Please Give Bards Better DPS - Faster Casting - Heres Why....

since starting this topic, I have leveled up my own troub.
got a fast crash course on how to group as a troub (reply to activate Jcap on those wanting it and so on) trying my best to get the best AA set up I am happy with, while maximizing group potential. I see group DPS far more important then my own. but that doesnt mean I enjoy being so low on the parse either....
currently, I have my epic weapon, marrow song for off hand, 4 T3 pieces, 2 T4 pieces, and a good selection of jewelry. about 1/4th masterd, all rest expert skills. 172 AA.
parsing about 2k reliably, 3 to 3.5k in raid.
any DPS potential I have is constantly interupted Capping people, or casting PotM. but I still try my best.
I know my mythical should help alot, when I get around to it, but for now I am gonna complete the sig quest for my drum and cloak since I can get that done easy.
overall, I would have to say, I think the simplest and best way to just give a nudge to the bard classes, is simply to give them stances...
just like all other scouts have... healers have... tanks have.


oh, and a quick reply macro "quit asking for UT - your DPS sucks - I am not putting it on you till you parse more then 2k".

Backpayne@Everfrost wrote:

Ok let's look at this. First of all I dispute your claim that Bards and Chanters command 8 spots in raids based solely on their DPS. This is a pheonomena of TSO because so many raid mobs drain power. If SOE decides to lower the need for power regen then the "need" for Bards and Enchanters would naturally diminish.
Secondly DPS is based mostly on gear. Sure you have Bards that DPS at X rate in your guild.....but it is totally relative and your Bards aren't parsing percentage wise any better than lesser geared Bards parse compared to other DPS classes in their respective guilds.
Thirdly, if you read this thread......twice, then you should know that we were discussing group and solo DPS......not raid. I doubt anyone is going to claim that Troubs solo well.....we are even below some priest classes.

Being both dirge and troub at lvl 80. I'm happy as a clam with their dps output. Sure im no assassin but i dont deserve to be.

Kulanae@Blackburrow wrote:

First, it has nothing to do with power drain etc on a given mob. The demand for the raid spots has nothing to do with THEIR dps, learn to read k thx. What I said, and I'm going to repeat it just for you, is that because of the utility they bring to a raid they get 8 of the 24 spots. Any decent raid guild is running bard+enchanter in every group. MT group - coercer+dirge, OT group - same, the two dps groups - illy+troub. So, with that said, I'll instead ignore your statement while you reread my post. I made sure to make it BOLD and UNDERLINED so it was easier to find without straining yourself.
Secondly, the dps is still relative to the rest of the group and length of the fight. I have an 80 dirge, 80 illy, 80 brig, and 80 templar. The templar takes at least 90sec to drop an even con nonheroic mob using a dps spec. Using the "cookie cutter" dirge spec that you can find almost anywhere, my dirge can drop that same mob in about 8sec. Defilers have even lower dps than a templar. My brig can put out more dps than my dirge but that SHOULD be the case. Regardless of guild affiliation, I've seen bards in T2 shard armor with fabled epics still put up 5-6k parses which is still 3-4 times higher than my templar can put out. With that said, there are templars out there that can easily do higher dps. The point I'm making is honestly quite simple - dps is also relative to skill at the given class not just gear. Yes, gear does make a difference but skill is the real factor that determines if the player of a given class can use that gear to its maximum potential. If you are parsing lower than another person of the same class - ask them their casting order, AA spec, what stats/effects they are focusing on, etc. Just because one person can't dps with the class, doesn't mean its broken. On the same note, just because a given individual can crank out double the dps as another using the same class/gear/spell or CA quality, doesn't mean that class is overpowered.
Third on your list was stating the conversation was about group/solo dps. Again, I can parse 3-4k with my dirge solo and he has mostly adept spells (not Adept 3's, just Adept 1's - if you go with the old names - or Adept not Expert for the new). In groups it honestly depends on the length of the fight. Some fights I parse higher, some lower as it honestly depends on dot duration and if they have a chance to proc the final tick which is typically a larger hit than the initial or damage per tick rate. I sat and watched a troub solo an 83^^^ heroic the other night in Chardok. Changing the casting order and how you perceive a given encounter can and does make a huge difference. If you're not soloing effectively, change how you are doing things. For example, using the troub from above, I watched him mez the mob repeatedly while he was fighting it. Not what I'd consider the first strategy to come to mind for killing a given mob but it worked.
Lastly, if you are going to quote someone and try to argue a point of view... make sure you have read and understood exactly what was said before trying to pick apart their statements. A classes dps being solely dependant on gear is about as absurd as claiming that the 8 spots in a raid for bards/enchanters is simply for their power regen. Both archetypes also bring a ton of buffs to a given group that increase dps. With dirges - they have the dps mod, str/agi, dead calm, battle cry, and Cacophany of Blades. For troubs - aria, dehate for nonfighters, increase to disruption etc, haste, str/sta, JCap, Upbeat tempo, etc. Both bards can have fortissimo in their AA spec as well as Don't Kill the Messenger. Illy - haste, synergism, Illusory Arm, mythical adds more DA. Coercer - dps mob, superior power regen, dehate for single targets, hate transfer/gain for the MT/OT, etc. Both enchanters can also have Peace of Mind in their AA spec. Simply put - claiming a bard/enchanter is only there for power regen is worthy of a good laugh at best. Putting both in a group is common sense when you are trying to maximize dps potential.

Backpayne@Everfrost wrote:

And why do you need an Enchanter in every group? Because of their ability to keep a group full on power so you don't wipe to encounters like Anashti Sul, or lose your DPS to encounters like Zarrakon. TSO has more power draining encounters than any previous expansion. And if it is their ability to boost DPS.....then that is on a diminishing scale of returns so why not boost Troub DPS? No matter how much you boost it it won't change the fact they they still bring a lot to raidwide DPS, nor will it make you want to drop a Wizard for a 3rd Troub.
DPS is relative to skill......well or course it is. But gear more than anything else determines your DPS. So when you come into this thread spouting how much player X or player Y is doing with their Troub/whatever you need to provide context. Ballads is probably the highest parsing/best geared Troub in the game IMO. If you ask him what he parses it will sound rather rediculous coming from a Troub......but then ask him what every other class in his guild is parsing and look at his percentage of the total raids DPS output and I think you will find a heavy corelation between differently geared Bards in their lower tiered guilds. Not taking away anything from Ballads but once you are raiding top tier instanced content or contested, you have a pretty good handle on how to play your toon.
This post started from the OP stating he was losing group mates who were Troubs because when they weren't raiding they played other classes.......or some of them just left the game. Playing a Troub in a group can sometimes be frustrating because CC in this game is basically non-existant so our CC abilities are worthless. So it's all about the bling of being on the DPS list and in most groups we are just north of the healer. And with respect to soloing. Yeah you solo great now......how many months after the level cap was raised in Kunark? When I stepped off the boat in Kunark even in all fabled gear I got a rather rude awakening from how hard the MOB's were hitting. I expect the same to happen when SF launches. I fail to see how an offensive/defensive stance wouldn't be a good thing for Dirges and Troubs since every other Scout class has them.
Finally if you want to try to pick apart my posts be consistant. You say Troubs/Dirges/Illys/Coer command spots for their raid buffing abilities......this is true. But they are right now at their max spots wise, and adding more would accomplish nothing. Therefore using this as an agruement against raising Troub DPS is moot. If raid leaders wouldn't add a third Troub now.....adding 1 or 2k to their total DPS surely isn't going to make a bit of difference, so your arguement there was absurd. Finally if you factor in the proposed changes there are already going to be spots opening up on raids as there should be no reason to have more than 1 of each of the buffing classes on a raid (providing SOE does it right), so why not bring them more in line with the damage output of other classes.

"I sat and watched a troub solo an 83^^^ heroic the other night in Chardok. Changing the casting order and how you perceive a given encounter can and does make a huge difference. If you're not soloing effectively, change how you are doing things. For example, using the troub from above, I watched him mez the mob repeatedly while he was fighting it. Not what I'd consider the first strategy to come to mind for killing a given mob but it worked."
I wanted to address this seperatly. There are only two ways for a Troub to solo a heroic of same or greater level. Mezing or kiting. That's it. I solo'd the named in Shard of Love after mentoring the zone down to 70. Tried straight up fighting them but the casters just burned me down as I didn't have enough interrupt abilities to keep them from casting. This also meant kiting was useless because they would burn me down from range. Now the Swashy in my guild regularly goes in and spanks this zone in less than an hour. It took me three hours to mez kill the named in the zone. And if they would have been immune to mez it would have been hopeless.

Kulanae@Blackburrow wrote:

I've heard that statement from just about every class when Kunark was released. So that really has no significance when arguing about a classes soloability in relaton to all other classes. everyone pretty much got the smack down from these mobs, even the best solo classes.
that said, I'm all for more DPS on my dirge. He solos 'solo' content just fine, but he can't solo named/heroic content as quickly, or even at all, that some of my other alts can. I see no reason to hold them back when soloing if the Devs are going to insist on making us solo quest to level efficiently.

my troub was in perfec balance in KoS( yes T5 was a bit out of wack) then out of no where they cut his balls off for nothing other then because some terribad wizards felt troubs shouldn't be able to do ANY dps at all...

further more taking their charm away( cos troubs don't have a charm anymore..) and making their mez practicly uselss was completely uncalled for. why did this happend? because chanters where supose to be the only mezzers/charmers? well guess what peace of mind? that's a troub proc! so please give troubs their charm and mezz spells back so i can once again enjoy soloing some quest with my trubador.

Our charm and mez work perfectly fine for soloing/grouping. They work great if you put some AA points in the abilities that boost their duration. Where they fall on their face is their usefulness on Raids. Since we cannot mez x2 raid mobs our mez is useless. My hope is that since they seem to be going to revive crowd control in SF that we get some love too.
I'm still waiting for them to revamp our two power drains like they did for the Enchanters.

Kulanae@Blackburrow wrote:

heh.. you wouldn't say that if you had been playing a troub from the DoF days like i have been. the charm and mez are indeed useless.

Well my character was created Nov 9, 2004. Was that before DoF? Ya know.....I think it was.

Kulanae@Blackburrow wrote:

so you think nerfing a charm from around 10 minutes to 30 seconds and changing the mez from(me) being able to hold 4 mobs with ease to barely being able to hold 2 mobs(one resist from death) work perfectly? your words "charm and mez work perfectly fine for soloing/grouping." sorry man.. seems you have forgotten what troubs lost or maybe you just never used the class to it's fullest potential back then.

Not that I am calling you a liar or anything but:
Davngr1

Loremaster

Joined: Nov 19, 2005
http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/...topic_id=416400
"my main is a necromancer. he was my first toon and my funnest, i learned the game with him."
My preorder for DoF was 8/26/05 and my transaction for DoF was finalized on 9/17/05 two months before you created your account. So please just quit now while you are behind.

Giving you the benefit of what little doubt there seems to be.....that you managed to level two toons simultaneously and got your Troub to level 40+ prior to KoS launching let me tell you what I remember about mez and charm from those days:
Charm had a short duration......could break before it's max duration on its own, and also would break if your charmed target took any damage at all.
Mez usually lasted it's full duration but unless you had some hellacious in-combat power regen......which pretty much required a prismatic to get to, you would slowly run out of power if you tried to use it to solo a group mob (which were TONS easier to solo back then).
All in all for soloing and grouping I stand by my statement that they work fairly well for what they are worth. But who honestly mez's anything when grouped other than some select encounters like in Maidens? No one.

Kulanae@Blackburrow wrote:

lol behind? the troub class is behind and you're here saying that the nerfs to the class where not exesive? btw i played my youngers brothers account for a few months and then transferd my toons over.
Kulanae@Blackburrow wrote:

charm worked well for soloing(as well as any charmed mob could) and mez worked better then it does now, no clue what encounters you're talking about but i use to pull off the kos instance in bonmire where you had to mez 4 mobs and kill them at the same time with out any issues.

either way i was just posting my thoughts on the class and how i feel they need their pre-kos nerf mechanics back.

Bards don't need better DPS, the parse needs to stop being worshipped. It's a terribly useless measure of value of any class that is not purely DPS. If the parse counted how much increase each person parsed because of the bard buffs they would out DPS any class in the raid most likley.

Lethe5683 wrote:

Yep, I think that's the crux of the issue here. People in EQ2 are the most parse-happy gamers I've ever come across. It's really bizarre. In no other MMO that I've ever played, including EQ1, were people all that concerned about their dps - because they all had a job to do, and to work as a team, and without that sort of teamwork dps meant absolutely nothing at all.
But here? Hell, people will boot you from a pickup group if they don't feel your dps is top-notch. It can be terribly elitist.
That said, back to the OP regarding dps. I play both an Assassin and a Troubadour (and a Conjuror, hah). So I know these issues very well. And you are 100% correct - the Troub will never compete in the same category as the Assassin. But I think the biggest issue isn't dps, it's defense (or, to put it another way, they're intrisically related).
Against some harder-hitting mobs ingame, you simply can't stand toe-to-toe with them. Even if you're defensive specced so as to avoid half the incoming attacks, those that do get through will still kill you pretty quickly. Whereas the Predators can take down these mobs fairly quickly with their high-dps attacks (or via kiting if Ranger), and the Rogues can avoid damage via stuns, AA abilities, and the like, the Bard can't do much about it except kite or mez. As noted above, it's *possible* for, say, a Troub to solo a ^^^ heroic. It's just really dicey at times, and takes forever because you need to mez a lot (whereas an Assassin, for example, can throw out an 18k opening assassinate followed by cheap shot-> 10-12k mortal blade in the span of 3 seconds).
Thankfully, auto-attack damage (and some of the new TSO AAs such as Intoxicating Notes) seem to be improving Bard damage noticeably. Not sure if that's a positive thing, as it makes some of their spell-based attacks weak in comparison, but at least they're slowly climbing the ladder. But I wouldn't complain if Bards got either stances, access to poisons, or even a nice hard-hitting shout useable, say, once every 3-5min. It would make their soloing life so much easier, as well as helping to improve their parses in groups/raids.
*edit* - *or*, the other option, would be to improve defense on Scouts (or at least on Bards) so that it's not as important to take a monster down *ASAP* and so that they can take a few hits. This would be more of an impact for soloing than grouping/raiding, however, so the almighty parse wouldn't improve at all. But it would mean more toe-to-toe fighting and less kiting. In EQ1, for example, Bards could wear plate. That might not be a bad change to EQ2.

Aaramis wrote:

It likely stems from a poor conceived notion of needing more dps falling from the raiding players and carrying over to heroic players, when aside from a few exceptions isnt really needed in heroic content. In raids, especially TSO raids, every single little bit of extra dps helps to make things easier and at the upper end of the difficult encounters, even possible at all.
The harder encounters have alot of different effects to mess up the raids dps output, making every little bit count. I have yet to see heroic bosses that:
Periodically strip all debuffs from themself
Target lock/Target remove people so they cant do anything
Stun/stifle/no hostile spells
Put debuffs on people that lower their damage to 1
De-level players
repeatedly spawn groups of adds that take the dpsers attention away from the main enemy
chance to knockback/stun whenever enemy takes damage
etc
I know that in my guild at least, which is hardly an actual 'hard-core' guild that the bards are required to parse at least 4k+ on named fights unless for w/ever reason they get screwed over on a fight or two.
As far as raiding goes though, I would say the priority of what you do as a bard is: 1 buff, 2 debuff, 3 stay alive, 4 dps. Aside from that what else IS there to even do really? They aren't there to be ornamental, or to look pretty, or to afk buffbot. Bards are still scouts after all, and doing all of those things is part of their role.

Aaramis wrote:

It's already rediculous enough that scouts wear chain, plate would be purly absurd and really wouldn't help bards to solo much if at all. Scouts defense is fine and loosing avoidance for mit is only beneficial for survivability vs mobs that are heroic/epic or significantly higher level than the player. I think simply changing the way dirge self heals work to be a % of hp rather than a fixed amount and giving troubs something similar would be more than enough to help their solo ability.

Lethe5683 wrote:

/shrug, just throwing out ideas here. Bards got by just fine in EQ1 in plate, and could end up with some amazing AC at end-game if outfitted properly. But yes, there are plenty of ways to adjust Bards, and there needn't be a huge change. Fixing self-heals for Dirges, for example, is one example. Changing the way Dirge Fear line and Troub Charm line works, is another example - that could add amazing utility if they were actually useful (and yes, I realize the Charm ability is marginally useful for solo pulling - but that's about it, really. Nothing like the good old days of EQ1.)
Like I said, plenty of ways to improve Bards. Thing is, people have been suggesting ideas for the past several years, and I have yet to see any of those ideas come to pass :/