What Are The Biggest Nerfs to Hit Bards?

Looking to make a YouTube video on this topic but I'd like more info.
I think I know about 3 major ones but I don't know about the details.

1) AoE Dots. Bards used to be able to pull swarms of mobs and slightly outrun them with strafing. Then they would play AoE Dot songs and beat it all down. On Project 1999, it got nerfed to only be 25 targets maximum. On Live, AoE dots got nerfed to only work on stationary targets. How big did this disrupt zones or cause lag?

2) Denon's Desperate Dirge. Got told that this AoE nuke used to have unlimited targets. Right now it is 5 targets max. Bards used to pull huge swarms in Luclin/PoP and dirge it all to death. Bards would sometimes kill steal pulls from Deep AoE groups with a full mana burn of dirge.

3) Vainglorious Shout. Is this like an AoE Boastful Bellow with 15k-45k nukes? Did it used to be unlimited targets?

Some thoughts

this comes across like "rarrr I'm super mad and don't even know what I'm mad about"

does this qualify as "research" in 2021?

that you think these are in the category of "biggest nerfs to hit bards" shows you only care about exp exploits, not bards.

The patches are what they are. Not mad about about nerfs that happened 5-10+ years ago. I'm just curious in how the class has changed. Just looking for more info on stuff that I never got to see first hand. Never used vainglorious shout or seen pre-nerf denon's dirge. Could be other big patches that I've never heard of.

Pretty much all of the unlimited target damage abilities that went in were nerfed eventually, mainly because they led to players abusing them so much that they impacted server stability.

(the amount of processing involved in calculating the pathing for a swarm of mobs could bring a zone to its knees, and even impact server performance in zones across the whole server)

But feel free to read through 22 years of server patch notes to find out about all the Bard nerfs yourself, certainly I don't think anyone has thus far considered collating that information to be a worthwhile or productive pass-time.

These spells had a hard-coded 4 target hit limit that was later changed (2018?), and the hit limit was added to spell data. Some spells were missed, Denon's was one of them. It got fixed in 2019 and they made it a 5 target hit limit for whatever reason.

Vainglorious Shout used to be a frontal beam unlimited target resist debuff + stun that did ~100 dmg. It was changed into a personal DPS ability where it cost a bunch of endurance and would do significant damage after the debuff faded. Later on it was limited to 6 targets and endurance cost increased b/c some people were able to beam kite with it (not me lol).

The biggest bard nerf I was around for was Fade - cost was increased (% of total mana rather than flat #), it no longer worked on NPCs more than 5 levels higher than you, and it would no longer invis you if you were too close to the NPC you faded from. The distance requirement was later removed. You can read more about the fade nerfs in this thread.

Yeah people asking questions on the forums is research. It's how I learned LOTS of good stuff about EQ from people way smarter than me and can now tell this guy, who we should encourage because EQ is a cool game and it's good for people to be interested in stuff like bard nerf history, as obscure as that is .

Edit: Another big bard nerf was the VoA flute (Twisted Reed Flute) in 2012. I was playing on TLP during VoA so only have second-hand understanding. The VoA flute extended bard wind songs by 6s and allowed us to sustain our PB AE mez (normally with a 30s duration and 30s recast, it would break). I guess it was nerfed to no longer extend the duration of mez, and people mostly stopped using it after that.

see these are bard nerfs. OP asked entirely about nerfs to people-interested-in-out-of-scale-exp-returns, particularly ones that *he* didn't get to abuse.

I would similarly characterize the abilities various classes (including bards) have had that enabled instantly crashing zones to re-farm raid encounters in early expansions. Those being patched aren't "bard nerfs"

and the aria/flurry nerf that iirc came out in the summer of VoA?

I’m going to wager the OP is cyclic player that comes and goes over the years and doesn’t know the subtle nerfs. The first two that are listed are the big events that are memorable, while stuff like Charm range reduction won’t be as remembered.

You’re getting too upset, because someone with a familiarity with the game only remembers the big outlier events. Also, if you’re making a YouTube video swarm kiting nerfs are much more interesting than comparing like a 10% reduction in DoT damage.

how does your thesis hold up when OP doesn't remember them?

Pretty well actually, it’s a common thing that humans do. They vaguely know/remember some event happening and asking others if they could explain or provide research material.

Why are you so grumpy?

Here are some "nerfs" that I can think of.

October 21, 2008:
Raid NPCs are now immune to Song of the Highsun.

September 23, 2015
Changed the invisibility component of abilities that allow you to escape. Now, upon successfully rolling your escape chance, if you are at least 30 feet away from all targets that have you high (top 10) on their hatelist, you will have a spell cast on you. In most cases this spell is an invisibility buff.

After this patch, Fading Memories began triggering Evader's Invisibility, an invisibility buff. Prior to this, bards would simply be set invisible. This change caused bards to lose the ability to retain a charmed creature when fading. This introduced the issue where fading lost some measure of safety, as your former pet would now attack you when you tried to drop aggro. I brought it up on the issue tracker at the time. I don't know for certain, but I assume this may have been why the demand charm line was introduced. The demand line has a chance to drop aggro on the charmed creature when charm breaks.

- Modified all AA abilities that allow you to fling or gravitate your target to your location so they function only on NPC targets below your current level. Added new 0 cost ranks at every level to increase the level range that the abilities will function on. This applies to Lure of the Siren's Song, Divine Call, Moving Mountains, Warlord's Grasp, and Hate's Attraction.

Although it was mostly undone later, this nerf to Lure of Siren's Song at the time was annoying, as it pretty much removed its usefulness in current content.

September 21, 2016
- Corrected an issue that prevented Bard songs from costing endurance.
- Bard - Raised the endurance cost of Dichotomic Psalm, increased the amount of damage it adds to spells and melee strikes, increased the amount it heals, and lowered the amount of mana and endurance that is restored.

With this patch, the target type on the Empowerment triggered effect from Dichotomic Psalm was changed from Caster Group to Single, which prevented it from triggering for each entity in the group. Before this change, it was without question super OP, allowing bards to pretty much keep group members at full mana.

September 20, 2017
- Bard - Rallying Call now consumes 75% of the mana and endurance restored by this ability. The reuse time for this ability has been increased to 10 minutes. The target requirements have been adjusted so that melee classes must be below 30% endurance and classes that use mana must be below 30% mana rather than any class being below 30% of either. - Bard - Added a new self-targeted ability, Rallying Solo, which shares a timer with Rallying Call, but allows the bard to restore their own mana/endurance if they are below 30% mana.

Rallying Call was split into two abilities on a shared timer. A cost was added and target restrictions were modified for the target ability, and the reuse was increased to 10 minutes from, I want to say, 5 minutes iirc.

August 15, 2018:
- Bard - Increased the base reuse time of Dissonant Chord to 9 minutes, added 4 additional ranks that reduce the reuse time and increased the max NPC level of the ability. Increased the duration of the ability from 6 to 12 seconds.

This resulted in Dissonant Chord, an ability used to lock aggro on the target, having a 5 minute reuse instead of its previous 30 second reuse.

The trade-off in that patch was gaining the use of mod rods...
- Bard - Modulation Effects (instant spells that exchange health for mana) now function for bards.

They also sort of reverted the nerf on Lure of the Siren's Song with this patch:
- Multiple - Gravitate and Fling abilities have been changed to work on targets up to 3 levels above the caster (up from 1 level below the caster). This includes Bard's Lure of the Siren's Song, Enchanter's Rune of Banishment, Monk's Moving Mountains, Paladin's Divine Call, Shadowknight's Hate's Attraction, and Warrior's Warlord's Grasp.

For specifics:

December 18, 2003:
Extended Notes and Sionachie's Cresendo no longer affects harmful area-of-effect spells.

September 14, 2004:
Bard PBAoE spells will no longer damage targets that are moving, however any other spell effects from the PBAoE spell will still be applied to the targets as usual.

Patch notes for that:

April 11, 2012:
The Woodwind Finesse effect on the Twisted Reed Flute will no longer affect PBAE songs.

Another I can think of along this line was the loss of Tune Stuck in Your Head extending the duration of PBAE mezzes by a tick when it was changed into a passive ability just prior to the launch of the ToV expansion.

November 20, 2019:
- Bard - Changed Tune Stuck In Your Head from an activated ability to a passive ability and rescaled the existing ranks between levels 71-106.

It wasn't called out in the patch notes; however, in a bug report, it was confirmed to be intended. PBAE mez and Tune Stuck in Your Head were both introduced in the Underfoot expansion. Nerfed a decade later.

(Not to say having everything else permanently extended was a bad thing)

Thank you so much for that info Sirene. Totally spaced about the Fade nerf. And never heard about the flute. How bad is the fade nerf when it costs 2%? Just got into TSS and it burning 6% is a HUGE upgrade from the 12% PoP fade. It's the major reason why I think monks do better pulling for a few expansions. No resource aggro drop is much better than OOM in a few clicks. 6-12% mana burns are hard to maintain when it's your only tool in some zones. Got to use biolumi orb for the first time today in Valdeholm to split unmezzable, unlullable giants. But blind + fade worked great.

Thank you also Nniki. I'm interested to know why Highsun got blocked on raid mobs. What did someone do to cause that lol? I know it's nasty against summoner mobs. Saw some 13 box PL crew run by 1 person in Velketors. He trained and killed this one bard's group several times. Bard got revenge. Boxer pulled all of OC/IC, and dogs to one spot. Kept it controlled with aoe stuns from enchanter duo. Then boxer started to AOE nuke. Bard started to highsun everything that was damaged. Dogs start summonings. One by one, all 13 of this guy's characters start disappearing to random parts of the zone and dying.

Hello,
I remember this change affected my play style a lot while doing CC.

Before this change, we could have like 50%(or was 80%?) uptime on Tune and have long mezzes and sing more songs on our melody % of the time.

After this change, which I think it was a boost/buff since it increased overall duration on all songs, we could have mobs perma AE mezzed (since mezz duration was more than its reuse and we weren't limited by the RNG involved on 30 sec duration mezzes and 30 sec mez reuse).

Then, some patches after this, they stleath-nerfed Tune Stuck in Your Head to skip boosting Mezzes, to its actual state, that excludes mezzes and makes us, again, to time perfectly the recast of the next ae mezz refresh and server tick sync:

1: Increase Duration by 6s
2: Limit Max Level: 115 (lose 100% per level)
3: Limit Class: WAR, MNK, BRD, ROG, BER
4: Limit Effect: Exclude Mesmerize

So, overall, we went from:
- We can decide/control when to have 100% uptime on ae mezz.
to
- We always have 100% uptime on ae mezz.
to
- We have 99% uptime on ae mezz.

Please, I am doing this from memory so, correct me if I am wrong. Also, I am not a main bard.

Oh, I missed Nniki and Sirene edits about the same topic I posted. Well, hope my own view of how I lived this changes helps you.

I think it was a long time coming at that point. The design team likely disliked it being used to simplify their events and having to deal with bugs caused by its usage in scripted events where mobs moved from one location to another, such as The Mastery of Corruption trial, where, when someone reported that NPCs were getting stuck in the wall and weren't returning after being highsunned, Prathun on June 27, 2006 responded with "Song of Highsun is now second on the top-ten list of my favorite content-breaking spells, right behind the Eye of Zomm."

The change was made on the patch for the Seeds of Destruction expansion. I don't remember specifics and wasn't raiding current content at the time, so I don't know if something came up in beta or whatever, but I remember it commonly being used as a way to hold off or even avoid dealing with adds that had to path to the raid in events, so I assume it was being used across current content for a few different events by at least some of the guilds. Reading back, at the time, it sounds like it was being used on the engineers in the Prototype event (Mansion Event: Battle Room) in SoF. People suggested using blind on them as an alternative.

I know back in Plane of Time, it was commonly used as a way to split the Supernatural Guardian and Avatar of the Elements during Phase 3. I did it that way many, many times. Bards would pull them both out, Deftdance, Harmony of Sound one, Highsun it, and fade to pull the remaining one single to the raid. It was more commonly used for pulling in general at the time as an easy way to separate mobs. In fact, I seem to remember using it to split the M`shas in Qvic away from any adds (I never cleared trash to pull those back then). Think of how Silent Displacement can be used now to separate either the target you want or don't want from a group of mobs; Highsun was the easy way to do that back then when the target couldn't be mezzed.

I actually used it in such a manner back in Greater Faydark during The War GM events. I would split and pull the Captains of Faydark to my party, but oftentimes, some other group would steal it off me after I had it single. After they did some damage to it, I would then Highsun it back to the army of mobs it came from where it would then proceed to summon each member of their group one by one to their death. After the thieves had all died and the captain had regenerated back to full health, I'd finish pulling it to my party.

Szilent is crazy, worst bard nerf was definitely AE kiting. It was wonderfully exploitive and lag-inducing fun. I remember making my own UI mod to make it easier to instrument swap while kiting dozens of mobs, so ridiculous to have boring gameplay keep you on the edge of your seat because one screw up loses such a huge XP payoff.

Otherwise I'd say the biggest "nerf" to bards is the steady utility / buff / ADPS scope creep in the game. In vanilla EQ in many cases adding a bard, shaman or enchanter to your group could be the difference between a trash group and a stellar group. These days so many classes come with ADPS, runspeed buffs, can self haste or have minimal mana concerns and many groups have no need for CC or even careful pulling.

Bards are still in a great spot because they can still improve a group across the board while contributing a respectable amount of DPS, but they're no longer the lynchpin of the group. Same issue with healers where healer mercs are good enough to fill in and stack well. Tanks have gotten more essential to groups over the years. It used to be that rangers/monks were just fine, and being out-tanked by pets in early EQ was humiliating, now they're walking gods compared to pets and mercs.

What about the mitigation and aggro nerfs?

While it isn’t exactly a direct answer to your question, it might be worth discussing that bards have continuously lost impact through providing other classes with ADPS abilities that compete with ours and through giving many classes access to items that close the gap between a character playing with or without a bard in group. For example, everyone that needs it has access to overhaste now so bards provide less overall increases than in the past.