Why not a little bit of compromise for dirge? It had one job - farm destruction glyphs so we weren't useless on raids DPSwise (ie might as well just afk and autofollow your boxed DPS). We were the only class that could go out and get 6 of them before raids so we'd at least do half the damage monks are doing. And this was every other, or every few bosses since it would still take our mana pool. How about a compromise? Make it cost less mana so we can actually use it more, or make it unresistable. Putting harmony and chaos chant on, then blowing your entire mana bar into Mata Marum, while hes weakened, and only doing 10k worth of dirge damage because 90% of them were resists or partial resists sucks. It's basically our ult bar if this were any other game. We get one big explosion chain then med for 40 minutes. It was a discipline if anything. And with all that power, we still did 200k while monks do 500k. Are bards just meant to be boxed? Luckily I leveled a monk the other day to 70 before the nerf so it's an option for me. Sucks for the rest of the bardos though. I actually don't mind the nerf as a concept, since it will force me to group more which is good for the game. But now the class is basically a buff box on raids. It went from a viable utility DPS thanks to destruction glyphs, to just play haste/mana and be quiet. If dirge were unresistable or cost less mana so you could use it on every fight, it would balance things out. We don't need to AOE zones, but you gutted the one thing that made us have even a reasonable amount of DPS on raids.
Just curious, but what about this change actually stops bards from pulling whole zones, causing lag and rubber banding?
Incentive stops them. Now there is no incentive to do so, other than being spiteful for being inconsiderate in the first place. Now that it's too late, another option would be giving all mobs the ability to summon from 100% life if Player has threat on more than 12 mobs. This could also kill training guilds. (12 mobs would still wipe most groups)
much needed change on your stupid TLP server....... not on real servers. People being stupid on TLP servers are getting far to much stuff nerfed on Live servers. PLEASE come up with a way to nerf just TLP servers without effecting the rest of us.
Im not sure why its an issue, Surely noone feels like swarm kiting 50 mobs is a reasonable game stay and in anyway was intended.
Keep up the great work Daybreak and hopefully EQ will turn out as awesome as H1Z1 did with all the great changes!
Doing that will make people get randomly murdered when mobs port themselves across the zone, will make Powerleveling alts significantly slower, and would make farming tradeskill materials even more of a chore.. Emergent gameplay is a thing, the good game companies tend to encourage it, not go out of their way to nerf anything that isn't the one "correct" way to do things.
The worst part is that a lot of the recent changes like this and riposte changes seem to be linked to DBG downgrading the hardware for the game. Can’t merge servers, can’t provide hardware that actually lets people play the game. Fix it DBG. Stop being cheap. Riposte was just fine for twenty years. Unless you are actively trying to drive players away?
They have a way to do it, but have already stated they won't do that because it would require them to maintain two different versions of the game code-base. Too much work for their skeleton crew.
I came to Agnarr for the nostalgia and to see the things I missed in era when I played back in the day. After seeing and doing everything I wanted to, I stayed because I was having fun. Dirge was fun. I'm not sure if Dirge was it's own problem or if it was just lumped in with Vanglorious Shout but I've never seen any real complaints about it, at least regarding Agnarr. It only ever worked in a limited number of situations, generally out of the way, and it's pretty hard to disrupt other players when there basically are none. I Dirged from time to time when the option was there, but I always knew I could accomplish the same thing with other classes. Farming could be done more consistently and xp was faster just grouping in Fire or Paw. I just enjoyed being able to do it on my bard because my bard was my main. All the time I put in and all the gear I got just seems like a waste now. It seems like everything a bard can do needs to be nerfed down into two categories: things other classes can do better, or things a half-naked box can do while on auto follow. Some people complain you shouldn't be able to swarm large numbers because they can't, but what always made EQ great was the unique emergent gameplay that it allowed. If it's not hurting others and the results are in line with what other classes are capable of, what's the problem? Not everyone enjoys being forced to sit in a static tank-n-spank group for hours on end... that's one option but shouldn't be the only one. It's just frustrating to see something unique and fun taken away without knowing why. If there was a real problem with Dirge maybe there was another way it could have been fixed.
As much as I hate seeing a play style being nerfed, this was obviously "clever use of game mechanics". I have a Bard alt, and it was very handy when farming tradeskill mats, but I don't get the logic of "Class XYZ should be able to kill 6+ Even Con Monsters, Solo, all at the same time" When has this ever been *intended* gameplay in EverQuest? This isn't Diablo or PoE.
On Agnarr you could not solo even cons with Dirge. Not even dark blues unless you got lucky crits and no resists. Then you had to med for 40 minutes. The results were in no way out of line with other methods of killing for xp or farming mats. Please describe for everyone what you think "intended" gameplay is in Everquest. I'd like to know how I'm supposed to play and enjoy the game.
As a bard who dirged the hell out of absolutely everything, leveling 5 boxes to 1-70 in a day each with 200-300 aa on all of those, it was definitely a stupid and overpowered mechanic. I am not at all surprised that it got nerfed on the power alone. The detriment on the zones it was being done in was the big issue though. Selos doesn't have a lot of bards doing it, but I can definitely guarantee it shut the zone down for 10-20 minutes depending on how long the pull took, rounding up C2 of fire then taking it to the field and pulling more between the bosses took ages. I found a way to "fix" the lag (dirge the pull periodically and they all stop lagging so you can pull more) but no one else would do it when I told them to. I once saw a bard in Nadox take a whopping 30 minutes. I even sent him a tell saying they are going to nerf this if he keeps taking forever, and here it is. I can't imagine how bad it is on other servers with tons of bards doing it. Zones would be all but disabled every time there was a kiteable pop. I want to be able to farm 80 AA a pull so I can get a full set of destruction runes an hour before raids, but that just wasn't realistic. It would be nice if they'd give us some other way to do more DPS on raids though now to make up for it. .
Denon's Desperate Dirge and many other "green gem" AOE spells are supposed to hit 4 targets based around your current target. That's the way the spells functioned (the intended way) for about 18 years. They broke something either last year or the one before that which made the 4 target limit no longer be applied which led to bards being able to mass swarm again after they went out of their way to nerf it in the past with AE dot songs. You can still charm-kite packs of mobs and it's pretty great.
Wonder why they don't invest the time to figure out why Targeted AE's are hitting everything instead of just the 4 targets that they were capped at for years.
