Segueing (a nice Bardish thing to do) from my "Useless Songs" thread, I actually DO mem this piece of junk
sometimes:

1. On guild raids, I will sing it if I have enough mana AND the leaders have explicitly called for an AE
fight AND there's no reason to think I'm going to have to use Charm (OR I'm expecting to die) AND I have
nothing better to fill my eight slots. Otherwise, I would be hung by my, well, you know whats, if I had
the temerity to use AE. This may be a little narrow-minded of my guild leaders, but I'm hardly going to
argue the merits of this song in an attempt to change their minds.

2. When I'm explicitly TRYING to aggro a primary target (VS comes to mind), the songs I use are: This,
55 bellow and Charm. It works pretty well, even if none of them stick, since I believe MOBs get aggro
from the potential effect, not the actual effect. I am usually the 2nd or 3rd to aggro VS, at which point
I can slap on deftdance and keep him uselessly swinging at me while the tanks clobber him. My guild
leaders don't know I do this, I have to sneak a rune onto me and do it behind their backs, since they are
stuck in the "only riposte discipline people fight VS" mode, but we've never lost when I've done this, so
I don't think I'm provably wrong. If someone has a BETTER 3-song aggro-the-primary-MOB songlist, I'd love
to hear it.

In most conditions, we're pulling too fast for me to take the time to mem and demem this, and keep track
of what song I don't have available in the meantime. Nobody likes me to stop singing Cantana in downtime,
I'd better have a really good reason. And while I haven't worked out the math, I bet the net mana gain
from my singing the extra few pulses of Cantana on 3 casters can be used for comparable effect on the
MOB(s) regardless. So why give myself the headache?

Regarding what I would do to the song, my feeling is that, for a "Desperate Dirge" that is usable once
every 40 minutes at best, the effect should be pretty darned good. Something like an AE, ultra-low-resist
12-second stun or something. Give the party the breathing room they need to get a horrible situation
under control.

The difference between this and Paladin LoH or SK HT is that it is much more difficult to find a situation
where the power of this song comes anywhere close to matching its theoretical power, and its theoretical
power is pretty crummy. This isn't even taking into account the resist rate. The Paladin will frequently
find occasions where dumping a lot of hit points into an ally (or himself) is useful. The SK will
somewhat less frequently find occasions where knocking a large number of hit points off of a single MOB is
useful. The Bard will almost never find an occasion where knocking a small (relatively speaking) number
of hit points off of four MOBs is useful. If the song did X damage divided by the number of MOBs to X
MOBs, it might be cool. Even then, it should do more damage (probably 50%-100% more), and its resist
should be lower. SK Harm Touch resists far less often than this song does. Further, both LoH and HT are
skills, and don't hog spell slots. And even further than that, using LoH or HT doesn't stop the Paladin
or SK from casting, say, Stun or Darkness as much as they would like for the following 15 minutes. It's
just feeble.

Still, I wouldn't want ANY song to have a multi-minute timer. 55 Bellow is bad enough, having to wait
five minutes after memming a song to use it. If I had to reduce my available songs by 12.5% by filling a
song slot that would then be grayed out for 40 minutes, the song had better be HUGELY useful.

If you consider the fact that high-level Bards have about 30% the melee of high-level melee specialists,
then for balance, I figure that Bards should have about 70% the power of pure casters. And given that we
can have only 3 effects active at a time, and that other casters can have easily twice that (3 static
buffs, 2 static MOB debuffs, one additional effect, for example), each individual song should be MORE
powerful than an equivalent caster spell. Very few of ours are. This is far from one of them.

Kenross Cantoforjado, 57 songs, <Silent Justice> Innoruuk