At 09:17 AM 2/27/01 -0600, you wrote:
>Okay - I've been following this thread for a couple days and I'm pretty
>confused as to what Whee is really arguing about. It mostly seems to be
>rhetorical debate; or perhaps the comment that people are exaggerating too
>much. Keep in mind that - like analogies exaggerating the opposite of what
>you are arguing is also a rhetorical device.
I agree with you Slyde. The conversations seemed to me to be getting
convoluted and losing their coherence. But since you've summarized the
basic gist of the arguments, I'm chiming in with a few quick comments.
>I don't mean this as a flame to Whee, (by singling him out); but the
>argument (if I'm not following it correctly I apologize in advance) seems to
>be that the thread is Whee one side and everyone else (who participating in
>the thread) on the other.
>
>1) DDD - are you saying that this IS a useful song? That 99 pct of the
>Bards are wrong - that it is VERY useful; or simply that it is very slightly
>useful and we are "ridiculously exaggerating" by saying something is
>"completely" useless instead of "very marginally" useless. Not MUCH of an
>exaggeration there if you ask me.
I would have preferred that this song were put on a timer much like the
Divine Aura spell for Clerics, instead of using our mana. Then again, at
least we can unmemorize this song while waiting for our mana to recover and
when we've got enough mana, just rememorize it. The cleric has to keep 1
slot inactive waiting for this to recover (though DA does come back pretty
fast).
If I had an extra spell slot I'd have DDD loaded just because it's a nice
finishing blow. Who wouldn't like the extra damage that this supplies?
Unfortunately, at the cost of a song slot, it's way too costly. I have many
other songs in my general repertoire that provide much better utility than
this.
However, almost each bard song has it's place, and in a particular
situation this song could be useful. If I had the extra slot, and I knew
that charm wasn't going to be useful, I'd memorize it for the one shot use,
use it, then put something else in this slot until I recovered my mana.
I pretty much fall in line with the majority here, that this song is
marginally useful in limited circumstances. If someone finds a reason to
use this more frequently, I'm sure we'd love to hear it.
>2) The PvP thing was argued a bit - but someone pointed out how Verant has
>made it very clear they claim they are specifically tuning this song to
>balance bards across the board. There has been no indication that this is a
>PVP. While it could be a "stealth component" of the tuning a) I doubt it
>and b) it's not taking the issue at face value especially considering the
>whole "Class Balance" threads
I don't play PvP so I don't have much interest in this particular argument.
From my casual perusal this conversation fell into a quibbling about
statistics and that there was a lot of back and forth. I think it was
summarized well at one time, but then kept going in a rhetorical argument.
>3) Bards are over powered. You haven't really spent much time arguing
>that - and I'm not quite clear on your argument for that. Perhaps it is
>due to soloing ability. I despise soloing and never do it. Personally - if
>you were to judge EQ as a solo game; it is VERY poor. Any single-player RPG
>game rings around EQ as a single-player game. If I felt like single-player
>gaming I'd play BG2.
This fell down to arguing about each other's perceptions of a bard. I think
at this point you state your opinion and back it up. If it's a strong
argument, it should stand up on it's own, with some back and forth on
smaller issues.
My quick opinion on this, bards are lot of fun and very challenging to play
in the long run. A bard's role continually changes depending on the group
composition as well as with each level you gain. The strength of a bard is
generally it's versatility. But the expense of that versatility is that you
must continually readjust your tactics. I think we all agree that at higher
levels we don't like being asked to play just one song (I don't need to
mention what that song is).
Now whether a bard is *the* best or not or whether they can only be played
by an "elite" group matters not a whit to me.
I enjoy playing him and that's all that really matters to me. I know a lot
of people have been dissatisfied with Verant and their handling of bards,
and perhaps because I play casually (which to me means only at most 2 hours
at a time) and have levelled slowly, I haven't been caught up in the nerfs
that have infuriated the more dedicated players. I definitely owe the
dedicated players many thanks for smoothing out the road for all of us who
came later.
---Windleaf
>A lot of the argument was spent on time arguing percentages - but that was
>pretty much arguing 1+2 I guess...
>
>The thread kind of reminds me of the Monty Python Argument sketch - the
>argument SEEMS to be going nowhere just argument for arguments sake (that's
>an exaggeration too by the way)
>
>Again - I don't mean this as a flame - or even negative in any way - I'm
>just intellectually both intrigued and very confused at the same time as to
>what is REALLY being argued.