Bard fade getting worse with gear feels really broken.

Yes

Can you Kick from horse?

Zam says its 85 speed. Is it actually faster than that? Dont include strafe. You can measure it on your character sheet on the stat tab. Whats your velocity?

Dont worry you get out of combat regen shortly. Then your mana problems are solved?!

If you have downtime to get the out of combat system to kick and and let your mana regen. Depending on your group there might not be a lot of downtime happening.

It's 85 velocity...but who doesn't strafe while using a mount to run? What is this, noob time? 95 velo and faster than bards.

Mana regen scales up as well. Between worn mana regen, AAs and item clicks that add AA mana regen, you can easily get 30+ mana regen well before TSS.

Granted, the mana regen doesn't scale as fast as the mana pool, so the OPs problem persists, but is not quite as pronounced.

Unfortunately, the problem this was meant to solve was that "Fade isn't very usable when you first get it". When LDoN launched on live (I remember specifically attempting Hard LDoNs and hitting this issue), I was only able to fade 3-4 times before running out of mana, and had no mana regen gear, and only the mana regen AAs. This meant that once I faded 4 times... I was done. No more fading. 900 Mana just took too long to regen at 4/tick. That's 20+minutes to regen one fade.

I'd prefer something like putting a cap on Fade cost. E.g., fade costs 12% of mana with a cap of level*15 (or something like that). So at level 60, the cap would be 900, at 70 it'd be 1050, etc. This allows the cost to scale with level, but not with gear. It doesn't completely negate the issue of punishing you for getting better gear at low mana pools, but significantly mitigates it in the long run.

I was under the impression that this fix was so solve the problem of higher level bards being able to spam fade with no detriment to themselves.

High level bards still spam for almost no cost.

2% which can be a LOT but it's still 2%

Kick does indeed work. There is no kicking animation but the kick is happening. Check your combat log.

Ok I guess I was wrong. I could have sworn I checked it by watching for kick cooldown. But youre right. Kick happens and cooldown does occur. That said, mounts dont really do much for bard combat mana regen. 1 point. OOC combat ok, but you could also sit.

It takes 1 min for my 115 bard to gain 2% while in combat

I don't spam Fade like I use to

Bard on horse does not go faster then other characters so if I have other characters autofollowing him they go the same speed.

Bard on horse can use all combat abilities and sing AND be sitting. This means I don't have to stop singing and sit to get OOC regen (for endurance).

Also... uhh, we killed emperor ssra this one time and long story short nobody but my bard could loot the horse.

Honestly I didn't really use it much until TSS when OOC combat regen comes in, but otherwise it gave the extra point of mana regen I guess?