Any 1 know the % that we are getting from the AA on test? bard dmg has been bottom of the barrel for so long its not even funny
Bards need help other than simply a flat %age mod IMO; something like damage tables, tripple attack, or whatever it is that they lack and that makes other classes hit harder or more often. They're wonderful to have in groups, but their personal dps is pretty weak. Once everyone gets mods, they'll still be in much the same position relative to everyone else.
Bards may still be in a position much lower than pure melee classes, but that is definitely working as intended. Bards are the lynchpin to making Zerker monk ranger and beastlord burns go through the roof and yet they also bring a lot to a variety of types of groups when played well. The bard is the ultimate support class, if you want to hit hard and fast be a monk. Oops left rogues out bards help dem too!
While bards aren't a dps class, the additional damage is appreciated. The proc stacking change alone helped a bit by itself. My answer when anyone asks me if they should make a bard is yes, as long as you know our limitations dps wise. And if you work at it you can do decent enough damage. One thing that I would assume good bards have figured out if you've hit a dummy since the change or even before the change, hit selo's kick often as you can. My highest since the patch is somewhere over 42k with a ton of over 20 k mixed with some 7-10 k, definetly worthwhile in my opinion. Much lower on real world mobs but still worth the push button.
The key thing is to consider whether replacing a dps class in a group with a bard will increase the net dps of that group. If yes, guilds will still want to recruit bards and all will rejoice. If not, then it's broken and some top guilds that take a strict min/max policy to rosters will start benching people and hiring more dps (without support) instead. Fortunately I don't think we're anywhere close to that right now. I have much love for bards in my groups.
While that certainly works from a tuning perspective, it completely ignores the lackluster gameplay that goes hand-in-hand with the current bard class. Between /Melody and an underwhelming choice of songs, bards are a very cookie-cutter class with not much active playing involved (which leads to a large portion of bards being alts/boxes). I agree you can't have bards boosting others to the extent they currently do with melee while also having competitive personal dps. But that doesnt mean the status quo is healthy for the bard class/game in general. Considering melee want to be less reliant on adps, and I would imagine bard would prefer a more active play style (more melee skill attacks to press, larger song variety with shared timers, etc), I think that some major changes would be good for everyone. Take the current 3 proc song lines: Arcane, Suffering, Spite. Suffering/Spite are designed with a clear choice that has to be made, their strength determined by situation/group makeup. Arcane on the other hand is a broad/catch-all type of spell line that in the end provides very little boost to any group. Its lackluster, boring, and "standard". Similar thing with Aria line can be seen albeit for the opposite reason, they try to make Aria a catch-all offering Spell Dmg mod + Triple Attack/Flurry chance making it a main-stay in every group no matter the situation. This one line probably provides 60-75% of a bards adps regardless of the class they're supporting. Then their nukes having push and having such a ridiculously high mana cost needs to change. Push on nukes in general is a bad idea, no one wants to be messing with mob-positioning while trying to deal damage. And the high mana costs are silly at this point as thats just a lazy way to balance bards DD dps, when instead the bard nuke should be balanced around the lost adps from not singing a support song. In my opinion, bards need a major song overhaul lowering the effectiveness of songs like Aria and boosting the power of things like the Arcane line and the +Spell Dmg lines for fire/cold. They also should be able to do close to if not equal dps of an Enchanter, right now they are way behind in that regard. I doubt any of these views will be popular amongst non-bards (possibly even bards will disagree), but I dont think its good for the game if the majority of bards are /melody boxes that function at 98% of the efficiency of an active main bard trying their best.
First, and I don't think you'll find a bard out there that doesn't agree with this, without melody coming into the game when it did the amount of bards still playing would be so miniscule that the class might as well have been discontinued. At the time it was put into the game I was just about to quit my main and go back to wizard main again. On all mobs not only was I the one running out to pull, I was then clicking about 60 times per mob to keep five songs running along with being the slower, and honestly I had just about done all I could do to justify the pain in my hands. Second, if just playing melody and standing there was any kind of "good bard" compared to what I try to do in my group, maybe I'd give up under those circumstances. I don't really want much more to click than I have now to keep up decent dps for my group and myself. Making sure to keep quick time, fierce eye, spire two or three depending on the group, cacophony, bladed song, funeral dirge and epic click running as much as possible. And thousand blades, dance of blades, flurry of notes, frenzied kicks, lyrical prankster, song of stone, reflexive retort along with keeping selo's kick and bellow on cooldown. While pulling every mob my normal group ever kills except on rare occasions is plenty to keep up with. Things that would be great would be more song choices & more damage per song, I don't think lowering aria is a great idea why do we want to keep lowering the damage for so many class's? Having arcane do three or four times what it does would make it a more attractive song to keep up, it is one that when I have to drop it its an easy choice. Removing push.. yay though as the only bard in our guild that really uses our dd it doesn't affect us very much. I don't use it as much as I probably should but I throw it out there every now and then. And last.. playing a bard is easily the most fun in Eq it's not for everyone and that's just fine with me Regrettable it seems too many people and guilds have decided that it's not about what fun a certain class is to play but what class's it takes to stack to beat raids into submission. Furthering the path of narrowing the class's people pick to whether they fit into a spreadsheet.
Couldn't agree with this more. It's so frustrating that 99% of our power is concentrated in Aria that it is nearly impossible in a raid to tell the difference between a boxed bard and someone who knows their class inside out and is giving it their all. Raiding with a bard is so incredibly boring. I like your suggestions very much.
If any guild leader/raid leader says: We have 2 bards in raid/guild, thats more than enough, then that person is not doing a proper job. Each bard more or less double the dps of each person in the Group and ....
bards are about the only class besides clerics every guild can never get enough of. Thats a great position to have, especially if you have fun with the class (poor clerics)
They could add some small damage bonus boost for bards, pretty much all other meleeing classes (besides BST, but BST's don't have to constantly maintain their ADPS spells so they can nuke and ) have an AA line that increases their DB (well SPA 220, same effect though) Although I don't end game raid, watching the few twitch streams it seems bards mostly just stay out of the fight so the raid doesn't lose their songs if they die, which can't be all that fun. (I did suggest to one bard streaming they could /autofire but apparently they didn't have the throwing skill high to matter )
I absolutely love my bard in group game. Tons to do, super active, lots of nuance. In the raid game its nice to be very needed. Like others have said most raids would happily slot in 6-7 bards. The problem is that bard is extremely passive in the raid game and just not fun. Turn on your melody, hit epic and fierce eye every two minutes. Hit burn hot key once or twice during fight. If you do those things (about 3 button pushes a minute or so?) you will be providing about 90% of max bard value to your raid. Bards desperately need more of their raid utility (or dps if that ever becomes significant) to come from active skills. Bards also need gear to make more of a difference in raids! The only things gear give me that make a difference on raids are HP and resists. Once I can survive current tier AE without over burdening healers I dont even bother to bid on more gear. It wont noticeably increase my DPS and I could wear raid gear from level 85 and it would max out my songs.
True, the added fun in groups is pulling and CC. If I am not the puller its no more engaging than raids.
My favorite thing to do on raids with my Bard is make our slack DPS look bad by beating them on the parse (go go 100k+ Bard parses!). That being said, it would be nice if there was more we could do for our own DPS. What and how? Not really sure. Maybe some large nuke that makes use of the large number of swarm pets we can summon (like Mage Strike of the Many)? Call it Resonating Cacophony or something, I dunno. And then add more stuff too. Keeping the group buffs up (/melody, epic, FE, QT, Spire, FD) while spamming Kick is not really all that challenging or interactive. We have a massive Endurance pool and absolutely no use for it!
If any real DPS class is being outparsed by a bard, you might want to remind them to turn on auto attack...
“While that certainly works from a tuning perspective, it completely ignores the lackluster gameplay that goes hand-in-hand with the current bard class. Between /Melody and an underwhelming choice of songs, bards are a very cookie-cutter class with not much active playing involved (which leads to a large portion of bards being alts/boxes). I agree you can't have bards boosting others to the extent they currently do with melee while also having competitive personal dps. But that doesnt mean the status quo is healthy for the bard class/game in general. Considering melee want to be less reliant on adps, and I would imagine bard would prefer a more active play style (more melee skill attacks to press, larger song variety with shared timers, etc), I think that some major changes would be good for everyone. Take the current 3 proc song lines: Arcane, Suffering, Spite. Suffering/Spite are designed with a clear choice that has to be made, their strength determined by situation/group makeup. Arcane on the other hand is a broad/catch-all type of spell line that in the end provides very little boost to any group. Its lackluster, boring, and "standard". Similar thing with Aria line can be seen albeit for the opposite reason, they try to make Aria a catch-all offering Spell Dmg mod + Triple Attack/Flurry chance making it a main-stay in every group no matter the situation. This one line probably provides 60-75% of a bards adps regardless of the class they're supporting. Then their nukes having push and having such a ridiculously high mana cost needs to change. Push on nukes in general is a bad idea, no one wants to be messing with mob-positioning while trying to deal damage. And the high mana costs are silly at this point as thats just a lazy way to balance bards DD dps, when instead the bard nuke should be balanced around the lost adps from not singing a support song. In my opinion, bards need a major song overhaul lowering the effectiveness of songs like Aria and boosting the power of things like the Arcane line and the +Spell Dmg lines for fire/cold. They also should be able to do close to if not equal dps of an Enchanter, right now they are way behind in that regard. I doubt any of these views will be popular amongst non-bards (possibly even bards will disagree), but I dont think its good for the game if the majority of bards are /melody boxes that function at 98% of the efficiency of an active main bard trying their best.” Couldn't agree with this more. It's so frustrating that 99% of our power is concentrated in Aria that it is nearly impossible in a raid to tell the difference between a boxed bard and someone who knows their class inside out and is giving it their all. Raiding with a bard is so incredibly boring. I like your suggestions very much. /\ personally i wish we had more Auras that enhanced certain song focus but degraded others .. one that enhances defensive abilities AC runes mitigation avoidance. one that enhances healing effects one that enhances DPS effects while the enhanced abilities are increased the other ones take a percentage loss Also our DPS proc song line i wish it was set up with a group divider for example the song proc would do 2k if we are solo but with each additional member the song damage is divided 2 people 1k each 3 666 4 500 ect songs like this could also be tuned for healing .... the less in group the more concentrated the song effects... it would give us a boost and give us more options with auras
