Rokenn's guild was overcrowded for the New(tm) Hate, so I got
to fool around a bit with the new songs.
L39 - Found (as far as my friends could tell) only in
Kelethin. Upgrade to charm. Doesn't require a flute. Uses
mana, but during a 5 minute session charming seafuries, I only
had a sliver of white show up. I suspect what's going on is
that they didn't want us running around in circles for 15+
minutes trying over and over to charm mobs that were red to
us, relying on the occasional success to help us kill 2 red
mobs. When I tried the song on myself (with 61 MR I resist
about half the time), I did notice an appreciable amount of
mana loss - maybe a quarter bubble - in about 1 minute.
(Btw, seafuries make terrible charming targets - they do
relatively little damage compared to their hp, and take a
really long time to kill each other.)
I didn't test for level limit. If we can charm level 50
stuff, then I need to go try charming Brother Zephyl - he can
kill a hill giant in 11 seconds. :) Course he resisted all
my Chains previously so who knows...
This is a very welcome and long overdue upgrade. I will not
be avoiding the dead side of LGuk and the bug/bats in Sol B
anymore. And I guess I'll have to stop passing on all the
Orbs of Tishan that drop off Nagafen. :)
L45 - str/atk buff, attack speedup, and magical skin (a la
Rune). It's targeted, but seems to work on both party members
and non-party members. It does seem to be a "twinking" song,
but OTOH I can see it being useful in emergencies when your
healer is OOM and someone is about to die. Previously, all we
could do was charm the mob, which only pauses things. Now we
can put a small Rune on someone. I haven't tested how many hp
the rune is yet. It does *not* work on charmed pets - you get
a "you cannot cast this spell on this NPC" message.
The big problem with this song is that it seems they forgot
our brass skill caps at 200. You get a ton of missed notes
with it even at max skill. Whatever they did to fix the
missed notes with L41+ songs, they forgot to do with this
song. /bug it and hope they fix it (servers went down this
morning for a patch so maybe they've already fixed it).
Another problem with it (if you use it for twinking) is that
low level mobs tend to run at half hp if you use this on
someone. They interpret this buff as you aggroing on them,
and since you're so high level, they run at half.
All in all, very welcome additions. I'm on the verge of
thinking the bard is overpowered again.
--
John H. Kim
kim@...