On Wed, 22 Sep 1999, Greg Gillan wrote:
>
> a) Why do certain of our songs (Lullaby, Pixie Strike) work find against
> monsters, but have absolutely no effects verses players in duels? Is this
> intentional or a bug?
I had no problems using Pixie Strike against my friend in the
Arena a month ago. I did not test Lullaby. Charm does not
work well in arenas, but I hear that is because there is no
pathing in there, so your "pet" has no way to follow you or a
target.
> b) When a magical effect wears off (i.e. Guise of the Deciever) our songs
> get stuck. The /st command does not unstick them in this situation and we
> have to resort to speed mashing of the buttons to unstick them.
I say get rid of the hit-a-song-key-to-stop-it function
entirely. The "you have not yet recovered" delay is
client-side and thus completely dependent on how quickly your
CPU is able to cycle the button graphics from greyed out to
colored in. If you get in a laggy battle (e.g. lots of area
effect spells), you will find the buttons taking longer to
come back. I can even change this delay by switching between
DirectX and glide mode (it's faster under DirectX on my
Voodoo3, which is one of the reasons I almost always play in
DirectX mode despite some other graphics glitches).
Unlike spells (which often stay greyed out a while after
casting), our songs come back immediately after you stop them
(aside from the time it takes to color the button in). So get
rid of this "delay" and when we hit a song button, have it
auto-stop any previous song and start up the next one. This
will also have the benefit of cutting the arcade nature of
playing a bard in half.
> Please offer up any suggestions you can.
Let us left-click on SoW to remove it.
Change our levitate song so that it does not override the
levitate spell (same problem as SoW used to have). Same thing
with underwater breathing.
Make the identify song party-effect, so folks without an
innate identify ability can identify no-drop items.
Fix the bug where a charmed pet will on its own decide to
attack a player.
Let us gain safe fall skill at something like 1 point/level
(thus capping us at around 65 for level 50, instead of a hard
cap of 40). I'm finding myself taking damage again running
over uneven terrain with my mistmoore drum at level 35.
Our dodge skill caps at 125. A cleric's dodge skill caps at
80. I understand not giving us parry and riposte since we're
not true tanks, but capping dodge at 125 makes us little
better than clerics at tanking. Surely a class whose primary
means of attacking is melee would know a lot more about
defensive melee than a cleric?
Either make our invisibility song make us completely invisible
(no glowing ball), or make the glowing ball for this song last
longer so that we can take advantage of it to coordinate party
movement while invisible (what GZ suggested we do last time).
Right now, the only practical way I've found to use this song
with a group is for me to walk and everyone to /follow me - we
don't need a glowing ball to do this.
Investigate whether the "you feel yourself starting to appear"
change made our invisibility song 100% reliable. As much as I
like 100% reliable invisibility, that can't have been what
Verant intended.
Fix Hymn so regeneration can be cast on top of it. Right now,
regen will not take unless you cast it before you start Hymn.
This has caused a lot of folks I group with to waste a lot of
mana trying to figure out why their spell won't take hold.
State whether or not Anthem/Clerity's attack speedups stack
with the enchanters' spells. I haven't found them to stack in
my tests, but some official word would go a long way towards
clearing up misconceptions (and saving me a lot of testing :-)
and letting us optimize our song selection.
Change spell behavior so that if it isn't resisted, its
effects last for at least one "tick." None of this BS where a
mob doesn't resist Lullaby and nods asleep, but immediately
wakes up to bash me. I'm pretty sure casters experience the
same problem with root.
--
John H. Kim
kim@...