Although nobody else has asked this question (and perhaps I should keep
my mouth shut), I'd like to know what it tells us that, three weeks
before the expansion release, they're "brainstorming" possible Bard songs
and asking us for suggestions? Kinda sad.

I'm not going to suggest/comment on new bard songs; a lot of the ideas
here are good, and I have a hard time deciding what to suggest given that
none of us has any idea what kind of MOBs a level 51-60 Bard might be
facing.

I would suggest that you say the following in your letter:
1) Given our small melee-based skill set, our lack of crits, etc., our
bad defense, our relatively under-powered high level armor (in AC), our
low hit points, and our lack of pets, our melee component is roughly 1/5
the melee of a pure melee class. That means that our casting should be
about 80% as good as a pure caster. In some circumstances, it should be
clearly better.

2) They seem to believe that our songs should be underpowered
because 1) we do not use mana, and 2) we can sing party-wide songs. This
does not compensate for the very short duration of our song effects, nor
the fact that we can keep at most three effects going at once.

We were asked to list the things we'd like to see them "fix". They
should be referred to the Bard Petition on the Gameplay board, and to the
Lullaby thread. My list:

1) Lullaby. When a level 43 Enchanter can mez 17 kobolds, with a less
than 10% resist rate, and a level 45 bard gets resist rates of 70%
against the same, this song stinks. It doesn't do what they say it
should do; even if it did, it should be better than that. If they don't
want us to stop gigantic trains, they should shrink the AE radius of the
song, not make it useless.

2) Pixie Strike appears (to me) to have the same resist problem.

3) Numerous songs are instrument-based, but instruments appear to have
no effect on the song at all. Lullaby and Psalms in particular.

4) Our songs don't scale up in proportion to either PC or NPC
HPs/damage dealing. They should.

5) Is there a reason that the Psalms don't stack with each other? This
makes them so over-specialized as to be useless.

6) For multiple effect songs: if they are going to cut the power of
each component in half (so it doesn't take away from the parent class's
abilities), and then cut it by N (where N is the number of component
effects), the MOBs should NOT get full resists against each component,
any one of which causes the whole song to fail. Either a component
should work if the specific resist is failed against that component, or
MOBs should get a single "average" resist check. Multiple component
anti-MOB songs are pretty worthless now.

7) If a party-based song has multiple components, they need to keep in
mind: 1) not every party member benefits, 2) if our songs have stacking
conflicts with a lot of different spell/buff effects, the songs have to
be pretty strong to make them useful, 3) we can only keep up three song
effects at once.

Just my take on it.

Kenross Cantoforjado, 46 songs, Innoruuk