On Wed, 10 Nov 1999, JasonF wrote:
>
> A 30th level necro friend of mine (Hi, Evanya!) has started a bard based in
> no small part on grouping with me a lot and seeing how much fun I have.
> Cyricc, the new bard, was asking questions about our skills when confronted
> with leveling up to 10th. I put it thusly: "Bards have very many of the
> skills that other specialize in. Since we have skills from all other
> classes it is only just and fair that we either get the skill later
> (Clarity: Enchanter 29th, Bard 32nd) or that it isn't quite as strong or
> quite as useful (Forage, Safe Fall, Charm, Melee)"
Just FYI, Clarity was originally a bard-only ability. It was
given to enchanters back when they were widely regarded a
broken class. I'd consider it a slap in the face that they
get it before we do, if not for the fact that it stacks with
bard Clarity and thus has only a positive effect on the
players (aside from bards being slightly less desired in
groups).
For the most part I agree with you that we don't *need* these
skills to cap higher. However, a lot of the early portion of
the game is spent in pointless button mashing to work up a
skill to where it's considered "usable" by most players. Our
skill caps in many cases fall below that point. e.g. Rogues
love to hit hide when a train is coming because they're
virtually guaranteed that it'll work. OTOH, bards are
virtually guaranteed that it won't work so they don't bother
trying. I'd like to see it succeed often enough to make it
worthwhile to at least try it.
The attack speedups of Anthem/Celerity/Verses behind halved is
another gripe. Halving Anthem I don't have much problem with.
Around that level (16), the enchanter's Quickness speeds you
up by 20% and takes 80 mana. A L16 enchanter (say 120 int)
would have to use virtually all his mana to cast Quickness on
5 other party members; the bard's Anthem was doing the same
thing. So it made sense to halve it.
The problem is that this doesn't really scale. They recently
halved the speed of Verses of Victory (L50 song), and from
reports I'm seeing it's gone from a 45% speedup (same as
enchanter's L49 Swift) to about a 23% speedup. A typical L50
enchanter (say 170 int) will use a bit more than half his mana
to cast Swift like the Wind (250 mana) on 5 party members,
plus has Clarity to help him recover from it faster. The
situation was nowhere near as unbalanced as it was with the
Anthem/Quickness comparison. In fact, a L50 enchanter could
cast Alacrity (25% speedup, 115 mana) on 5 party members for
about a bubble and half of mana, and that would be *faster*
than our nerfed Verses.
Granted Verses does have stat buffs as well, but I think it's
clear the imbalance was not as bad as with Anthem. Verant
just took the methodology they used to balance things at L16,
and applied it to L50. They probably should've reduced our
speedups by a flat amount (say 10%) across the board. But
because they halved it, you get the ridiculous situation where
a L24 spell is faster than our L50 song. Also, if this had
been like Clarity and the effects stacked, then I wouldn't
have a problem with it. But because they don't stack, it in
effect takes away from what we have to offer to a group if an
enchanter is present.
--
John H. Kim
kim@...