It has no effect at all on Clarity and the rate at which your party members regen mana.
The Desperate Dirge is VERY powerful for a bard song. Most bard songs are classified as cantrips, quick little spells that have minor duration and impact when song once, but add up over time. This song breaks out of that mold completely. The mana use, and the lack of regen, was needed to keep it from being overused. As the name implies, it's a last ditch effort on the bard's part to end a combat.
We'd kicked around the idea of the song stunning the bard for 10 to 30 seconds as another balance factor, or using a horn or lute as a consumable reagent, but neither proved practical, or easy to code. The change making bards immune to mana regen was relatively easy to implement.
It's going to take at least 30 minutes of just sitting to regen all that mana once you cast the song, twice that if you remain standing. And thats as it should be. The song rivals harm touch at that level in damage done (A 43rd level SK can do 430 to a SINGLE target), and this song will hit FOUR targets. That's 1600 damage, fast. It's use should be limited.
And it might encourage bards to wear more mana and mana stat boosting items, so they can have a larger mana reserve to draw from, speeding downtime between songs a bit. This is fine, as it means in most cases that they'll have to give up better armor to wear the low or no AC caster tuned garb.
----- Original Message -----
From: Douglas Bierbower
To: eqbards@onelist.com
Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 1999 5:10 PM
Subject: Re: [eqbards] New Patch.
I read it the same way.
Actually, the patch message seemed to indicate their would be no method possible to speed up a bard's mana regen rate, it gave no indication of any change that would alter how current bard songs *may* speed mana regen for other party members (or maybe I just read it wrong).
Ariell, Karana Server
-the resident "dumb" bard *smiles*
George Holt wrote:
in addition there is no way for bards to speed up mana regen... (sorry, those buffs won't work...)