On Fri, 11 Jun 1999, dennis wojdyla wrote:

>
> Well, if we get anymore songs that require mana i'am thinking Meditation
> will be needed (like all other hybrids)

I disagree. Using mana for DDD was just a way of putting a
rather long delay on it. They could've given it to as a skill
that cycled every hour or so (like Lay Hands), but it makes
more sense to make it a song and use mana to incorporate the
delay. (They could've just greyed out the song icon until the
time had cycled, but then you'd end up memorizing the song,
thinking "#&!@ it still hasn't cycled," and forgetting it for
another song.)

Several combat skills (e.g. monk special attacks) are
exclusive of each other - if you use one, it starts the delay
timer for all. Having multiple one-shot bard songs which used
mana would be the same thing, except we have a nice blue
progress bar showing when we can use it again instead of
having to glance at our watch and note the time every time we
use it.

The *only* reason I'd like meditate is so that it doesn't take
us 10 times longer to memorize a song than it does for a
spellcaster to memorize spells (if you haven't played a
spellcaster, you auto-meditate when memorizing and the bar
moves in huge increments of about 20% - takes about 4 seconds
to memorize the most difficult spell you have). When my
cleric friend and I died, she memorized her spells, conjured
up a new hammer of wrath, crossed two zones to get from the
bank to the gate (where I was), and I was still memorizing my
songs. Surely after memorizing these songs so often, we'd get
pretty good at it? Just one point in meditate - that won't
help mana regeneration will it? Please please pretty please?
:-)

--
John H. Kim
kim@...