Update 56 Preview 3: Stormsinger Archetype

Howdy all! Please be sure to check out both the Producer's Letter and the Archetype Overview page before diving in here :)

Changes from Base Class

Feats and Abilities:
Stormsingers gain the following feats:

• Magical Training (1)

Stormsingers do not gain the following feats:

• Improved Inspire Courage +1
• Improved Inspire Courage +2
• Soothing Song
• Ballad Melody: Greatness
• Inspiration Melody: Heroics

Spellbook:
Spell Level 1:
Added: Shocking Grasp
Removed: n/a

Spell Level 2:
Added: Electric Loop
Removed: n/a

Spell Level 3:
Added: Lightning Bolt
Removed: n/a

Spell Level 4:
Added: Ball Lightning
Removed: n/a

Spell Level 5:
Added: Chain Lightning
Removed: n/a

Spell Level 6:
Added: Thunderstroke
Removed: n/a

Past Life
Stormsinger: +5 Lightning and Sonic Spellpower per stack

New Tree: Stormsinger
Replaces Swashbuckler

Themes: Lightning and sonic damage, thunder, offensive spellcasting

Summary: Harness the thunderstorms to bring elemental destruction to your enemies.

Core Abilities

Core 1: Stormsinger: You gain +5 Lightning, +5 Cold, and +5 Sonic Spellpower per core ability you take in this tree.

Core 3: Lightning Strike: Your Sonic and Cold spells have a 20% chance to cause a massive Lightning Strike whenever they hit an enemy. This lightning strike deals an extra 1d6 Electric damage per caster level.

Core 6: Enhanced Bolt I: Your Lightning Strike damage is upgraded to deal 1d6+2 Electric damage per caster level.

Core 12: Enhanced Bolt I: Your Lightning Strike is upgraded to add 1d3 stacks of Vulnerability when it goes off. The damage is upgraded to 1d6+4.

Core 18: Enhanced Bolt II: Whenever your Lightning Strike goes off, the enemy is Stunned with no save for 3 seconds. +1 Caster Level and Max Caster Level with Sonic + Cold + Electric spells.

Core 20: Master of Storms: +4 Cha, +1 Evocation DCs. Your Lightning Strike now deals 1d6+6 damage per caster level. The stun is upgraded to 5 seconds. +1 Caster Level and Max Caster Level with Sonic + Cold + Electric spells.

Tier 1:

• Multiselector: Sonic Blast or Niac's Cold Ray
• Musical Refrain: +1/2/3 Bard Songs
• Spell Critical: Electric and Cold 2%
• Electrocution: Whenever you cast an Electric or Sonic damage spell, you gain +5 to your Electric and Sonic Spell Power for 6 seconds. This stacks up to 1/3/5 times.
• Electric Reflexes: +1/2/3% Dodge

Tier 2:

• Multiselector: Reverberate or Niac's Biting Cold
• Metamagic Reduction: Maximize or Empower
• Spell Critical: Electric and Cold 2%
• Pierce Resistance: You bypass 5/10/15 points of Electric and Sonic Resistance.
• Fast Movement: You run 1% faster for each of your Bard levels.

Tier 3:

• Multiselector: Shout or Snowball Swarm
• Metamagic Reduction: Maximize or Empower
• Spell Critical: Electric and Cold 2%
• Stormcaller's Aria: Your Inspire Courage grants nearby allies +2/4/6 more Universal Spellpower and MRR.
• +1 Charisma

Tier 4:

• Inspire the Storm: Your Bardic Inspiration imbues allies with a chance to deal your Lightning Strike on melee and ranged attacks.
• Ride the Lightning: Your main hand weapon is now considered an Implement. When you critically hit with a Sonic, Cold, or Lightning Spell, you gain +3% Dodge, +3 Reflex saving throws, and your spell point costs are reduced by 3% for 10 seconds.
• Spell Critical: Electric and Cold 2%
• (this space intentionally left blank)
• +1 Charisma

Tier 5:

• Horn of Thunder SLA
• Eye of the Storm(singer): You are no longer negatively affected by Sleetstorm, and while in any Sleetstorm spells, you gain an additional Lightning Strike proc chance.
• Spell Critical: Electric and Cold 2%
• Stormcaller: +5/10/15 Electric, Cold, and Sonic Spellpower. Rank 3: You get Iceberg as a spell at level 6.
• Storm Studies: +1 Evocation DCs

Spellsinger Notes:

You may notice that this tree shares a few SLAs with Spellsinger - to help we've added multiselectors to Sonic Blast and Shout (Cure Light Wounds and Cure Light Wounds, Mass). You can't take Sonic Blast and Sonic Blast at the same time, same with the other shared SLAs. Also, we buffed Reverberate a bit!

Bugfixes from last Lamannia:

• New SFX have been added!
• Snowball Swarm SLA now works correctly
• on-hit lightning from the bardic inspiration buff should now work
• Even more stormsinger SLAs should have unique and appropriate cooldowns
• Fixed some misc typos and antiquated text in all Bard trees while I was in there poking around :)

To Do List:
Should probably add some source of the Sleet Storm spell somewhere - just barely ran out of time for this preview :P

I really like this now - the sleet storm enhancement is just the type of thing I was looking to be added to this tree. Cant wait to test it again.

Does the increased proc change of sleet storm happen when monsters are inside or when the caster is inside?

Is there any chance you can make bard songs apply en masse. Right now, people use action cancelling to get around it, but it would be nice to see a QOL with bards fixed. In raids buffing people with songs using only WAI mechanics takes a full minute before you can buff with spells. Every shrine. This can easily make it so the bard spends a significant chunk of the quest buffing rather than playing.

Can we get numbers (even ballpark ones) for the proc chances from the song buff, sleet storm buff, etc. for lightning strike? It would really help us give meaningful feedback. Because a lot of this stuff is very difficult to test, especially the song buff due to needing another player with us.

Anyways, great work, this is really turning into something cool.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Lynnabel

[*]Should probably add some source of the Sleet Storm spell somewhere - just barely ran out of time for this preview :P

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You think? :P

Can't say I'm happy about the change to sonic blast, justifications notwithstanding. But I'm glad you decided to pick up on the suggestion to add Sleet Storm to the archetype's spell list. Thanks!

Still would love to have Ice Storm and Gust of Wind there as well, but I'll take any win I can at this point.

Cheers,
NH

Since with the launch of Stormsinger you guys are taking the time to revisit some of the bard related features, I'd like to make a suggestion, even if not for the next update but some time in the future:

I understand the change to sonic blast - it does overperform in a vaccum and at lower levels, and making it single target brings it on par with similar single target elemental spells from other classes. For spellsingers, however, it's a big part of their rotation even up to cap. That's even more so due to the fact the few alternative spells we have are cones, which still have wonky targeting and quite often simply fizzle without hitting anything - so sonic blast is a good spell to cast to mitigate those opportunities and fill in the rotation. Not to mention the fact the change also significantly reduces the value of both Master of Music and Master of Accoustics.

So, here are a couple of suggestions, not mutually exclusive:

1 - Make it so that Master of Acoustics turns sonic blast back into AoE, if technically possible. Or put it in Very Very Vocal if that's better balanced.

2 - Create new bard exclusive sonic spells for level brackets 3 and 5, which are currently empty of options for DPS spells for spellsingers. Maybe some sonic version of other elemental spells of those levels, balanced as needed. That would allow for regular bards to still be useful in the caster niche if they want to focus on being spellsingers. At the current state, this change will make Stormsinger bards the only really viable alternative for caster bards, effectively adding zero new options to the table and turning all current spellsingers into stormsingers, whether they go with Spellsinger or Stormsinger T5s.

Thanks in advance for the attention,

Cheers,
NH

Something else that makes the sonic blast change even more drastic for Spellsingers is the fact that The Spell Greater Shout still strips spell absorb and can potentially kill people wearing 5 piece LGS sets if you have Fatesinger's core 4th on, so we have to pretty much completely remove the spell from our rotation more often than not. losing the AoE DPS from sonic blast further compounds that issue.

If you guys decide to indeed go ahead with that change, please don't do it before you fix this Greater Shout bug. Otherwise the sonic blast "fix" will impact Spellsingers's rotation and DPS all the way from levels 1 to 32.

Cheers,
NH

Inspire the Storm

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Lynnabel

Howdy all! Please be sure to check out both the Producer's Letter and the [URL="https://forums.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/533846-Update-56-Preview-3-Archetype-

[B][COLOR="#FF8C00"]Tier 4:[/COLOR][/B]

Inspire the Storm: Your Bardic Inspiration imbues allies with a chance to deal your Lightning Strike on melee and ranged attacks.

Bugfixes from last Lamannia:

• on-hit lightning from the bardic inspiration buff should now work

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Not sure what the intent is with inspire the storm. But at the moment it just adds a VERY small amount of lightning damage on hit that happens each hit. No proc chance. It also doesn't have any of the riders or scale with your spellpower from what i can tell. The person I got to test with me literally was getting 10-12 a hit he said. I was getting like 50-60 a hit from the proc when i tested it out myself.

Blast Rod

I don't know if its intended or not, but I received blast rod as a spell after leveling up, picking EDs, and Enhancements. Don't know where in this process it occurred. That said, I actually like it if this is WAI. Blast rod helps smooth out the rotation. Though if I had to guess this is not WAI.

Lightning strike "stun"

The lightning strike "stun" is really a freeze. The freeze does not seem to add helpless. And it seems a lot harder to proc than you would think. It seems dots only have a chance to proc on it when you cast the spell not when their damage ticks. This significantly changes my estimation of the power of this class as it significantly nerfs the single target dps. It also makes it basically impractical to stack vulnerability stacks on a monster. I didnt see any above 4 stacks due to how infrequent the proc is mixed with it only proccing on first cast of dots plus a lot of spells not proccing it at all despite doing sonic / cold damage.

I'll also add that the damage value for the lightning strike was also a fair bit lower than I would expect as well. I don't know if it was just some fluke with my build / race combo or what. But the math didn't seem to add up based on the tooltips + caster levels I'd expect.

Expensive Tree

The tree is ridiculously expensive. Allocating points was frustrating as there's obvious things that you must take (crit chance etc.) and other enhancements that when you add it all together, you're left with a very underwhelming amount of choice for fun enhancements (both due to lack of points and also lack of options).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Archfae

Inspire the Storm



Not sure what the intent is with inspire the storm. But at the moment it just adds a VERY small amount of lightning damage on hit that happens each hit. No proc chance. It also doesn't have any of the riders or scale with your spellpower from what i can tell. The person I got to test with me literally was getting 10-12 a hit he said. I was getting like 50-60 a hit from the proc when i tested it out myself.

Blast Rod

I don't know if its intended or not, but I received blast rod as a spell after leveling up, picking EDs, and Enhancements. Don't know where in this process it occurred. That said, I actually like it if this is WAI. Blast rod helps smooth out the rotation. Though if I had to guess this is not WAI.

Lightning strike "stun"

The lightning strike "stun" is really a freeze. The freeze does not seem to add helpless. And it seems a lot harder to proc than you would think. It seems dots only have a chance to proc on it when you cast the spell not when their damage ticks. This significantly changes my estimation of the power of this class as it significantly nerfs the single target dps. It also makes it basically impractical to stack vulnerability stacks on a monster. I didnt see any above 4 stacks due to how infrequent the proc is mixed with it only proccing on first cast of dots plus a lot of spells not proccing it at all despite doing sonic / cold damage.

I'll also add that the damage value for the lightning strike was also a fair bit lower than I would expect as well. I don't know if it was just some fluke with my build / race combo or what. But the math didn't seem to add up based on the tooltips + caster levels I'd expect.

Expensive Tree

The tree is ridiculously expensive. Allocating points was frustrating as there's obvious things that you must take (crit chance etc.) and other enhancements that when you add it all together, you're left with a very underwhelming amount of choice for fun enhancements (both due to lack of points and also lack of options).

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Woah, great catch on the Blast Rod thing. And yeah, the Freeze is meant to be a Freeze, I'll make sure the tooltips mention it properly. Was supposed to be on-theme since you're supposed to be able to use Cold spells for DPS here :)

I'll take another look at the on-hit lightning damage from the song. It definitely sounds like its still not calibrated correctly.

Advancement still bugged

Went Arti Bard Bard Bard Arti...the Arti level prompted me to take a L1 Bard spell, and then wouldn't let me advance (Invalid Advancement Data)

Took L5 Bard, tried again at L6, same deal, prompted me to take 1 spell from L1/2 Bard spellbook, errored when I tried to finish

Worked at L7 though

Things I still want from this Archetype:

-Sleet Storm & more CC in general.
-A lingering buff for standing in Clouds, Mists and Storms– as well as access to these spells + Gust of Wind. A % chance to turn any foe standing in these Clouds etc. into a block of ice.
-And since this is supposed to work with Warchanter– a chance for any Sonic/Electric spells, as well as vorpal melee attacks, to destroy(instakill) any frozen enemies. The melee portion of this ability could be placed into Warchanter.
-I want Bard Songs to be reworked, as a whole. But for now:
A Song of Haste that provides a Music Bonus to you and your nearby party members' Movement speed/Attack Speed/Reflex saves for a short duration(20-30 seconds or so).
Song of FoM somewhere in this tree.
-While the guitar riffs are sick– they do feel a touch out of place :P Maybe this is because it seems to happen off the Lightning procs. It would be wicked cool– and perhaps more digestible– if at the end of every song– you automatically produce a Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning effect, with a riff to go along with it.
-Stormsinger's Fascinate should leave foes with a lingering vulnerability to Lightning. Or freeze them.
-New and better VFX for Snowball Swarm
-Misty Step SLA.
-Absolute Zero instead of Iceberg. Or at least a choice between them.

I am happy to make concessions for Stormsinger losing access to Sonic Blast/Cure SLA's, Reverberate, Fast Movement, Ride the Lightning, in order for the above to happen.

I also think Spellsinger should lose Shout and Horn of Thunder, and get replacement abilities instead, because both trees having so much overlap– especially identical tier 5's– is lame. And Stormsinger would otherwise just steal its thunder, so to speak.

Confirming that Inspire the Storm does nothing - at least on yourself. Ran through Grimm with an Inqui Stormsinger with the buff, never procced one lightning bolt, and I didnt see any lightning on hit either

Is it supposed to work on yourself, or is it ally only?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by droid327

Confirming that Inspire the Storm does nothing - at least on yourself. Ran through Grimm with an Inqui Stormsinger with the buff, never procced one lightning bolt, and I didnt see any lightning on hit either

Is it supposed to work on yourself, or is it ally only?

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This is my bad. I was running a level 32 character that had scion of air. I mistook the electric damage from scion of air as the on-hit damage from Inspire the Storm. Retesting, I'm getting no discernible effect from inspire the storm.

Sorry for causing confusion. The text does say ally, but the buff is applied to yourself too (like a few other song effects with wording of "allies").

Niac's cold ray and biting cold are awful sla choices. As is Reverberate. I don't know what you guys think DoTs are for or how useful they are...but no. MAYBE if they proc'd stuff per hit, but sounds like they don't. Not sure if other dots work that way or not, because the only time anyone ever uses them is on red/purple bosses and they're immune to most stuff that would proc.

Party members are going to love this sleet storm addition ;)

Core 3: Lightning Strike: Your Sonic and Cold spells have a 20% chance to cause a massive Lightning Strike whenever they hit an enemy. This lightning strike deals an extra 1d6 Electric damage per caster level.

Inspire the Storm: Your Bardic Inspiration imbues allies with a chance to deal your Lightning Strike on melee and ranged attacks.

Does the song I put on other people which is supposed to give them then chance to proc, scale with anything? Or is it 1D6+6 times what ever my caster level is?

Currently, it seems to be broken, as I put it on a bear that was attacking, and in about 100 hits, he saw 3 procs, for 10, 12, and 17 damage.

Eye of the Storm(singer): You are no longer negatively affected by Sleetstorm, and while in any Sleetstorm spells, you gain an additional Lightning Strike proc chance.

What confuses me about this, is that I don't know anyone who casts any kind of AOE spell, that obscures your vision, and makes it difficult to find targets and to avoid damage, and then stands in it on purpose.

Sleetstorm can be a decent spell, when you cast in down a long hallway, to prevent the mobs from rushing upon you, giving you or your party a chance to kill them from range, but you don't cast it where you stand,

It would be great to see:

- If it can be programmed - The ability to for Fascinate to strip way Electric Immunity, fading say [20 seconds] after the Fascinate wares off. This would bring Songs back into the equation for this Bard option, in a different way, and give the occasional reason to use Electric spells in the book over sonic and cold SLAs. However, due to the time it takes to sing songs and the fact that to catch opponents you need to be close to them, it would require an active decision to use, rather than being a simply button to press in the rotation. May help differentiate the play-style.

- Deflect Arrows once every 6 seconds built into the tree around T2 or T3 (or a Core). "Your mastery of the winds allows you to control the air pushing missiles aside".

- For the T5 2% crit ability, adding in the addition of 200SP. T5 Spellsinger already has this as part of Advanced Magical Studies. Both abilities are T5 so they would be mutually exclusive, but would assist picking T5 in Stormsinger as they are primary nukers, but the T5 option lacks the Spellsinger's SP regen. Keeping spell points on-par would help; plus purely a Crit bonus is not exciting (even if effective) for a T5 selection.

- +1 Charisma, to be a +1 Charisma/ +1 Con Selector.

I copied over my LV 30 Spell Singer and did a LR - moving to StormSinger

- I wasn't sure if I would need a +1 to make the change - I used a +20 and didn't need to use any- might be worth some extra verbiage
- Spell choice was a little tough while leveling - but as I got to 20 - felt about right
- Gap in LV 1 electric spell choice (I think)
- LV 5 spells continue to see underwhelming - Call Lightning Storm would be intertering - but I never like the way it worked (low proc rate) on live, Call Lightning would be fun
- Took Masters of Air vs Masters of Music - note no shacking grasp for LV 1 StormingSingers (unless I missed that)
- Being a Enchantment focused bard 1st, I took Scion of the Feywild (+4 DC Enchantment - the Sonic and Force bonus have little value). Scion of Air would doesn't mesh as well as Feywild did with Spellsinger

More to follow...

After some more testing, there's one more thing that is somewhat worrying and may have escaped the devs attention when thinking about the sonic blast change. As usual for a game as complex as DDO, it may look like a single small change, but it's one that has very important repercussions for the whole leveling process:

Before the change, a player going for Stormsinger could pick the sonic blast SLA from either tree depending on preference and keep filling it up till they get to the more juicy things they want, before going to the second tree.

Now, with the lack of sonic blast's AoE damage, a player will very much NEED to get both shout and snowball swarm SLAs as soon as possible to remedy that at least some. That means having to necessarily split valuable enhancement points into two trees and postpone valuable abilities till much later, or lose a lot of potential damage. For example, spellsinger T4 abilities will most likely have to wait till level 10 instead of being taken at 6 like today.

The new electric spells do not help mitigate this much at lower levels as bards do not have enough spellpoints to apply metas to them, so even using them instead of the SLAs from both trees will mean a significantly reduced damage potential that goes beyond just the change to sonic blast.

This, of course, only in case someone picks Stormsinger - for pure bards going caster route is gonna pretty much a nono considering they won't even have the electric spells nor the other SLAs to help them out. As said before with this change the inclusion of the archetype unfortunately won't bring new options to the table, it will just replace old regular spellsinger bard with new stormsinger/spellsinger bard, leaving regular bards pretty much only for the melee route.

So, reiterating what was said before:

Technically, the change is justifiable in a vaccum and brings the spell in line with other spells of the same level. For bards, though, that has imense implications to the current viability of the class that go far beyond that change. Unlike other classes, they can't just really pick another spell to use instead - as they have just 4 native damage spells in total.

I'd either pursue another avenue for balancing Stormsinger (which I believe is the main reason for this change, possibly due to the lightning procs from sonic blast's AoE), or at least postpone this change, even if this is gonna leave Stormsinger a bit on the too strong side, until a revamp of the sonic spell portion of the bard's spellbook gives them some more options (mainly for those that do not wish to be pidgeonholed into Stormsinger) to mitigate the loss of Sonic blast's AoE effect.

Anyway this goes, I'll be taking a break from the game for a while as it's become clear this type of thing is affecting my mental health more than it should (my problem, not yours), so I wish you find a good compromise for those who'll stay around.

Cheers,
NH

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Abilbo

Eye of the Storm(singer): You are no longer negatively affected by Sleetstorm, and while in any Sleetstorm spells, you gain an additional Lightning Strike proc chance.

What confuses me about this, is that I don't know anyone who casts any kind of AOE spell, that obscures your vision, and makes it difficult to find targets and to avoid damage, and then stands in it on purpose.

Sleetstorm can be a decent spell, when you cast in down a long hallway, to prevent the mobs from rushing upon you, giving you or your party a chance to kill them from range, but you don't cast it where you stand,

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But now you can!
And FoM protects you from the negative parts
So you definitely should!
Often.
Do it.
Cast sleet storm
AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.

So I've asked this in preview 1 and 2 now, and never saw a response. So I'm going to try my luck and ask what I assume is one final time in preview 3.

What happens to this core in Warchanter:

Fighting Spirit: +10 hit points.
Your Inspire Greatness now uses your Charisma score for its Temporary hit points. This is doubled in epics

And as an extension, any ability directly related to a class feature that gets removed in an Archtype.

Will this feature simply give +10 HP and nothing else?

Will features in general that run off removed features just not work? If so, should they maybe be exchanged for something else that does? I have no issue with you removing features of the base class for an archtype, but leaving stuff in the archtype that it no longer qualifies for seems odd.