Make Bards Fun Again...

Discussion in 'Hybrid' started by Zenja, Jan 27, 2020.

  1. Hellowhatsyourname Augur

    Let's shift this over to the class forum, since it clearly is entirely 100% focused on bards.
  2. ptah Augur

    As a bard main, i got disagree with OP 100%. From my POV I bard, am here to make others better, then after than I make monsters die.

    If the style needs this or that I adjust. That is what makes being a bard different, you adjust as needed to event, mob, day or night, we answer the bell. If mashing a bind over and over is fun.. there are classes that do that 1 or 2 trick very well.

    The game is much more than exploitive PL or 2% narrow view of years gone passed.

    With bigtime groups pushing burns higher and higher.. its still an adps support role and dot if pure dps suck. We simply adjust to what is needed to crush. And crush we do. I need more mana regen i need more regen, more powa.. she wants more that 17 mins of funtime.

    enjoy your day.

    AE snare and target flops if wish kite more than 1.. its pretty basic, welcome back OP.. study and learn all that you can.. there are options.
    Elyssanda and code-zero like this.
  3. Cloud the Third Augur

    Honestly wish they would get rid of all req / rec levels from items level 85 and under. I love twinking and solo leveling back up. I do it all the time for fun. There is no real reason why you could solo level to 85 with level 85 gear on. Sure you would be slaughtering mobs like crazy but does it really hurt anything? Most people just use the instant level 85 for a new toon because unless you are PLing there is not enough low level people to play unless you are on a TLP server.
    Waitwhat likes this.
  4. code-zero Augur

    They made the changes to Bard AE DoT's for the same reason that they later set a maximum number of 8 for Wizard beam DD and a host of other changes down the line.

    Sure it may have been fun to do that but it did in fact affect other players when it resulted in massive lag and even server crashes.
  5. Cloud the Third Augur

    It had nothing to do with lag and server crashes. It had to do with going to old world zones and aeing to farm trade skill drops fast. There is really no other reason to really ae any zone with that many mobs that would give exp (maybe a handful of raids where you have more than 8 mobs at once that aren't mezed and you want to ae but not many). Maybe ae slow for bards to hold aggro while the twink used monkey sticks but outside that no real reason to use it in the latest 3-5 expansions.
  6. Hellowhatsyourname Augur


    You are mistaken. In both instances (bards and beam casters) toons were using those abilities to farm exp in massive quantities in current or nearly current content. Icefall was popular, iirc. It had nothing to do with trade-skill materials.
    code-zero likes this.
  7. Bobbybick Only Banned Twice

    I mean if you REALLY want to quad kite, you can use Denons. It's literally what it's there for.
    code-zero likes this.
  8. code-zero Augur

    I played a bard right through that era and I can't recall at the moment the Luclin zone but literally all the mobs froze several times and then there was a mass dying with dozens of corpses warping back to their spawn point and my level jumping up 2 or 3 at a time


    Hehe yeah I had a wizard, well still do, that I leveled like crazy beaming in Icefall. Nothing like running blind using to map to guess where the mobs were
  9. Cloud the Third Augur

    Personally I love the new expansion, here is a combine of the clear of all 3 ToV T1 raids (sadly I did die while pulling one of the giants that roots you during the GD raid so that did hurt my dps a little)

    All Raids + Trash T1 ToV in 4993s, 30,470.5m @6102639
    #1 Rogue 1,409.7m@282.3k
    #2 Mage 1,393.0m@279.0k
    #3 Necromancer 1,204.7m@241.3k {X}
    #4 Cloud + pets 1,152.9m@230.9k
    #5 Berserker 1,121.0m@224.5k
    #6 Bard 1,040.2m@208.3k
    #7 Beastlord 934.5m@187.2k {XXXXX}
    #8 Wizard 907.1m@181.7k {M}
    #9 Rogue 905.9m@181.4k
    #10 Mage 900.0m@180.2k {X}
    code-zero likes this.
  10. Cloud the Third Augur

    That had nothing to do with bards but when luclin came out there were alot of issues.
  11. 666DPSweDeliver Augur



    Not to burst your bubble, but you are near the top of the parse because everyone else below you is sucking bad. Wizards, necros, zerkers, rogues, monks, mages, and beasties all should be blowing you out of the water, its not even close.
    Skuz and Waitwhat like this.
  12. Cloud the Third Augur

    This is totally true but I am not comparing it to the best guilds (we were probably top 3 game wide at one point but far extremely far from it now) I am comparing it to previous expansion parses and where we are at now. Sure if you go to the best guilds in the game I would probably not be at that same location (heck I didn't start playing again until TBL was halfway over so I don't even have near best TBL gear) but when you go from moving up from in the 20s to below 10 with the same group of people it matters how much they increased our dps.
  13. Herf Augur

    Bard nerfing in game is just mirroring the RL downtrend in quality singers and musicians ;)
    Funky and Chorus like this.
  14. Taffer New Member

    Doesn't Denon's have a massively short radius? Even with a good connection I don't think that would work well for exp because the slightest hiccup and you're hit and dead. I've not really tried it so my info may be 100% incorrect.

    I started in game before almost literally anybody else. I started with the first 200 alpha testers and the game was a blast with the errors they were still hilarious! This was weeks or months before the closed beta testing, then the open beta testing to stress test the servers. Alpha was a trip though. Self-buffing near a guard was a no-no because casting on a character was assumed to be an attack on another player and guards would instantly attack anybody casting a spell on a character near them - even casting buffs on yourself. The game didn't know the difference between attacking another person versus self-buffing. Snakes could kick (I think they left that in for the fun of it), sharks and water creatures that should be bound to the water would chase you out of the water across dry land, if you didn't loot your corpse in 30 minutes it decayed with all of the gear and cash on it, and two people fighting and both had a damage shield that inflicted damage when they were hit...one shield would proc the second shield and it was considered a hit, so the other shield proc'd back. It caused rolling battle spam of damage shields until someone died, and melee and spells didn't do much compared to the damage shield loop. Quest characters would respond something like, "Quest 18496 text to go here".

    So I can see both sides. It was fun to be able to AE kite. I saw a lot of people doing it but my connection wasn't good enough to allow me to take advantage of it. I'd get going with a very small group and get a few kills, then there would be a short lag spike and by the time it recovered, I was dead and running back from my bind point to recover my corpse, so I wasn't making EXP as fast as I was losing it. Some bards would be reasonable and pull smallish groups and kite them down. Others would quite literally train an entire zone with hundreds of mobs and that much particle effect would crash people left and right or lag them horribly, and it would leave the zone empty until either the AE kiting killed everything, or the bard died and everything slowly wandered back to their spawn points, or ran back across players that the bard trained the MOBs past adding them to the hate list en mass resulting in massive slaughter. It was tons of fun for the bard, but that one bard could literally ruin a zone for dozens of parties trying to get experience or items for crafting or whatnot. And if that bard killed the entire zone, they would often loot, go sell, then come back and steal every mob in the zone again for another round of exp/loot at the expense of everybody else in the zone. It was great fun for the bard, but not so much for everybody else. That one bard would own almost the entire zone forcing people to go to lesser zones to try to have their fun. Goodness forbid if that zone or the next was also being AE farmed. That happened to me more than once. So you run away to a dungeon since you can't AE kite in most dungeons, but back then trying to find a place to camp with the number of people in game could take hours by the time to go from zone to zone to dungeon to find a fun place to play. All ruined by a bard or wizard kiting tons of mobs...so although it was great fun, it was detrimental to the game for most others. Granted, not every bard was a jerk like that, but there were enough on my server that it was worth nerfing.

    I don't see the programmers taking the time to give that kind of power back to a class, no matter how much fun it was. Would I like to see that happen? Yes, on a limited extent, such as up to level 60 or 70 maybe, or only in zones with <4 people so they are not ruining others fun, but I don't think with the amount of things the programmers have to deal with that they will go back to allowing bards that kind of power.

    So I came across this thread while trying to find info on a good set of songs to twist at level 65. Songs have changed some, and I've forgotten the rest. Good to hear that bards are still in demand though and rocking (no pun intended). Any good links to good bard info for someone that has been gone so long they are essentially a newb again?
    Sirene_Fippy likes this.
  15. Cloud the Third Augur

    AE kiting I could care less about because one second of lag and you are dead and wasted a ton of time but I always like to swarm (charm and sending it into a pack of mobs and letting them swarm onto it than break charm and finish with dots) or pure dot kiting. I don't ever see this coming back into the game. They have way to much fun making mobs either summon or randomly cast dots that kill you in a few ticks or snare / root you and not curable.

    They did put the guards you can pull to for soloing. I don't know if that was on purpose and will be nerfed or if they did it on purpose. I would love for 1 zone in every expansion to have some npc tank sections of the zone for allowing anyone to solo with them instead of mercs which alot of classes can't solo with.

    The one big issue I do have with the guard tanking is you can double exp for no merc or other player in your group when you do it. I found while leveling the TS earring that it went so much faster while solo to the point that me and my friends stopped grouping because each of us could pull a different guard camp and level it faster. This is crazy and needs to be fixed. Everquest is an MMO that means grouping should never hurt you by making things go slower. I am finally to the point that I no longer need any exp and will invite others to join my group while I farm named trying to get rare 18 slot aug ore. Alot of the people I grouped with can't even out dps the guard's dps so maybe the guard dps meeds to be lowered as well but I like to have people in the group to talk to.
  16. Sirene_Fippy Okayest Bard

    I mean, maybe there are some bad players in that parse, but it's not entirely true that bards being in the top 10 DPS are only there because of other people sucking.

    Reminds me of when bards were top 10 DPS in Underfoot and everyone just said everyone else sucked. At the time bard nukes had no recast time so we would just play Aria -> DD -> DD -> DD and it was very good burn DPS. After that Aria also got nerfed and it was years before I could do as much DPS as I did in UF again.

    It's really just because of how ToV bard DoTs are tuned and has almost nothing to do with playing well (If anyone thinks playing 4 DoTs makes you good at EverQuest please camp and delete your character).
    Nniki, Szilent, Derresh and 2 others like this.
  17. Cloud the Third Augur

    You can still have 2 bards who are geared exactly the same and 1 can play better than the other. There are 2 of us bards in our guild that normally are in the top 10 and the other one will likely pass me once he finishes maxing all aa etc because he uses a different weapon setup. I setup for life taps and he sets up for proc DPS.

    It also has alot to do with what other classes in your group. Like I have said in other post you can go to a parse and look at the DD procs on a bard and if they have certain other classes with them they get massive extra dps from those procs.

    I used to question why parses for the same boss week after week were so different for my dps vs his and that is why I looked into who we were grouped with each week. Get a bst, rog, ber in your group and compare it to being in a wiz, necro, mage group. Even if both bards play the exact same songs and have the same weapons the one with bst, rog, ber will have millions more damage done.

    That is why I sometimes got pissed because bards used to be the ones who boosted others dps but now other classes can do the same boost to dps as bard does. They basically gave bard songs to every other class with how powerful the class auras are now.
    code-zero likes this.
  18. Cloud the Third Augur

    You do know Icefall was a completely different expansion than luclin right? I was talking about luclin like the original post, I wasn't even playing during icefall zone so I don't know what happen there.
  19. Sirene_Fippy Okayest Bard

    I agree with you, I guess I was trying to say that sometimes powerful abilities are mistaken for playing well, and that there's nothing skillful about playing 4 DoTs.

    Yes and this is exactly what other classes had been asking for for years. Eventually things wear down (i.e. resistance to giving x class y ability). Fortunately the resistance to improving bard ADPS is also wearing down (Quick Time and Fierce Eye stagnated for a long time but have gotten some improvements in the past few years). I feel like one could easily dredge up 10 old forum threads of pure melee asking for <bard replacement> because their DPS sucked without a bard. Bards still provide a lot to other classes, but it's a lot less than it used to be, and it makes me a little sad that we can play as little as 1 ADPS song and the rest can be thrown out (in favor of DoTs).
    Nniki likes this.
  20. Jhinx Whimsical Chinchilla

    I get where you're coming from Zenja, and I think that you will find, should you scan to older posts, that the response was the same from the community to the nerfs in that era.

    It appears that Swarm Kiting was stopped from being a viable strategy for the same reason that Dirge Kiting was. Players would tyrannize entire zones of training mobs, creating untold lag (mobs "rubberbanding" back and forth, et cetera) and causing grief to other members of the community. The move appears to be a restricted number of targets, which is rather gutting for those of us that are masochistic enough to do tradeskilling (DEATH TO SPIDERLINGS~!!!!!!).

    Ahem, anyway...

    It may seem rather gloom and doom, but bards got a rather welcome shot in the arm DPS-wise with Torment of Velious DoTs, and also a lovely amount of versatility with double invis AA for the group.

    Personally, I would love to see three things addressed to maximize my happiness units:
    1. Songs locking up when a clicky is used (see Epic) that is not instant, or stopped by even an instant cast if it happens near the end of a song.
    2. Vainglorious Shout had it's Endurance cost doubled when they changed it from unlimited targets to only a handful. I would love the Endurance cost to be reverted back to its old cost.
    3. It appears there is an interaction issue between bard double invisibility and other classes' invisibility, which leads to them getting arterial blood on my shoes. I like my shoes. Let's keep my shoes ichor free, so I can run away and leave them for dead without slipping.

    My 2.6cp