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Bard Theme's [Skill] Clarification

seyonseyon Member, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
edited November 7 in Bard Archetype
Hello community,

Unsure if this is a bug or a feature so I wanted to open up a discussion on the usage of the "Theme" buffs in the bard skill tree.

Bard has 3 Themes colors (Red, Blue, Yellow) that they can generate via 6 different skills. These themes provide a buff to the casting bard and a sperate buff the party as a whole. They all share the same 30 second cooldown so the casting bard can only apply one party wide buff every 30 seconds. After 3 Theme casts the bard is able to spend them by using their "Saga" skill that is a generally very powerful.

A little info on the types of theme colors and how they are generated:
  • The "Red" Theme is generated by either the "Conflict" and "Chaos" skills
  • The "Blue" Theme is generated by either the "Destiny" and "Wonder" skills
  • The "Yellow" Theme is generated by either the "Triumph" and "Joy" skills

Now, here is the crux of the issue and why I decided to open this thread.

If your party contains two, or more, bards you can only have one buff applied by any of the skills listed above. This runs into the odd play where one bard will always be overwriting the other bards buff.

My party runs with a more damage focused bard so they like to use "Chaos" to generate their red themes and give the party a magic crit chance buff. I typically ran Triumph to generate my yellow themes and give our party a % max health and stam regen buff. However since I discovered that we were overwriting each other I stopped using Triumph and therefore can't use my saga skill.

I feel that since we are casting spells from different theme colors we should be able to have the buffs stack. Right now the 'correct' play would be for both of us the run one color to insure 100% uptime on the party buff that most benefits our group, but that effectively removes 5 of the 6 saga casts from the pool since we always have to be concerned about removing the others buff.

If overwriting the buff is intended, I would like to see it changed to where only buffs of the same "Theme Color" overwrite each other. IE, if one bard casts "Conflict" first and the other casts "Chaos" second the "Chaos" buff would overwrite the existing "Conflict" buff since they are both of the "Red" Theme.
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