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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
PTR Bard changes
nanfoodle
Member, Founder, Kickstarter, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
What are your thoughts? IMO if support is stronger I'm fine taking a DPS nerf.
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We all knew nerfs are coming, I just don't get the logic behind some of them, such as Dark Lullaby changes. Why would I now care about stacking status effects on an enemy for a max 15% dmg boost on a channelled ability when most of the bards kit has 25 second cooldowns? Any form of burst damage on bard might be gone after this. Again, I have to check this out in pve and especially pvp.
Saga "buffs" are still irrelevant. It's too expensive to get to them, and their value remains "questionable" if you consider what utilities you would have to sacrifice to get to them.
I won't be fine with the nerfs if this limits the way you can build bards. Until now you could go 3 different ways really: mana regen, heal and dps + whatever support kit you could afford. If these changes limit bard playstyle options, then that would be a hard NO from me.
So...who is next to the chopping block? Clerics?
Blown past falling sands…
I wanted to play since the beginning as a Support/DD which buffs allies and hit enemies with some skills / auto atk which can apply some debuff to help. (Like the bladedancer or Iss Enchanter in L2)
But with these changes, I feel like the DD part is not really foreseen for the bard archetype.
Fortissimo skill seems interesting, curious to see the impact of it. Looking forward more skills like that as using resonance stack is difficult in mid/large pvp scale. (As stated by MilosAoC here : https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/65566/resonant-weapon-does-not-feel-good-especially-in-mid-to-large-scale-pvp)
That being said, as we don't know how will be the augments from second archetype, maybe those nerfs are here by design, waiting for the second archetype which will "re-buff" these skills, giving us multiple way to play the bard.
I'm still hoping for a bard/ranger which can be fully played with a bow, with ranger centric buff and some ranged damage skill which apply debuff.
Also I don't see waiting to level 25-50 before your archetype / class starts making sense, opens up with basic playstyles as a great design decision.
Blown past falling sands…
That said, I think Dark Lullby and Chilling Lament nerf is too heavy handed. They were already skills that kind of were not needed as auto attacks would be stronger and faster.
So Now we have low dps with very little value channel abilities which kind of makes them dead.
is bard supposed to have high dps? lol
Damage nerfs to the Dark Lullaby status damage stacking undermine the mechanics of the ability and one way bard was able to apply dps pressure if built towards damage. Why am I supposed to care about building negative status effects on my targets now? For measly 15% damage boost at its best possible performance? That change feels rather poorly thought out.
Even the Chilling Lament damage nerf seems unjustified, but at least it hurts less than DL changes. We will know soon enough how that works in real life.
Blown past falling sands…
You are missing the point, its not about bard should have High dps. Bards needed a DPS adjustment but the current path that we are going down is not a well thought out one.
Currently you will be better off auto attacking and using or fishing for a finisher which will be more damage. Dark Lullby doesn't have another condition to make up for it and same for lament in a lot of ways.
So bard is going to turn into an auto attack class which doesn't seem like a lot of fun.
Resonance weapon with menacing needs a rework along with the abilities such as dark lullby and lament.
Right now, I mostly see Bards that specialize in a duelist playstyle or perform actions I find unbalanced. There’s still a lot of work to do to make this class both essential for group play and enjoyable to use.
That said, I find it encouraging and interesting that they’re reducing the DPS aspect while trying to improve its utility. I’m looking forward to testing all of these changes in-game and seeing how the balance evolves.
There is no reason to take them on your bar because they will cause sub-par damage even without menacing, and the conditions don't give enough to outweigh the loss of damage. We are now an auto-attack class which creates a poor dynamic and doesn't make the bard class feel good.
Right now the class needs a total rework and it has lost a lot of its luster. It needs to have a rework in the sense that they need to pick a direciton.
1. Add more crowd Control abilities
2. Add more healing abilities or hots to make up for the lack of dps
3. or some other dps ability or boost to dark lullaby and rework chilling lament
Blown past falling sands…
With what they are going for Fortissimo and they keep the current changes than they will need to rework the class.
From playing a lot of hours already here is what my thoughts that need attention.
1. Saga's need a rework
- The healing and mana one change is fine and good direction but the fire/dps one needs a rework as it is clunky. The Damage on the lighting value one needs to be increased also for the cooldown and cast time on it.
2. Dark lallaby and Chilling lament need a work if they go for their damage values, either they need to adjust them somewhere in the middle or add different abilities
3. Need to rework resonance it pigeon holes us into an auto attack class more and more and they are double downing on that.
4. Add either smaller heal abilities that are different from cleric such as Hots like Dark Age of camelot did for Bards/ minstrels
5. Add more layers of CC as another ability such as a stun or combo for freeze .
6. Add another dmg ability or make Dark lullaby go back up somewhere in the middle. We should in theory have two dps abilities that we should be able to weave through and currently we have one with discordance.
Fortissimo - another skill you have to activate to receive a 10 second buff.
Dark Lullaby (DL) is a dead skill. Just remove it from the game. Even if the target has the status effects which boost DL damage, I do more damage with my ranged weapon auto-attacks. That is WITHOUT any Resonance stacks.
Blown past falling sands…
The damage u got from pantheon actually made some specific AoE pulls a lot better / more manageable, which was kinda cool. Now its just an empty skill.
Themes basically received less advertised, but significant nerfs also.
Blown past falling sands…
EDIT: Second click for saga is still not as meaningful as it could be. It needs more combos. That covers heals, mana, DPS and cc.
This picture visualises the state of the dps bard ability atm. Yes, I'm aware this doesn't give the full picture, with melodies, resonance etc, but the irony is strong here.
Blown past falling sands…
Ya I do get that, I just mostly play team support so I am happy =-) Would I like well rounded DPS? Yes. I did try and take on a 2 star mob solo that was 4 levels under me that I could solo before. I had to run by the time I got it to 50%. I would rather have more buffs to boost my teams DPS over me being a solo king. IMO, if you going to lower our DPS, we should have better mitigation of damage to keep us alive in PvP. If I cant kill as well, there needs to stay alive to support, because at this point we are more like a tank, support with little teeth but a Tank can stay alive better.
One of the interesting things about bard gameplay is that you can change your group focus (dps, heals, mana) with a melody swap. That has not changed for heals or mana, same for bard speed, same for bard CC and debuffing. See the bad section for more details about dps.
Fortissimo doubling the effect of your current melody for 8-10 seconds is an interesting tradeoff. Using mana song as an example, you get more than double the mana return from fortissimo if all 8 party members need mana, than you would burning that 5 resonance with combos and delivering mana to 1-2 players. Likewise with menacing, your party DPS buff goes to 30% from 15%. It's going to be great for burn phases and healchecks.
Sagas are going to me useful! I'll have to play them now
Resonance at the end of songs and dances is great. I now have a reason to use all of my skills in an intelligent way. Added to Pantheon Saga, I think group mana regen will be much easier to maintain. Enough that twisting or song swapping should become viable.
The mediocre
Skill point contention just got a worse. 2 Themes are now mandatory and at least 1 saga, but realistically, 2 points for sagas. Twisting is a lot more viable, so thats 2 melodies also. Maybe this becomes less of a problem with a higher skill point cap, but at L25 without respec-anywhere there are not enough skill points.
The bad
Resonance spending is still too random. I have no control over whether I spend 4 or 8 stacks with a combo, because the extended finisher will spend 4 stacks. I'd rather just spend res stacks with the first finisher, then I can clip the extended finisher with skills if I don't want damage.
Bard is no longer a DPS class. If that is the class design (heal/mana/cc support) then success. If bard is intended to be a "75% dps" class when spec'd/setup for damage, then this fails.
To put numbers to it. Resonance with menacing used to deliver up to 175% damage (as AE if using book/melee) per stack. 50% on hit, and 125% with shocked. ~65% of the time, 8 stacks are used per combo. The damage was ridiculous and the AE damage was beyond ridiculous. Now, resonance stacks deliver 75% damage per stack, and dps skills have been nerfed ~20%.
A little napkin math shows that bards lost roughly one third of total damage, in a full single target DPS rotation. It's not as high as you might expect from the numbers above, because combo attacks didn't lose any damage. AE DPS is down over 50%
A compromise
If keeping bard DPS "viable" is in the design, I'd suggest:
Revert the Lullaby and Lament changes. I assume they were nerfed because they give 2 stacks of res now instead of 1. But it's ridiculous that they do less damage than auto-attack, and resonance isn't always used to damage, but Lullaby is.
That resonance add one stack of shocked to all enemies hit by the combo like it does now, but also add another stacks of shocked to the main target (not AE)
Was hoping someone wrote this out. Probably needs it own post tbh. Now both spells are pure utility, Chilling for the weakness and Lullaby for the stun extension( someone has to save these trash fighters and soon to be rogues.) You no longer earn a dps spot with just Menacing and a Greatsword. All the Bads carried to max lvl as mana slaves are no longer needed and 2 bard groups will be more rare.
With twisting, 1 bard can keep 10% menacing up along with mana regen, and if we had better control over resonance spending, a bard could even allocate resonance spending towards more damage or more mana. But twisting is high attention gameplay.
Without twisting, a group is better off with 2 bards over 1 bard and 1 DPS even after the nerf. +15% menacing and themes (variable, but ~6%damage) means that the second bard is providing passive buffs that deliver 80% of a DPS's damage assuming 4 DPS in the group. So if the "DPS bard" is dealing 50% of the damage that the other DPS are, it's a new win for the group.
On the other hand, with twisting a second bard could also optimal. That means 4 melodies can be up: damage, mana, cathartic for DPS healing and cheerful for even more healing. This simplifies healing for the cleric as they can save cooldowns for the tank. Also debuff uptime with weakness, humiliated, demoralized, etc. This is good for a 1 cleric group