Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Bard Feedback/Gripes
Frope
Member, Alpha Two
I have been playing bard since P1 started, and while I am loving it, I do have some gripes.
To start things off, Resonant Weapon. It's cool that you want Bard to be a half caster, and make our weapon combos effective, but it's currently awkward and over tuned. 10 stacks just doesn't feel like enough, and I find myself going over the limit just to finish off a rotation. Especially if you get 10 stacks at the end of a fight, you can keep those long enough that your cooldowns will come up for the next fight, and you have to decide weather you want to use your abilities, applying valuable debuffs, or auto attacking to use those stacks.
Another issue with it is for things like Pensive and Cheerful melody, you may find your self auto attacking just to help with damage, and end up wasting those stacks on a finisher by over-healing. I think perhaps both of these should apply an over time effect, rather than being a big burst.
Lastly, Resonant Weapon is doing far to much heavy lifting for our class. Hymn and Serenade are practically useless. The DoT from Cathartic even takes precedence over other damage abilities. It feels like some of my abilities are just there to generate Resonant stacks.
My second biggest gripe is Shielding Dance. There is no reason to ever channel it to completion. Just tap it once for the shield, and then immediately cancel it. The healing is extremely weak, and the shield is front loaded. If you made it so that each tick applied a shield, that would stack with its self (and not with other bards because we saw how that turned out), then it would feel much better to channel it.
Lastly, just class balance in general. I know it's very early to be worrying about class balance, but we will have to cross that bridge at some point so I might as well give feedback sooner rather than later.
I get that we are not the primary healer, and heck, we offer a lot of damage reduction. However, we do have heals, and the heals we have do not feel good to use. Serenade has a similar problem to Shielding Dance, where you should pretty much just tap it once for the mitigation or Glee, and then immediately cancel it. The healing on it is so incredibly slow, and if you have a cleric in your party, the healing you are providing is actually meaningless. Clerics can top off a tank instantly with a single ability, so if you have one in your party, you might as well take Serenade off of your hot bar. I would take off Shielding Dance too if it wasn't such a good Resonant Weapon generator.
I think aside from just buffing our heals, or nerfing Clerics, an increase to the tick rate of our heals would be big. Glee only ticking every 2 sec can often miss damage windows entirely, and really make you tighten them glutes. Also, as I mentioned, currently Cheerful Resonant Weapon is our strongest heal by far. It is the only thing making Bard truly capable as a healer. It's just so unreliable in its current form.
Our damage is even all over the place. Lullaby's only utility is that it won't wake someone from incap. Why is it's damage so low? It does more damage per debuff on the target, but the scaling is tiny. Once again, the bulk of our damage comes from Resonant Weapon. Menacing Melody + Resonant Weapon + a quick attacking weapon like a shortbow or wand, will do a good burst. Having to run Menacing to do damage is fine, we can't have bard giving mana, healing, AND doing damage at the same time, but the way we do damage is currently very niche in it's scope.
To start things off, Resonant Weapon. It's cool that you want Bard to be a half caster, and make our weapon combos effective, but it's currently awkward and over tuned. 10 stacks just doesn't feel like enough, and I find myself going over the limit just to finish off a rotation. Especially if you get 10 stacks at the end of a fight, you can keep those long enough that your cooldowns will come up for the next fight, and you have to decide weather you want to use your abilities, applying valuable debuffs, or auto attacking to use those stacks.
Another issue with it is for things like Pensive and Cheerful melody, you may find your self auto attacking just to help with damage, and end up wasting those stacks on a finisher by over-healing. I think perhaps both of these should apply an over time effect, rather than being a big burst.
Lastly, Resonant Weapon is doing far to much heavy lifting for our class. Hymn and Serenade are practically useless. The DoT from Cathartic even takes precedence over other damage abilities. It feels like some of my abilities are just there to generate Resonant stacks.
My second biggest gripe is Shielding Dance. There is no reason to ever channel it to completion. Just tap it once for the shield, and then immediately cancel it. The healing is extremely weak, and the shield is front loaded. If you made it so that each tick applied a shield, that would stack with its self (and not with other bards because we saw how that turned out), then it would feel much better to channel it.
Lastly, just class balance in general. I know it's very early to be worrying about class balance, but we will have to cross that bridge at some point so I might as well give feedback sooner rather than later.
I get that we are not the primary healer, and heck, we offer a lot of damage reduction. However, we do have heals, and the heals we have do not feel good to use. Serenade has a similar problem to Shielding Dance, where you should pretty much just tap it once for the mitigation or Glee, and then immediately cancel it. The healing on it is so incredibly slow, and if you have a cleric in your party, the healing you are providing is actually meaningless. Clerics can top off a tank instantly with a single ability, so if you have one in your party, you might as well take Serenade off of your hot bar. I would take off Shielding Dance too if it wasn't such a good Resonant Weapon generator.
I think aside from just buffing our heals, or nerfing Clerics, an increase to the tick rate of our heals would be big. Glee only ticking every 2 sec can often miss damage windows entirely, and really make you tighten them glutes. Also, as I mentioned, currently Cheerful Resonant Weapon is our strongest heal by far. It is the only thing making Bard truly capable as a healer. It's just so unreliable in its current form.
Our damage is even all over the place. Lullaby's only utility is that it won't wake someone from incap. Why is it's damage so low? It does more damage per debuff on the target, but the scaling is tiny. Once again, the bulk of our damage comes from Resonant Weapon. Menacing Melody + Resonant Weapon + a quick attacking weapon like a shortbow or wand, will do a good burst. Having to run Menacing to do damage is fine, we can't have bard giving mana, healing, AND doing damage at the same time, but the way we do damage is currently very niche in it's scope.
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