I'm going to include the below with our letter as
amplification; its one of the most sailent
descriptions reguarding "balance" I've read.

UPDATE 2 when I get home from work.

Thanks,
-Tork

John H. Kim:
Just to clarify what it means to "buff without
exceeding your mana regen rate..."

Say each buff costs you one bubble. Say each buff
lasts 60 minutes. Say you meditate back one bubble a
minute. That means you can keep a maximum of 60 buffs
up.

How many buffs you can cast going from FM to OOM is
pretty irrelevant since buffing is almost always done
during downtime. What matters is how many buffs your
mana regeneration rate allows you to maintain.

This is the type of analysis Verant failed to do (and
is failing to do) every time they go off on one of
their "but bards use no mana!" tangents. No we don't
use mana, but because of the short lifespan of our
songs and the (relatively) long "casting time" for our
songs, it's pretty much the same thing as using mana.
In fact, you can think of our songs as spells that
last 12 seconds, require 5 bubbles of mana to cast,
and our mana regen rate gives us back 5 bubbles every
3 seconds.

--
John H. Kim

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