With the recent change to Bard DoTs making them actually useful again, it's time to change them back to taking up a single debuff slot instead of 2 for each DoT.
Why would they do that? Based on all the "consolidations" having lead to more debuffs i thought maybe EQ was based in the upside down room in Plane of Mischief... Joking aside it would be great to not have things take up multiple slots when they have created so much bloat added to every class.
If the debuff were part of the dot, then anything blocking or overwriting the debuff would also block/overwrite the dot. The most obvious thing doing that would be another bard's same dot so two bards would be unable to use the same dot simultaneously, but also Bladewhirl would block all bards from using the fire dot, all varieties of Malo would block all bards from using poison dot, and necro Scent debuff would prevent disease dots from all bards. One bard per monster would get to use one dot -- the Ice one. ... yeah, in Velious.
What is the reason it has a debuff component? Is it so that the dot part isn't resisted or does the dot just somehow not work without it? If it's for the resist they can put an innate modifier like the scent aa gives to necros I assume. I don't know the reasoning as I don't play a bard, but it seems crazy when debuffs are at a premium to make so many classes using use the amount of slots they do.
As long as it's only a resist debuff (which it is), there should be no stacking issues at all. Precedent exists from the Shaman "Svartmane's Affliction" line and Enchanter "Deceiving Constriction" line of DoTs which include resist debuffs in the primary DoT spell but still stack from multiple casters and stack with other resist debuffs such as Malo and Tash. Of course, that assumes there's nothing special about Bard debuffs, but I doubt that would be the case. As far as why the resist debuffs exist, I believe it was just an added bonus for Bard DoTs to also reduce resistances.
In a raid with 5 bards casting the dot the debuff stacks between all the bards taking up 4 slots and isn't double for all 5 bards. So total of 24 debuff slots taken up for 5 bards casting 4 dots instead of 40 slots. It isn't a big deal.
Please don't do this. The ultimate fix is to revamp necros so they use fewer slots. Without this additional debuff slot, bard dots wont stack with other bard dots.
I'd be on board with consolidating all dots to use (a somewhat stronger version of) the Chant of Chaos proc instead of individual elements? That'd be real nice, could reclaim 4 debuff slots that way and help out casters with their Corruption proc resists as a corollary.
