Where have the quality Bards disappeared to?Follow

Bards do have some AE damage songs, but also a host of chants which are single target DoT/debuffs and single target DDs of varying effectiveness.

I don't consider myself the greatest bard ever to grace Norrath, but I've been playing my alt rogue a lot (lvl 37 right now) and just about every bard I've been in a group with has been a few strings short of a lute, if you get my drift. Like you said, bards who merely melee, bards who sing a single song and nothing else and one special bard who not only sang a single song, but did so to the exclusion of meleeing. Had he not been talking, I would have assumed he was a bot set to /follow and forgotten about.

Before anyone suggests maybe he was twisting five songs onto the mobs, my main is a bard. I have a pretty good idea of what songs give what effects and what a mid-30s bard would normally have in their line-up. If he was singing a full twist on the mobs, there should have been a laser light show of song particle effects. There was not.

Anyway, I don't know what to tell you. If I have a chanter in the group, they're free to mez to their little robed heart's delight. Frees me up for better things. If I do have to do CC, a single add is easy to hit once a twist and continue to melee the target mob and twist a couple other songs at the same time. If I'm mezzing 2+ mobs, I tend to fall out of combat since resist can be harder to recover from without giving it enough concentration. From your last sentance, it seems obvious enough that you have a decent grasp of what a bard should be capable of so I won't toot my own horn (the puns flow fast and free tonight) but I can't answer why so many suck. They do serve to make me look better though

Where have the all good bards gone? Long time passing...

[Edit: Changed a couple words so that I might actually make sense]

Edited, Thu Jan 8 23:57:27 2004 by Jophiel

Personally I play a Bard and usually twist while grouped. I also sometimes get a tad tired and take a short respite from the constant key pounding if not needed. I guess depending on the situation a good Bard will react and set things right when it goes bad, a bad Bard will continue doing what they do and the situation will go from bad to worse. To each there own I guess.

seeler

When I play my alts (I have 42 monk, 47 druid, 52 sk and those in my sig), I ofte get so disapointed of the skills of many players. I don't think it is the problem of the bard class only; all other classes have bad players. Espeically in LDoN, where there is a time limit and requires skill to pull/CC, players with bad skills really drags the group down.

Just couple days ago I joined a group mostly made up of one guild. Every single player in that guild I've met have NO Skills to speak of. I still decided to join because I was confident that with my twinked monks dps there is nothing to stop a level 40's group to sucess in a LDoN (ldon is extremely easy at earlier levels). It was a cleric, druid, bard, wizard, necro and my monk in the group. The cleric, bard and druid are from the same guild. First of all, bard did not want to pull. She said warriors or monks had always pulled; she has never pulled before. I asked her to pull because monk FD split is a waste of time in LDoN, as we all know. However she didn't even want to try... I grouped with the level 45 cleric before and I knew she was a bad player (good person, just bad skills) so I didn't want to ask her to pacify mobs for me.

So there I go, my little monk goes FD split in takish.. First pull comes 2 mobs... easy for a full group with a bard mez'er right? No, it was not. Bard was meleeing the add and cleric used half of her mana healing the bard... I asked the bard to mez and the cleric said, "how can she mez when she's a bard?".

Obviously this bard has never lulled, and never mez'ed before in her 40'ish levels.

[edited out long winded of LONG list of bad things that happened in this partically bad adventure].

Anyway, everyone died a few times except my monk. Druid was not heling on healing much and cleric is very very very slow on patching casters. And there was another pull with 4 mobs (durid decided to come in to monitor my FD split progress and trained the group in the back room...), I kept agro on 3 this time knowing that bard wouldn't mez and hopefully the 4th wouldn't kill anyone.

I was wrong again. Cleric was chaining that cele healing on me. Yes, she's chain casting that heal over time thing on me until she went oom. I told them to gate or zone (wizard got tried of this stupid group and left, and and druid died so no evacor) while I hold off the mobs. but no, they either didn't listen to me or didn't see my message (happened a lot). I had to FD at 5% health and they wipped once more.

I decided to ask the cleric to pacify a room with 4 mobs in to save time. She brought all 4 back and died. We killed 3 mobs and I was down to 1 bubble of life before I started getting druid healing. And two or three 300hp heals later druid goes oom...

sorry for the long winded post even after edit... but I needed to vent a little...

Edited, Fri Jan 9 18:11:52 2004 by Assailant

I find it rather difficult to grasp what you are trying to say Toasticle.

Are you saying that because some aspect of your class' skill base is difficult to perform, then you don't bother with it?

Bards used to be among the elite once upon a time, they took great pride in mastering the difficulties, like a good Chanter or Necro.

I think Bardsdome has suffered the same fate as Druids and Monks, because the class had earned an impressive reputation due to the efforts of a few very good players, all the "would be uber" types have piled into the class with out a clue as to what it realy takes to be competent, let alone good at the class.

I think it is sad. But as Jophiel said it makes the good Bards realy look good.

And how can you possibly be any good at the game if you do not have a decent working knowelge of the other classes that you group with?

Edited, Fri Jan 9 23:18:19 2004 by Iluien

That's just silly. With armor dyes, any armor can look good. I mean, if you're so committed to fashion that you'd wear Cheapo Breastplate A over Decent Breastplate B, you ought to be committed enough to cough up the 40pp to make Breastplate B match your threads.

As for the rest of it, yeah, I know.. I'm super elitist for actually expecting the people I group with to play their class with slightly more skill than a monkey banging on the keys There's a difference between "maximized for efficiency" and "this guy is playing his bard like it's a warrior". I guess it's easier to just suck and blame the evil people for daring to notice that you suck than it is to actually learn how to play the class with a modicum of skill.

The main reason there's an increase of bad bards at high levels is it's one of the fastest leveling classes in the game. Swarm kiting will allow a bard to solo from the mid 20s to 65 without ever coming up for air. Add that to their increased demand in guilds since PoP was released due to the addition of Fade Memories, and you'll see there's been an influx of people playing bards.

Until a bard gets charm in the mid 20s, they's just another fighter with a few pathetic songs thrown in. But once they get charm, they can run off and solo to the top. So they'll run off on their own, playing with themselves. Then when the player's do finally feel like coming out and grouping, they don't have a clue as to what half their songs do nor do they understand what their role in a group their current level should be. A bard's role constantly changes as you level. Once you get mana song it becomes a main stay in some form or another. Once you get a few dots it's possible to just sit back and let your instruments do your damage. And the evolution continues all the way up to 62 with Fade. If they keep their head down soloing, when they finally pop up 5 or 10 levels later they won't understand their role anymore.

Playing a bard means you have to fill in the gaps in your party and if you don't know what you can actually do, how are you going to fill those holes. With a little research and study on the forums, that's how :)

Meesha - 65 Bard
Komoda - 51 Monk
Gnik Gnak - 55 Wizard
Qaat - 27 Rogue
Sfynx - 37 Beastlord

While I don't hound people in game, that doesn't preclude me from ******** about them in a general sense on message boards

Talking of perfection is like the previous post about min/maxxing. There's an enormous grey area between "not even contributing the basic mechanics of the class" and "absolute perfection". If you were to invite a wizard into your group, you'd at least expect him to know to nuke, right? Maybe he doesn't always use the best nukes in term of mana ratio to damage and innate resists per mob type, but at least he's making things go boom in his own way. If said wizard spent 85% of the time meleeing, you'd start to wonder where he got his spell casting license. If I had an enchanter in the group, it wouldn't really bother me if he didn't refresh buffs until asked. I certainly wouldn't worry if he didn't have all the science of mezzing down and perhaps was using single target mezzes when AoE mez might be better or whatever. But if he reacted to five mobs in camp by casting Shallow Breath on each of them, I'd be curious what the hell he was doing.

Likewise for bards. If I was grouped with a bard who was singing, I don't know, Katta's, Shield of Song and Chant of Poison in a situation where I would have sang haste, slow and mana then at least I can say the guy is twisting and perhaps has some method to his madness. If he's not singing anything then he's dead weight. It's not a question of demanding perfection; hell I dork up all the time. It's just hoping that whoever you're with is somewhere over the halfway point in the suck-perfection spectrum.

My theory is that all the good bards out there are currently recovering from Carple tunnel surgery again. That, or their wrists finally blew out.