Not Feeling any Dev Love

[BajaElladan]

Hail Bards and Music makers,

I am asked to bring this Topic before Thee all by my Dearest Bard-Friend:

My friend began his Study of Music and Instruments back in the Days of "Enticement." All things musical were his passion. As the days became months and eventually years passed he achieved Grand-Master and then Legendary ranks in Discord, Music, Peace, and Provoke. He endured numerous and endless "nerfs" solely because he used his skills as intended angering the envious and the tone deaf. Then along came Mastery, and despite his Legendary achievements in ALL the Barding disciplines, is limited to one Mastery at a time in spite of his having all FOUR of the skills consuming 480 skill points.

He took limited solace from his ability to discord paragon cu sidhe in the Twisted Weald and then provoking them upon each other, usually in answer of pleas by others for his help removing the paragons. Paragon Cu's each with barding difficulty of 160.

But now despite suffering all these indignities, he had the humiating and frustrating experience of discording unbound vortexes only to be told by the great dark powers ruling Sosaria that provoking these foul vapors is disallowed even though their barding difficulty is also 160.

Why are those so called "hybrid" bards able to use all the Mastery spells in their templates (discord/bard, peacer/bard, and voker/bards) while he is limited to using only ONE Mastery in his template? Why is he limited to combat with one vortex at a time while sampires battle 3 and 4 at a time? Why are "full Bards" who have obtained Legendary Mastery of ALL the Barding skills forced into limits not applied to most, if any, other Professions???

I know my dear Friend does not intend his questions to come off as rants nor whines. He simply wants to hear from Dev's and fellow Sosarians, especially fellow Bards why it is necessary let alone appropriate for Bards to be so shabbily and unfairly treated?

I, and my Friend, await the responses and comments of fellow Sosarians, especially Bards, and hopefully Dev's.

May the discussion please be civil, and free of Trolls?

Respectfully,

Elladan of Baja

 

[Remy Blacktoe]

I agree. It would be nice to have access to another bard mastery if you have a certain amount of real skill points between the four skills, say 400 points, total.

 

[Poo]

i hear what your saying and a lot of people have said the same since the masteries came out.

i for one think they did it right.
forcing us to specialize on one was the way to go i think.
why?
well, if you walk in with 120 in all barding skills and start using ALL the masteries you are gonna do some insane damage and far out score everyone else, and what does that do in the end?
it gets us nerfed.

as for the Unbound EV's, ya i was a little surprised by that too.
and ill admit, i wasnt very happy about it either.

i still dont know why we cant provo them, i thought maybe there was something about them being elemental, but we can provo everything else that is elemental.... so..... ya i dont know, i got nothing.

what i did with them, i grabbed one and flagged on it and had it start to follow me around. i took it down to the mage first, Mr Crazy Pants, and provoed the mage onto the EV.
i discoed the mage.
mage died.

i think took the EV down to the burning mage.
provoed the mage onto the EV.
discoed the mage.

then i took it down around the bottom to the wind elementals.
put like 7 of them on it, it finally died.

then i went and got another EV and took this one off to the diseased blood eles.

that was what i did to get around it, just provo stuff onto them.

but ya, it sucks.
maybe it was a mistake, maybe it was as intended.
i dont think we will ever know.

 

[Logrus]

Energy Vortices are summons -> Non-provokeable.

Think of the Unbound ones as summons which were too powerful to submit to the will of the summoner. So swaying them with a bit of music should be considerably more difficult if not borderline impossible.

 

[Merion]

It's not only the vortexes (vortices?) but also the eternal gazers. At least I got a "you cannot provoke that" message.

 

[BajaElladan]

Energy Vortices are summons -> Non-provokeable.

Think of the Unbound ones as summons which were too powerful to submit to the will of the summoner. So swaying them with a bit of music should be considerably more difficult if not borderline impossible.

So does this mean that 120 Mages with 120 Eval may dispel them?

And what of my Friends other laments? Would it not be a reasonable compromise that while a 120 x 4 Bard may only USE one Mastery at a time, they need not redo a Quest to switch their active Mastery but merely cast the new Mastery Path spell which then replaces one active with the other??

He simply asks that "hybrid or specializing" so called bards are not less disadvantaged than Full 120 x 4 Bards who embrace the fullness of bardic existence. Some ask "why would anyone want or choose to waste 460 real skill points" on their templates? My Friend would answer that some may choose to embrace full bardic abilities rather than focus only on "how may I best exploit skill choices, weird templates, and item mods" to build an uber template rather than "be a Bard?"

We merely beg the Devs to reconsider what exists and seek a new Path that either advantages or disadvantages all templates similarly.

We thank ALL for this discussion

 

[Poo]

i hardly think that my 480 skill points i have invested into bardic skills are 'wasted'

infact i would wager that overall bards are more versatile that any sampire out there.

we dont have to rely on the mod to get our mana back and leech life off of it.
we can sit back, strum our lutes and kill pretty much anything in game.

no, again i think they hit the nail right on the head with how they did the masteries.

to say we are at a disadvantage or somehow handicapped by only having one mastery at a time is just wrong.
the ONLY excuse that could be brought forward for this is that a person is being lazy.
it takes what.... a minute to switch masteries?

i for one think the bard mastery quest is way way way to simple for something labeled 'Mastery'.

at the end of the day the masteries come down to making a choice.
do you want to give your party a boost in stats.
do you want to give your party and your summons/ pets a boost in HCI, SDI and DI?
or do you want to reap damage directly onto a critter.
choose one, embrace it, use it, rule the world.

ill say this though, if they where to open up all 3 masteries to be usable by a bard at the same time, they had better make the mastery skills on par with say the Virtue gaining.
cause really, a 1 minute quest to be a master?
no, should be more like a month long trial that requires constant upkeep to maintain.
THEN you can open it up to all three.

again, i think they did it right.
pick one, its easy to do the quest, no upkeep.

 

[Remy Blacktoe]

When I got my Discordance mastery quest I was prepared to go up against dragons and worse only to read five goats! Hardly difficult but maybe they had it in mind that a bard with multiple bardic skills might have to change masteries to fit into group play and thus could complete the quest quickly to suit whatever need.

 

[Poo]

exactly!

i was standing there with my wetting my lips in anticipation of some grand adventure..... 30 greater dragon and 100 ancient wyrms!

5 goats.

hehehe

 

[R Traveler]

New shame monsters with 160 difficulty does not drop it to 155 after discord. Unlike other cases like doom bosses.

Why?

 

[Cloak&Dagger]

New shame monsters with 160 difficulty does not drop it to 155 after discord. Unlike other cases like doom bosses.

Why?

Perhaps the base Difficulty is actually higher than 160? That is my only conclusion as of right now as to how that could be possible. (Aside from it being a mistake)

And of course if the difficulty was "actually" higher than 160, I would assume they round it down to 160 so its not impossible and thus when you disco the actual calculation of its "current" difficulty is still 160 or greater. Still all just conjecture and my 2-cents.

 

[Poo]

might be something in the calculations.

barding diff goes off the numbers.

so with their numbers being SOOOOOOoooOOOoOOOooooOOOooo high, even discoed their numbers are high enough to keep their barding diff high?

 

[Poo]

1. Use the Animal Lore skill on the creature
2. Add up the following attributes:
* Max Hit Points * 1.6
* Max Stamina
* Max Mana
* all Skills
3. Add another 100 points for each of the following abilities:
* Spell Casting
* Fire Breath
* Radiation or Aura Damage (Heat, Cold etc.)
* Resistance to Poison
* Lifeforce Draining
4. Add another 20 points for each level of poison attack the creature can do. This ranges from 20 for a level 1 poison attack to 100 for a level 5 poison attack
5. If the creature's stats and skills total is 700 or less, continue with step 7
6. If the creature's stats and skills total is greater than 700, subtract 700 from the end result of step 4, then multiply the result with 0.275, and finally add 700 to that result.
7. Drop the numbers after the decimal point and then divide by 10. The result is the creature's barding difficulty.

If the result of the difficulty calculation is higher than 160, then the creatures barding difficulty is lowered to 160.

 

[R Traveler]

Disco is 10x less effective on ML peerless bosses. Even with less effect they have 155 after discord.