Remove WC bonus to Inspire Courage - Opinions?

[Lord_WC]

Yeah, this suggestion is purely theoretical, and I realise turbine would never implement it just because it would screw so many people over...It just makes me angry that WC CAN do deep splashes (for personal DPS usually...) and still have better IC than pure virts and SS.

Giving all PRE's regen songs would make virts even less competitive.

I guess it's been this way so long it must be reasonably balanced and I just should just get over it.

I'd really love to have sorcs get their lvl9 spells @lvl14, so I could make deep splashes.

/sarcasm off

As the game is all about dps in endgame, the problem is not with warchanters. And besides, why does it make you ANGRY, that a class can multiclass and another can't? I mean you get angry if you see fighters, or rogues, because they can multiclass?

[AltheaSteelrain]

/not signed

Reason: everyone else has mentioned it.

On a selfish side note, I don't like this suggestion because it makes making Virt/Spellsinger DPS builds pointless and w/o challenge seeing the Warchanter PrE is already a huge shoe to fill as a bard.

[karl_k0ch]

Hell, no!

I want to have bards in my party because their songs add valuable DPS to the whole party. I play bards because the party likes my buffage.
The Warchanter does exactly that with a focus on combat buffs. It would feel odd when a pure Spellsinger would be preferred over an Axesinger, because the latter sacrificed better overall group dps for better personal dps.

[Angelus_dead]

Tl;dr: Remove WC bonus to IC, give WC more personal DPS.

It's true that the Bard specialties would be improved if some of their party buffs were replaced with personal effectiveness, but the +2 Inspire Courage is not the problem here. It's not a big deal compared with the total magnitude of Inspire Courage you'll get anyway.

It's actually the tier 2 abilities that would've been better left out: Song of Recklessness and Spellsong Vigor. In both cases, gameplay would be better if the Bard had instead got a self-only buff to give himself either direct melee power or offensive casting.

PS. An additional helpful change for Bards would be to reduce the cost of Inspired Damage to 1 per tier, opening up more flexibility after the obligatory is taken care of.

[coolpenguin410]

Why is this bothersome? It's just a +1/+2. How is this a huge deal? Give them a boost for all I care! Doing so would not detract from the reasons to make a Virtuoso or Spellsinger.

For the record, my bard is a Virtuoso and he's a blast to play so far.

You're upset because Warchanter can splash 4 levels of another class and have a comparable Inspire Courage? Big deal! They still can't do what other bards can do. Their fascinate won't compare to a Virtuoso's Enthrallment and casters won't need the bonus to hit and damage, but they will appreciate a Spellsinger. They can't regen HP or SP.

[AltheaSteelrain]

Why is this bothersome? It's just a +1/+2. How is this a huge deal? Give them a boost for all I care! Doing so would not detract from the reasons to make a Virtuoso or Spellsinger.

For the record, my bard is a Virtuoso and he's a blast to play so far.

You're upset because Warchanter can splash 4 levels of another class and have a comparable Inspire Courage? Big deal! They still can't do what other bards can do. Their fascinate won't compare to a Virtuoso's Enthrallment and casters won't need the bonus to hit and damage, but they will appreciate a Spellsinger. They can't regen HP or SP.

This.

THat's why I prefer to play my Spellsinger Splash more than Warchanter Genghis. I like versatility over min-max builds and the other two bard PrE's offer this better than Warchanter IMHO.

[LeslieWest_GuitarGod]

It's true that the Bard specialties would be improved if some of their party buffs were replaced with personal effectiveness, but the +2 Inspire Courage is not the problem here. It's not a big deal compared with the total magnitude of Inspire Courage you'll get anyway.

It's actually the tier 2 abilities that would've been better left out: Song of Recklessness and Spellsong Vigor. In both cases, gameplay would be better if the Bard had instead got a self-only buff to give himself either direct melee power or offensive casting.

PS. An additional helpful change for Bards would be to reduce the cost of Inspired Damage to 1 per tier, opening up more flexibility after the obligatory is taken care of.

I agree fully here. Warchanter 2 is a hastily thrown together cluster-flunk. Self buff would have been great.

My addition to this would be to add what almost every spellsinger agreed they wanted, more bard spells from pen & paper that would allow for far more varied and effective casting.

[Angelus_dead]

I agree fully here. Warchanter 2 is a hastily thrown together cluster-flunk.

The minor parts of WC2 are good: Martial weapon, medium armor, and more hp are all nice little touches. But the big strength comes from Recklessness, and Recklessness has several problems.

But it seems that Spellsinger2 is actually the bigger problem: the amount of spellpoints you can get by converting songs is huge, and makes a big difference in any quest that's hard enough for mana bars to be a real factor (particularly epic where Mass Hold rules the world). It's a lot like adding 5 feats to every spellcaster in the party.

[AltheaSteelrain]

It's a lot like adding 5 feats to every spellcaster in the party.

ssshhh!!~ be quiet!~ XD

that's my reason why I went 12 spellsinger II splash on my ranger instead of the usual 12 warchanter path :P

[bartosy]

/signed

I probably won't make any friends like this but I agree full heartedly with the op, as it stands now warchanter just have an edge over all the other prestiges and are able to splash and recieve other benefits at the cost of absolutely nothing,in comparison to the other 2 pre's

try splashing a virt.. You'll see what i mean when you loose +1 damage and +1 atk by not going pure spellsinger or virt or and this is even worse, -2 damage and -1 atk to an equal splashed warchanter or -3 and -2 to a pure warchanter.

No matter how you look at it,those numbers count to a raid enviroment, the more damage you add to a party the quicker and easier the raid becomes for everyone.

Try splashing a spellsinger and see how far you can come you'll loose out on -3 spell dc and -2 spell pen wich is huge for a spellsinger, splashing the other 2 pre's hurt tremendously while a warchanter can splash at virtually no cost to the party and only add extra benefit and fun to the class itself.

basicly what i'm saying and what the op probably means is that warchanter are having their cake and eating it too, in comparision to the other 2 pre's.

[breadstick]

/signed
basicly what i'm saying and what the op probably means is that warchanter are having their cake and eating it too, in comparision to the other 2 pre's.

That phrase did come to mind when I was writing the OP. Nice to see that someone else thinks similar to me.

[Dragonhyde]

eh don't really see the need for change ...if it is the deep splashing that concerns you well who knows if we ever get tier 3 pre's then maybe they will be decent enough to make you think about splashing.

[Stitch78]

/signed

I probably won't make any friends like this but I agree full heartedly with the op...

+1 for courage.



/not signed

The OP needs to look at things in context. Warchanters aren't overpowered, or you'd see many more of them around. Most PUGs are thrilled when ANY bard happens to apply. Also, if you scan the forums, you will see SS and Virts making the argument now that WC's are nerfed and not preferred in raids.

In addition, any class gives up something substantial in order to splash. Splashed Warchanter's crowd control is craptastic compared to any pure bard, and a splashed WC's casting/CC is especially poor when compared to SS and Virts.

It is all what you do with it my friend.

[hit_fido]

If anything, I had expected warchanters to get another, modest, bump to Inspire Courage at tier 2.

Look at this this way, the typical warchanter is 14/x/y, 15/x/y, 16/x/y or 18/x. They all get +7/+8 if maxed out. A pure spellsinger or virtuoso can reach +7/+7, or you could argue +6/+7 since Inspired Attack III is expensive. But still, the typical warchanter only gets a whopping +1/+1 over their pure counterparts, not much really. Ironskin chant benefits how many people at level 20? Most pure/near pure barbarians have that much DR, FvS laugh at DR/5 (so do warforged?), Mabar cloak is practically DR/5, etc. Heroism song only duplicates a spell and for a not very long amount of time. Recklessness seems to be the only tier 2 attempt to further boost the warchanters positive affect on party-wide damage output but seems that it ended up being spurned by players?

Given all that do you prefer a warchanter mix delivering +7/+8, or a pure spellsinger that can deliver +6/+7, 10% sp discount, and sp regeneration?

So dropping the warchanter Inspire Courage bonus is a definite no, for my part. Either boost it another +1/+1, make Inspire Attack III and Inspire Damage III have Warchanter I as a prereq, and/or add Inspire Damage IV (again with a Warchanter prereq).

[Lorien_the_First_One]

I think they need to IMPROVE the WC song. As it stands WCII isn't really competing well with spellsinger, I'm seeing quite a few people changing the WCs out.

[Gumbolo]

2)

Wc's songs
Anyway, currently 1-6 players in group benefit from warchanters dr song, 1-5 players from extra attack bonus, 0-6 from heroism (well, sure ya can use clickys etc. but saves nicely sp and most of time ya got a lot of extra songs) and 0-5 from double hit bonus

Spellsinger's songs
0-3 players benefits from spellsinger's dc increase/sp consume reduction song, caster level song and sp regen song, but overall clvl song won't benefit much (mainly +1 spell pen) and sp regen spell is so slow that it won't benefit a lot in more or less shrine happy quests (~5min for 300sp and arcanes maximum damage nuke spells cost around 80sp/spell)

Virtuoso
0-2 players benefit from enthrallment (seriously, awesome -2 will and -2 attack roll?), healing song? Well, it's single target diehard feat? Song of capering is long range otto's resistable dance, except it breaks fairly often when monster is hitted.

So WC benefits most of the group with their pre's spells and gains better inspired song. Also, they've them as mass songs while others have single target stuff and benefits less players (oh well, I suppose that's why they're single target...). Before pre's second tiers WC was far more useful than other pre's and adding second tiers brought em a little bit closer, but at least in my opinion still a little bit ahead.

Btw. virtuoso needs a lot of rework o.o

[Chai]

/not signed.

Warchanter has to have advantages that do not include drawbacks for some things. Right now I think pure spellsingers have the edge on buffs.

Also: If you want to be "more personal dps" - play a pure melee class.

[Angelus_dead]

Also: If you want to be "more personal dps" - play a pure melee class.

Bad advice, because it means passing up an improvement to gameplay.

The fact is that Bards with their shared abilities and tier 1 specialties already provided tremendous buffs to their party. There was more than enough incentive to invite a Bard to your team and have him sing for you. But as game designers well know, being a buffbot is a really limited degree of gameplay interaction, especially if the buffs last several minutes between refreshes.

Warchanters weren't lacking in songs to give to the group; it's what they do in between that time that has shortcomings.

Also: If you want to be "more personal dps" - play a pure melee class.

In my suggestions above, I carefully avoided saying Warchanter needed more "personal DPS" in favor of "effectiveness" or "power", because what matters is that the Warchanter gains another good reason to go into melee. It doesn't necessarily have to be that his own damage is high.

For example, maybe he pulses buffs onto nearby allies as he fights; whatever...

[Raithe]

All bard song damage/hit modifiers are personal damage. Just because they apply to another member's kill count does not make the kill count statistics accurate nor does it make them interesting or important.

Having other people or charms/summons, or TWF versions of such in the party buffs the bard's damage statistics, not the other way around. The fact that warchanters get an extra +2 personal damage per melee/missile attacker seems fairly tame compared with a spellsinger's +1 DC and/or +1 CL to every spell cast.

There is nothing preventing anyone from taking more than one bard in a group, except perhaps ignorance. Ignorance doesn't negate the benefits of having the best of both worlds.

Nerf bards. But nerf 'em all.

[LeslieWest_GuitarGod]

The minor parts of WC2 are good: Martial weapon, medium armor, and more hp are all nice little touches. But the big strength comes from Recklessness, and Recklessness has several problems.

But it seems that Spellsinger2 is actually the bigger problem: the amount of spellpoints you can get by converting songs is huge, and makes a big difference in any quest that's hard enough for mana bars to be a real factor (particularly epic where Mass Hold rules the world). It's a lot like adding 5 feats to every spellcaster in the party.

I very much like the Spellsinger II PrE except for one thing, it did nothing for the SPELLS. It did not strengthen the spells that SPELLsingers should be known for.

I would trade the current Spellsinger II PrE for a significantly enhanced spell list ANYDAY.

That being said Im enjoying the spellsinger II PrE, I would not want to see it diminished in the slightest UNLESS there was a major effort undertaken to enhance our spell selection.