS upgrades we got were from archetype AA (like Burst of Power). In past expansions, when we have gotten upgrades to ADPS, they tend to be very small (for example, Aria usually gets a 0-1% upgrade in spell damage focus), or an increase to sustained (such as hastening of discs without increasing their % mods). Over time, this has resulted in stagnation of bard ADPS. The common belief is that because bard ADPS is a % mod, every time anyone else gets an upgrade to DPS, it indirectly improves bard ADPS. I made a graph (made up numbers) as an example of what I'm talking about - - Bard (base dmg 25k DPS), gives 33% ADPS, gets 2.5% upgrade in a new expansion.- Other DPS class (base dmg 100k DPS), gets a 10% upgrade in a new expansion. Bards contribute more ADPS when other DPS classes get upgraded (as long as those upgrades stack with current bard abilities), but the bard class itself hasn't changed very much. Over time, the disparity between bards and other classes increases, and it becomes more and more unbalancing for bards to get an upgrade at all. That is why this thread is talking about adding personal DPS for bards instead of ADPS, because we ask for ADPS increases every year and get very small upgrades, if any. The lack of bard personal DPS has gotten to the point where, without grouping with a powerful DPS class, bards are immensely behind. On the other hand, if a DPS class groups without a bard, they still have a decent amount of power. I'm intimately familiar with this situation personally, as I box a cleric and bard (two of the lowest DPS classes). I don't think bards need to be as good DPS as other DPS classes, but they do need to be getting upgrades along with other classes - we need to be relevant without the support of DPS classes, just like DPS classes are still relevant without bards.
I think your numbers illustrate another point, and I think realistic numbers are important here. A friend showed me this concept on raid setups a while back, and it's really something to think about. Let's say hypothetically a bard adds 18k dps to others. I think the adps you're listing is a bit more like all of the adps in a group. Even if a bard added 18k dps per person, that's significant, right? In a group with 1 melee they can really tailor what they do to that melee, so it can be a bit more to be fair, but how much do they add to every single melee in the group vs what that melee can contribute without a bard? This is the important number when considering bard adps. I think what they add is closer to that. If I'm right though, there is a problem with this. If a bard does 33k and adds 18k a person, then in a group they are adding 72k adps + their own 33k dps. That is 105k dps. If the average melee does 100k dps, then consider this scenario: you have a group of a shaman and 5 melee at 100k dps, or you have a group of a shaman, a bard, and 4 melee. While everyone is alive, this group has 400k dps + 105k dps + shaman. The non bard group has 5k less dps. So it's beneficial to have a bard right? But what if anyone in the group dies? If the bard dies, you lost 105k dps. But if any other melee dies, you lose 100k + 18k. You lost 118k dps vs just 100. So: all melee group: 1 melee death: 400k dps. Bard melee group: 1 melee death: 400k dps if bard died, 387k dps if other melee dies. all melee group: 2 melee death: 300k dps. Bard melee group: 2 melee death: 300k dps if bard was one of deaths, 269k if other melees died. As things get worse, your dps can lower drastically more than what you would gain for that risk. And you know how the deaths are commonly distributed. Usually it's the melee that would benefit the most from adps.. That's why either the bard has to have very high adps, or they have to have reasonable adps and deal some decent level of damage themselves. So that in mind, how much adps do bards really contribute?
This thread needs some straight up Bard parses at 105. People don't understand exactly how low they are. As a level 93 Monk I could match the DPS of a 105 Bard in my group. I was using abilities, but not discs, the Bard was auto-attacking. We were both ~16k DPS. That same bard could do ~24k DPS with a Shaman in group and doing more active stuff. I don't know if doubling that would be too much, but it seems like too little the way it is now. I'm not an expert on parses or achieving max DPS, but somebody around here probably is.
Selos Kick is more like Selos Cuddle, used on recast is like lol maybe 1000dps. Lyrical Prankster on recast (120s) and the Song of stone (7min) with extended swarm maxed is like 800 dps sustained on a combine. So basically they don't. Could throw insults in but you will gradually go OOM. So not sustainable either.
Selo's Kick is over 15k dps for the duration of Frenzied+1kBlades. It's less outside that minute, but if you're just getting "lol maybe 1000dps" instead of 3k, you're … not doing something right. The numbers for pets, too, are so wrong that it feels like misinformation instead of a mistake. I've a dummy pumped up to 4209ac (so, like, raid armor) in my hall, Prankster is 3.5k dps even without mage aura. Song of Stone is the same total damage per click of the button, but 1/3 the sustained due to cooldown. Could skip throwing Insults in, but you will immediately stop benefiting from Troubadour's Synergy, besides the dps loss. I dislike the growing feeling that this thread is actually "/melodybots DPS increase required". The actual class maybe needs a something, but bull****ing low numbers where existing abilities aren't used doesn't help get there.
Maybe battle leap is a bad idea then, and they should get discs that require more effort to use, but give them some %damage modifier, or are just a bit stronger in general.
