Charging bard skills

Why does it take so long to charge these skills compared to all other skills? I understand that there should be some advantage to stacking glyphs as opposed to charging, but why is it so dramatic with the bard skills?

Seems strange to have such a powerful skill tree locked behind episode 2 access and have such a limitation on it. It seems like we have an older than average playerbase here and I've heard from a lot of players now that they cannot stack these skills because of issues with their hands.

Am I missing something?

 

I think the "reason" is that charge time is a function of cast time, and bard skill cast times are so long.
Unclear whether this is a deliberate design choice (IE, "no hold-to-press-button charging for bards intended) or just an oversight.

This actually is a complete blocker to playing bard for those of us who never really got the hang of trying to manual stack bouncing glyphs or get motion sick doing so lol. Manually stacking for me is is just completely unviable in that regard, and that means anything other than casting a single stack skill (not really effective) puts the whole tree out of usability. I would love to see this changed, since I thought the whole whole-to-stack thing was added to help us inept folks achieve some measure of parity :x :x

 

The reason given is that since they are so incredibly powerful when stacked/charged a player should have to put in additional effort/skill to reap those benefits. It does of course create some problems when this can be a physically difficult thing for players to do, though in general there are some nice builds for more physically accessible game play. Even without stacking the skills bard/tamer is very powerful, for instance.

 

I agree with that, but I think the time it takes to charge is still way too long. It should be adjusted to the point where it's at least usable for players that want to charge it, while still giving an advantage to players that stack it.

Also if it's that powerful... maybe they could fix the damn tree? How long is it going to stay the way it is before they nerf it and make you hold an instrument like was intended from the beginning?

These types of decisions really bother me.

 

Bingo!

 

Good hands

In all seriousness...

Heh, last time they tried to balance the tree, the outrage... How dare Chris increase the casting time of a skill that is supposed to be used by a dedicated support player by so long that now people cannot use this in their rotation buff... How dare Chris make Atonal Aria respect the basic rules of combat! HOW DARE HE!!!

Bard is OP, bard is better than nearly every other similar effect : Slow? Psalms hits -100% very easily, try to do that with Water spells (water magic's gimmick is slows...) you will struggle to ever slow anyone more than 50%... Healing? Melody of Mending will heal you and anyone near you at a rate of 50+ HP per 2 seconds, Healing Grace could do better if your nicely invested in life magic, but on a single target... Atonal Aria? Yeah, immolation does better(ish) but is magical, thus, can be resisted, Atonal Aria cannot... Bard does everything better, while still allowing you to use a weapon, all you need is enough skill or hand motricity to do the stacking (and people found clever ways to do it with bad hands), and you're good to go... Bard is long overdue to get its one special mechanic in, instrument requirement, and then (AND ONLY AFTER) get balanced correctly... Dont introduce the instrument requirement + nerf all the songs to the ground at the same time, or else you risk overtuning, but the tuning needs to happen...

 

The problem here is that charge time essentially disappears with an unlocked deck. The difference between the two is massive in the case of bard skills.

 

Bard is also an aggro magnet. It does take some finesse to stack with an unlocked deck.

Bard is great entry level for any player, but tapers off due to lack of gear or progression compared to melee bow or magic.

Which skill costs like 2000 mana to cast? Balanced?

I would enjoy some benefits or boosts with the use of an instrument.

 

Tapers off? At its highest levels and coupled with taming its the strongest overall build in the game for pve.

 

I dont know, I think tactics + something, like air or bow or swords or even heavy armor is better all around.

 

Not even close.

 

It might be better in a few choice circumstances, but tamer/bard spec will allow you to kill just about anything. And with much less effort/risk.

 

But which skill that "costs" 2 or more focus lets you cast with 1 focus? Canticle eats large amounts of focus, but it takes so long to cast that you've regened some by the time it's over, so you can chain-cast canticle forever, and in groups of mobs with the right gear it's incredibly powerful. Unlike Atonal Aria it also seems pretty light on the aggro compared to possible damage.

I very much agree with Adam Crow about the tree needing a fix, and I think Violet Ronso is dead on in describing the intricacies and pitfalls of that.

Edit: For people that have not played around with Bard, Concussive Canticle drains a huge portion of your focus pool every use, but as long as you have at least 1 focus you are still allowed to cast it for full damage. It might even be a bug, but I assumed it was a way to combat the problem of bard being free additional damage/power as opposed to a dedicated playstyle. It helps prevents folks from dropping a bunch of canticles but also pinging off a ton of fireballs or coups de grace or something in between.

 

It depends what you mean by better. My Bard/Tamer build is in the top 3 most powerful builds I've run in terms of best DPS, but it's also more versatile and can get that DPS most anywhere. It's less demanding, both in terms of paying attention to the fight and responding to it with active deck use (stacking, swapping decks, taking consumables, etc).

It's also a better at scaling. The build starts good and gets more and more powerful, whereas some builds (like PvE chaotic feedback melee) do more harm than good under a certain level. And it's super cheap to run. I had a build (which doesn't work anymore) that had me taking sometimes 1000's of imbued potions a day, not to mention the damage on the sylvan spears. It did a bit more DPS than bard/tamer with less XP, but it cost 10-20k gp/hr to run when doing nonstop PvE fighting.

That's an extreme example since despite being one of my top DPS builds it was ultimately silly and I ran it for fun, not for profit, but it's a telling caricature of the sort of build required to beat bard/tamer. It takes a lot of work and investment.

 

I would suggest making the bard a mana dependent character. In general, why the game does not implement turn-on abilities that consume mana, this would solve so many issues and make armor builds to increase mana relevant.

 

I've never considered this a bug myself, as if you read the tooltip (heh) it is not a focus cost, but rather a focus drain. The difference IMO here is that a focus cost is what it costs to be able to cast it, while a focus drain is simply a scenario of "If you cast this, you will lose up to this amount of focus"

All around is a stretch. Air is unuseable in some scenarios due to resistances, blades are better for small packs or single target, bows too. Heavy armor can be worn as a bard, and even as a tamer, so Heavy armor is not a build that can surpasse a bard nor a tamer. Taming has no real weaknesses that I've noticed, and Bard takes the pros of taming, and multiplies them 10x, its just that strong...

 

That is because of a bug where bard spec is boosting Frenzy skill 2x. this alone is why the bard tamer spec is OP right now. They are aware of it as I reported the finding but if they remove it would make all them bard / tamers not as powerful and not getting the mega hits again. the devs don't want to touch it right now but I suspect it will get fixed in the future

 

That is 100% for sure not only reason bard spec tamer is OP.

That said, I noticed the bug got verified today, so still waiting to hear some dev input. Every time I've brought it up in streams or AskADev I got the impression it was intentional. Presumably part of the synergies between trees they talked about doing for a while, as it was added at the same time those conversations were happening.

 

All the discussion of balance, powerfulness and whatnot aside, the issue as I see it is:

1. HOLDING to stack a skill was added as an alternative to manual stack whack-a-mole for usability purposes.
2. Hold-to-stack (in every other tree) is not quite as fast/effective as manual stacking, but it is comparable. Manual stacking still gets an advantage.
3. Hold to stack (in bard tree) has an excessively long "hold time" making it extremely ineffective / borderline unusable.

Therefore it is not achieving the purpose of hold-to-stack methodology, and if used, is absolutely not comparable to manual stacking in terms of speed or effectiveness.

Everything else aside, I'd be interested to know:
Is it INTENDED to make this tree (and only this tree) inaccessible to players who cannot deal with manual stack whackamole?
If it is NOT intended, can we get this addressed?

The relative overpoweredness of bard, its synergy with other trees, etc. etc. is a related, but different issue. Bard tree does not have a usable alternative to manual stacks. If that's a design choice, its a bit of a baffling one, since presumably players who would want to play a dedicated support class would more likely be the ones who aren't white-knuckling the keyboard. I'd just like to hear it confirmed either way so I can give up on dreams of barding and move on with my life, or not.