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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Bard Theme's [Skill] Clarification
seyon
Member, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Hello community,
Unsure if this is a bug or a feature so I wanted to open up a discussion on the usage of the Themes and the story buffs that they provide.
Bard has 3 Themes colors (Red, Blue, Yellow) that they can generate via 6 different skills. These themes provide a buff(story) 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:
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 story applied by any of the skills listed above. This runs into the odd play where one bard will always be overwriting the other bard's buff story.
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's story 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 stories 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.
Unsure if this is a bug or a feature so I wanted to open up a discussion on the usage of the Themes and the story buffs that they provide.
Bard has 3 Themes colors (Red, Blue, Yellow) that they can generate via 6 different skills. These themes provide a buff(story) 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 story applied by any of the skills listed above. This runs into the odd play where one bard will always be overwriting the other bard's buff story.
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's story 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 stories 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.
3
Comments
Blue (Mystery) is a bonus to mana generation effects. Use it when you are the main mana battery.
When there are two bards - coordinate. One will be the mana battery and will usually be running Wonder (but might run Destiny if the party is mostly fighters and Rangers).
The other should be on dps support or healing support. I do DPS support and I usually run Conflict unless my party has a lot of mages in which case I run Chaos.
Oh i think I may have misunderstood your concern. I haven't noticed different stories overwriting each other. I'll test this when I get in game next. Conflict and Chaos should both be able to be up at the same time. The theme is a small buff on the caster and doesn't affect the rest of the party.
One bard has 100% uptime on their story of choice (with only the casting time being a delay). Stories have a 30s duration and a 30s cooldown so as long as you cast it on cooldown it is always up. This is only not true if you are mixing themes for some reason an I can't see a reason why you'd do that unless you are playing around with Heroes of Ages Past (Mystery, Mystery, Comedy).
Thanks Shiva, I updated the usage of the word "buff" to story in my original post to hopefully make it a bit more clear what I was talking about.
I tested last Saturday and my bard friend and I were overwriting each others stories. They were using Chaos and I was casting wonder.
Maybe its a UI bug for the buffs, but a few weeks ago my Max HP from Triumph was being removed when ever they cast chaos.