Echo's of Power

[jellyfish21]

I feel ripped off now that I found out that Artificers, a specialist class like the bard, recieves echos of power. It makes me angry and have a disrespect for the people who take advantage of us who play bards. As always, new content out-powers old things. I have always accepted this until now. Do you realize how many thousands of times that my bards have ran out of spell points. We are the main crowd control of many parties. We buff the party more than any other class. We are given the shank for the lower mana pool and now the shank for leaving us without echo's of power. My bard has an equal spell power as both my cleric and my FvS; yet, my healing is considerably lowered. Bard's heals are less effective. We get cure moderate wounds mass. The line of healing for a bard is pathetic. Without echo's of power, our simple cure light wounds doesn't even refresh. Ok... the many, many warforged artificers have their repair light damage refresh? I feel ripped off and feel taken advantage of. Bash, bash, bash and bla-bla-bla.... Does anyone even care?

[Aashrym]

Long break from the game? It's been like this for a while.

On lamma the option to purchase magical training as a feat has been opened up. It's a quick bonus to SP and echoes for anyone who wants it if that goes live, and at the cost of a feat it might not be that unattractive once the feat restrictions are relaxed for PrE's when the enhancement overhaul finally hits.

At that point it's just a bonus feat for arties that bards can pay for to add if they want it. I still think bards should have it for free but echoes just isn't that overwhelmingly potent. I would take it at low level and swap it out later if it goes live as is.

[jellyfish21]

Okay, each bard prestige takes one or two feats. Toughness is a must. My present bard is a warchanter. Therefore, I would have to spend four feats, toughness, weapon focus, power attack and echo's. I would have only three more feats until level 20. Furthermore, the main focus of the feat is to have the ability to use cure light wounds and have it recharge. Therefore, as I have done, a bard must take empowered healing. Understand this leaves my bard with only two other feats. That is crazy and why I'm so very angry.

[jellyfish21]

I have healed the shroud on my cleric with only using cure moderate wounds mass and cure light wounds mass. The fact is true that a healer needs a quicken feat. Bard's recieve a full healing line of spells. Must I have quicken, too? Do you believe that the spell singer can be the answer? No. A spell singer would need to spend five feats, toughness, mental toughness, empower healing, quicken and echo's. Basicly, a spell singer uses near 50% of his time singing songs for party members to regenerate spell points and all of that stuff. My warchanter sings inspire courage only; I know that singing only inspire courage does not use all of my songs. However, I have put two feats into inspire courage and want to be able to use those two feats myself, swinging my weapon and not singing for 50% of the quest.

p.s. The extend feat is a required bard feat, too, or our haste will suffer.

People just don't play bards like they used to and would rather play a character who is more powerful, a character that is sometimes three of four times powerful more than a bard. That is a fact.

[buddabopp]

or you could go visutro without requiring any feats (requires extra song 4 though) which gives you a heal over time that is quite helpful as well as regenerating songs which can provide top notch cc as well as, with epic destinies, a decent aoe dps option (dirge), multiple special effects (chains), or even massive single target damage (siren's).

Also your claim that a ss needs the echos is unfounded as they can regen mana through a song, which with a little simple farming ie about 20 min in lordsmarch can be kept up almost constantly due to the song regen cloak

[Xilth]

On lamma the option to purchase magical training as a feat has been opened up. It's a quick bonus to SP and echoes for anyone who wants it if that goes live

so... bard, caster class with the lowest sp pool will have to spend feat for minor sp boost, which other caster classes (with higher sp) get for free, its sounds like very balanced idea

[legendlore]

What's even worse is that it locks bards out of using the newly created caster orbs since it requires magical training.

Bards should definitely get the feat for free, it would make no sense for bards to require to buy it as a feat. Sorcerers and favored souls are spontaneous casters as well (ie don't study or train their magic as wizards and artificers do) and they get the feat for free. They also get 2x their spell points for losing their class benefit of spontaneous casting (since every class is a spontaneous caster in ddo) but bards don't even though they are a spontaneous caster as well, they're simply stuck with the worst of two worlds.

[Aashrym]

Okay, each bard prestige takes one or two feats. Toughness is a must. My present bard is a warchanter. Therefore, I would have to spend four feats, toughness, weapon focus, power attack and echo's. I would have only three more feats until level 20. Furthermore, the main focus of the feat is to have the ability to use cure light wounds and have it recharge. Therefore, as I have done, a bard must take empowered healing. Understand this leaves my bard with only two other feats. That is crazy and why I'm so very angry.

Virts take no feats at the cost of 4 AP. Spellsingers take one feat they would have taken anyway and out of the 2 feats a war chanter needs only one is wasted; the other he would also have taken. The enhancement changes coming up will be removing the need to take specific feats in order to qualify for PrE's.

Bards also do not 'must take empowered healing'. Wand and scroll mastery is the way to go unless becoming a devoted healer. Most take maximize instead. With the changes in spell point costs in U9 and spell power in U13 or U14 (forgot off the top of my head) meta'd healing spells become much less efficient and if echoes is your concern then repeat casting of cheap spells will stretch your SP out much, much farther. Echoes doesn't regen enough SP to meta your cure spells regardless so they tend to mutually exclusive of one another.

I have healed the shroud on my cleric with only using cure moderate wounds mass and cure light wounds mass. The fact is true that a healer needs a quicken feat. Bard's recieve a full healing line of spells. Must I have quicken, too? Do you believe that the spell singer can be the answer? No. A spell singer would need to spend five feats, toughness, mental toughness, empower healing, quicken and echo's. Basicly, a spell singer uses near 50% of his time singing songs for party members to regenerate spell points and all of that stuff. My warchanter sings inspire courage only; I know that singing only inspire courage does not use all of my songs. However, I have put two feats into inspire courage and want to be able to use those two feats myself, swinging my weapon and not singing for 50% of the quest.

p.s. The extend feat is a required bard feat, too, or our haste will suffer.

People just don't play bards like they used to and would rather play a character who is more powerful, a character that is sometimes three of four times powerful more than a bard. That is a fact.

Most players are no longer using extend because there simply aren't that many short term spells that it benefits. Quicken is a good feat for healing, yes. Alternatively a person can remove themselves to a safer location and/or continuously move to help avoid damage. A person can also splash to open up more feats if they want.

If you think you need mental toughness you may as well replace that with magical training. It provides almost as much SP, but much sooner, plus echoes, plus grants the ability to use orbs.

so... bard, caster class with the lowest sp pool will have to spend feat for minor sp boost, which other caster classes (with higher sp) get for free, its sounds like very balanced idea

The free 200 SP that low SP caster class gets along with vigor provides a lot more SP than echoes, which is why I said I would take it at lower levels and swap it out later. Running quests with vigor on constantly places spellsingers in an SP range much more comparable to wizards and sorcerers, plus songs still don't cost SP.

At first level the SP boost plus echoes, if necessary, isn't minor. If someone wants to keep it later because he or she thinks echoes is important then that's up to him or her.

The reality is that we need to look at what we spend our SP on and in the case of bards it's usually buffs and some healing that can be covered with consumables. That's not a high cost spending build except in the case of raids and echoes isn't going to do squat raid healing.

Spellsingers are running 1600+ SP before epic destinies with gear and built as casters plus vigor and DV procs on top. SP spent on CC might become more typical but it still tends to be rather affordable and much of the content still doesn't need the CC. The fact that spending 4 songs will add another 1K+ SP to that total keeps them in a good place as far as SP totals for casters goes. That feat does nothing for them beyond using orbs.

Virts might make CC casting builds too but they don't use the SP for the main source of CC. They use songs for the main source and the SP for orange names or the occasional disco ball that might be handy. They also run a constant hit point regen song to help with healing.

I think either bards should have gotten it for free or artificers should not have. If we look at the purpose of echoes and the design of the classes I would have gone with echoes for bards (to fuel casting at low levels just like other casters) and not with artificers (who, at low levels, don't do a whole lot of casing at and just play machine gunner).

If the game were designed with major vs minor casting in mind then the cut off point should have either included or excluded both bards and artificers. Following PnP design both classes counted full caster levels while other classes counted as half caster levels so based on the caster level mechanic in PnP I would have expected both to qualify in the spirit of how PnP considered them.

I don't disagree that bards should have had echoes. I just don't think it an important ability regardless, and if a person needs to rely on it after learning how to play then there are other issues going on. I was pointing out it will be available for those who want it if it goes live and that the best time to use it is lower level then ditch it.

I would also recommend to the dev team to add it to the spellsinger tree as an AP purchase alternative to a feat purchase. Problem solved.

[Aashrym]

What's even worse is that it locks bards out of using the newly created caster orbs since it requires magical training.

Bards should definitely get the feat for free, it would make no sense for bards to require to buy it as a feat. Sorcerers and favored souls are spontaneous casters as well (ie don't study or train their magic as wizards and artificers do) and they get the feat for free. They also get 2x their spell points for losing their class benefit of spontaneous casting (since every class is a spontaneous caster in ddo) but bards don't even though they are a spontaneous caster as well, they're simply stuck with the worst of two worlds.

The magical training feat existed from day one as a way to differentiate an SP bonus for casters at first level because bards had songs as an alternative. Bards had the same spell points as clerics originally if they had that feat, plus songs, plus skill points, plus some nice arcane spells. The SP bonus in that feat was still a large portion of SP at the whopping end game of level 10, and the only purpose in that feat was bonus SP for certain classes.

When the spell point costs changed and spell power changed, and with the changes in SP totals over time I think the original idea behind magical training (which, in essence, was just the SP version of the heroic hit point bonus) became obsolete but was never really dealt with. Bards really should have received that feat for free as well after the changes in U9.

It's just still not that big a deal unless someone wants an orb.

[jellyfish21]

Thank you everyone for contributing your knowledge to this thread.

[Jaid314]

mind, once you get to epic levels it's available to you regardless as a twist, is it not? (granted, you have to farm far enough through the destinies to get that twist, but if you're really serious about casting you'll probably want it either way, no?)

[TheFantasticBard]

My bard nets 2513 sp at cap. That is without feats. With them I'd be over 3000. So depending on your build your not the lowest sp class. Also you can twist magical training in for a Lvl 1 twist and get 32 sp back. I would like it, but I find it unnecessary.