Bard songs

[kiaoto]

Recommendation:

1. Combine the buff bard songs into one buff song. Why: after playing 2 or 3 bards songs most the time the group is running away in different directions so I cant even finish buffing. Most of the time I am not using half my songs.
Implementation: universal song. It grows with buffs as the other songs become available and increase in strength.

This fix does not make the bard anymore powerful just simply reduced the time wasting playing each songs not to mention the spell buffs he might want to add also.

2. You fixed heal song to be aoe which was needed but the spell point song is still single target. please make spell song vigor(spell point song) group wide. It will truly add to the value of a group having bard there seeing there power increase. rather than having to chase each person down to give it to them. Rarely in group content do we all stay together.

3. melee dps survivability. little more ac and damage reduction so they can take couple hits without almost instant dying. Melee bards are extremely difficult to play in higher level content anyhow to play( r5+).

[Arienn]

1. Combine the buff bard songs into one buff song. Why: after playing 2 or 3 bards songs most the time the group is running away in different directions so I cant even finish buffing. Most of the time I am not using half my songs.
Implementation: universal song. It grows with buffs as the other songs become available and increase in strength.

This fix does not make the bard anymore powerful just simply reduced the time wasting playing each songs not to mention the spell buffs he might want to add also.

Yes! I have a charmer bard. She is good at two things; singing songs and crowd control. It takes forever to sing all of the songs.

Would be nice if inspiring echoes worked with spellsong vigor.

Epic Elyd Edge is the only weapon my bard ever uses, and it's all for inspiring echoes. Would be nice to see that power on an end game weapon, as well.

[kiaoto]

Funny how songs can only be heard by one person anyhow. think about it, I have to whisper a song to a person so no one else can hear it and benefit from it.

Everyone should be either dancing or at least throwing apples at me when I start singing and playing a tune :P.

[AzB]

Recommendation:

1. Combine the buff bard songs into one buff song. Why: after playing 2 or 3 bards songs most the time the group is running away in different directions so I cant even finish buffing. Most of the time I am not using half my songs.
Implementation: universal song. It grows with buffs as the other songs become available and increase in strength.

This fix does not make the bard anymore powerful just simply reduced the time wasting playing each songs not to mention the spell buffs he might want to add also.

2. You fixed heal song to be aoe which was needed but the spell point song is still single target. please make spell song vigor(spell point song) group wide. It will truly add to the value of a group having bard there seeing there power increase. rather than having to chase each person down to give it to them. Rarely in group content do we all stay together.

3. melee dps survivability. little more ac and damage reduction so they can take couple hits without almost instant dying. Melee bards are extremely difficult to play in higher level content anyhow to play( r5+).

Yes, yes, and yes.

I tr'ed my melee/charmer bard who absolutely crushed LE content into a caster. Playing him in reaper was like having a race car with square wheels. Every single aspect of reaper that supposed to tone down character power completely neuters much of a bard's ability. You've got a light armor wearing melee with high dodge, displace and evasion. Self healing is a part of that character's defense. Taking self healing away wrecks the ability to stay in the fight. Additionally, many champs ignore displacement and dodge. Then you have every single cc effect shut down to 6 seconds. Pretty much the only weapon a bard has that is effective is cc. Now it is so short lasting, there is no way a melee bard, who doesn't have much in the way of any dps, let along burst dps, has to get those enemies knocked down even faster.

Really, the problem is that reaper shouldn't affect the self healing of classes that inherently heal. It should have simply affected cocoon and the other twistable by anyone heals. Clerics, rangers, paladins, and bards should still be allowed to self heal at something like normal power.

At any rate, I really miss playing my bard, and every now and then I try to think of a way to make it work, but I'm just frustrated by how everything in reaper works against the class. (and other light armor wearing melees, like melee rangers and rogues)

As a caster, my character has none of these issues, as he can stand back and cast from well out of the hitbox, or kite if he gets aggro. Those tools aren't available to a melee.

[HastyPudding]

I never understood why we couldn't have 2-3 songs instead of 6-10 songs, depending on your focus. The mechanics of using songs is just very outdated and clunky, meant for when there was only 3-4 songs in the game. I mean, ever since the old PrE's with the drop-down menus we had 'add X to X song' type of enhancements. Why can't we simply reduce songs down to inspire courage, inspire heroics, and inspire competence, and then have the enhancement trees add passive abilities to particular songs?

Or, more radically, have one or two songs, and then have additional bard songs be similar to metamagics, in which we use a right click menu to add additional songs (cadenzas) we want to that base bard song (the melody). Kind of like this:

Inspire Courage (Melody)
-> add inspire heroics (Cadenza #1)
-> add inspire competence (Cadenza #2)
-> add inspire greatness (Cadenza #3)

You could have one melody be able to combine with no more than 3 cadenzas (maybe even put a limit on the songs in relation to bard level, like a melody song at level 1, one cadenza at level 3, two cadenza at level 6, etc). This also alleviates the irritating mess of having 8 different songs with 8 different durations.

[Selvera]

My problem with bard songs in the current game has always been that power creep is doing bad things to them. You're no longer a bard who brings power to the party via buffing them. You're not even really a bard who brings power to the party because you buff and can also fight. You're a bard who brings power to the party because you can fight. Oh yeah, and there are buffs on the side, if they're passive or you remember to hit them all.

(By fight I mean any or all of the following: provide melee dps, provide ranged dps, provide spell dps, provide melee CC, provide spell CC)

It would be nice if bard's party-buffs weren't so invalidated by power creep.