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Bardic Instruments

RovenRoven
edited May 2013 in New Ideas
I'd like to make a suggestion that may or may not be appropriate (I know, I'm very new to be suggesting stuff, but I can't help it!). As a newbie bard, I love the idea of making my own instruments to use with my musical abilities, but I find it quite vexing that the musical songs I learn in Thespia are useless without learning the corresponding instrument crafting skill in Artistry, and an instrument crafted from Artistry does little except toggle which Thespia abilities I can use.

My suggestion is to rework the role of instruments in bardic abilities so that they do more than sit in one's inventory to gate abilities from other skillsets. Why not allow the bard to choose which instrument (or instruments) to play for a particular song, with each having a slightly different effect?

For example, why not have each ability in Thespia that currently requires a particular instrument (or two) instead just require any instrument (or two). Then the corresponding artistry skills can be adjusted as follows:

----------------------------------------------------

Mandolin
The musician's first instrument, years of practice allowing them to coax beautiful melodies from it as naturally as breathing.
Effects:
  • Reduces the cost of your Thespia abilities, and adds a very tiny mana regeneration to everyone in the room in which it is played (ally & enemy)
Varieties available for crafting:
  • Lute (reduced mana cost of songs),
  • Viola (slightly reduced equilibrium cost of beneficial songs),
  • Fiddle (slightly reduced equilibrium cost of harmful songs)

Flute
A beautifully gentle instrument whose layered vibrations carry the unending song of the wind.
Effects:
  • Extends the duration of your Thespia abilities, and has a chance to draw additional vermin or other small creatures in the room in which it is played (very infrequent chance)
Varieties available for crafting:
  • Flute (songs last slightly longer)
  • Oboe (your songs are more difficult to end or remove)
  • Piccolo (ticks of your songs have a small chance to extend the remaining duration)

Drum
The pounding percussive rhythms of the drum add force and impact to your music.
Effects:
  • Increases the effectiveness of your Thespia abilities, and grants an extra movement step to everyone in the room in which it is played (rarely, like every 10 sec or so)
Varieties available for crafting:
  • Tabor Drum (increased healing/protection from beneficial songs),
  • Conga Drum (increased damage/weakening from harmful songs),
  • Slit Drum (small chance for extra ticks of music effects that are not damage/healing)

Panpipes
The complex and layered harmonies of the panpipes can be used to evoke depth and shade once mastered by the skilled musician.
Effects:
  • Adds secondary utility effects to your Thespia abilities, and has a small chance to cause additional herb growth or blossoming flowers in the room in which it is played
Varieties available for crafting:
  • Panflute (chance for songs affecting allies to cause the next damaging attack to have 30% of its damage deflected, lasting a few seconds only)
  • Syrinx (chance for songs affecting allies to reduce the mana/willpower cost of the target's next ability by 75%, lasting a few seconds only)
  • Harmonica (chance for harmful or beneficial songs to add a random statistical buff or debuff, lasting a few seconds only)

Harp
The golden-stringed harp is the trademark of the maestro bard, who can coax the most exquisite and beautiful music known to mortalkind from within it.
Effects:
  • Improves the effects of your Thespia abilities, and adds a very tiny health regeneration to everyone in the room in which it is played (allies & enemies)
Varieties available for crafting:
  • Golden harp (Harmful songs have improved individual effects)
  • Silver harp (Beneficial songs have improved individual effects)
  • Lyre (Utility songs have improved individual effects)

------------------------------

Note that the minor passive room ability that is associated with each instrument would not cause a message line (otherwise it would be way too spammy), and these room-wide effects are intended to be more flavourful than directly useful. Also, it would be impossible to play two varieties of the same instrument at once.

So for example, as soon as I learn Restoration in Thespia I would be able to use that ability as long as I am playing any instrument that I have - but as a novice I might only be able to craft a lute (meaning it costs slightly less mana to play). As my skill grows, I might decide that I prefer to use a tabor to get bigger ticks from Restoration instead, but pay a little extra in mana now that I'm not using a lute anymore. Alternatively, I could choose whichever instrument best suits my play style, or possibly some combination of them once I am skilled enough to play two at once. I would also suggest that the effects of instruments only apply as long as the bard continues to play them - while the same song may persist after I've unwielded or started to play a different instrument, the bonuses that apply to the song are derived from what I am playing now and not the original instrument that started the song.

It would also be really wonderful if somehow I could pay a woodworker for designs that allowed me to make different looking instruments - maybe that already exists somehow and its just not clear from the AB descriptions.

Anyway, just a suggestion that I'd personally like to see! ^_^

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Comments

  • SarriusSarrius
    edited May 2013
    I am not sure if maybe I am reading this wrong, and if I am, sorry for assuming this but.. you know you can get another Bard to craft your instruments for you, right? Artistry is not precisely parasitic design in regards to Thespia. Artistry gates what skills you can use insofar as you must find one active Bard to make your instruments for you.

    On the topic of reworking instruments - I would rather see Imperian's Bards get the axe at some point and be remade. Every attempt made by admin or players to prod or poke them in to the right direction, balance-wise, tends to blow up in our faces (see: my Cruel Lament change, the beta-less Bard 'revamp', the Words of Power and the Voice Word: Myried in general). I prefer Achaea's "swashbuckling guy" Bards, even though I hear they are, oddly enough saddled with some of the same issues in combat.

    In an ideal world, the ideas you brought up would have already been thought about and very likely had seen the light of day in some fashion - namely requiring specific instruments for songs is kind of stupid, and instruments should have been a utilitarian (and roleplay) choice of some fashion instead of being ingredients in a recipe. Sadly, Bard is caught somewhere in the middle of "legacy design philosophy" (which was pretty awful, in retrospect) and "intelligent, thoughtful class design" (or as close to what we have today - I think most classes Garryn gets his hands on look pretty good, honestly).

    <div>Message #2062&nbsp; Sent By: (imperian)&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59</div><div>"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a right</div><div>ass, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."</div>
  • RovenRoven

    Sarrius said:
    I am not sure if maybe I am reading this wrong, and if I am, sorry for assuming this but.. you know you can get another Bard to craft your instruments for you, right? Artistry is not precisely parasitic design in regards to Thespia. Artistry gates what skills you can use insofar as you must find one active Bard to make your instruments for you.

    On the topic of reworking instruments - I would rather see Imperian's Bards get the axe at some point and be remade. Every attempt made by admin or players to prod or poke them in to the right direction, balance-wise, tends to blow up in our faces (see: my Cruel Lament change, the beta-less Bard 'revamp', the Words of Power and the Voice Word: Myried in general). I prefer Achaea's "swashbuckling guy" Bards, even though I hear they are, oddly enough saddled with some of the same issues in combat.

    I did wonder if you could just use the instruments of other bards - but seems to make those skills even less useful or well designed as standalone abilities (given they last for what, about 4 RL months?).

    I can understand the desire for a 'slash and burn' approach to a whole new class, but I definitely wouldn't want to play a swashbuckler/rogue myself. I like the idea of music as serious magic, not as a part of cheap tricks and boyish entertainment (although the current bard skills seem a bit of the way down that path already).

    A full rework would be great too, but in lieu of having the desire or resources for that, I think this suggestion takes what we already have and makes it much more intuitive and hopefully a little more interesting.
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  • MathiausMathiaus Pennsylvania
    edited May 2013
    Everyone hates on bards because they don't understand how to keep a solid offense/defense on them.

    I really like your ideas for instruments, and you're enthusiasm for one of my favorite classes.
    image
  • MathiausMathiaus Pennsylvania
    All fixable next classlead if admins allow the supposed changes to go through.
    image
  • RovenRoven
    Okay, so I thought I'd go right down to the bottom of the rabbit hole and create an alternative suggestion for the other component of Bardic Artistry that I'm not a huge fan of - sketches. For reference, the current abilities are at http://wiki.imperian.com/Artistry and http://wiki.imperian.com/Artistry_(abilities).

    I was really looking forward to the whole concept when I first read about them and chose my class, but finding out that sketches are just another set of loyals that only have any usefulness in combat with other players was a bit disappointing for a primarily PvE-oriented person. I quite like the fact that you can sketch any mob in the game - that's very nifty - but the fact that you can't do anything with your sketch other than scry a location was certainly less than what I was expecting, as is the fact they just replicate existing abilities from other classes. Isn't it better to cooperate with actual players from those professions?

    Anyway, my idea is to change the concept of sketches slightly so that they become artful illustrations created entirely from the imagination of a Bard, but only brought to life when they use their golden voice to tell the story behind that illustration. The sketch itself is drawn and prepared beforehand, then the Bard uses the STORYTELL command, which looks something like:

    Roven opens a sketchbook to display an illustration of [a mythical talisman/a volcanic landscape/a legendary dragon/whatever], spinning a vivid tale in a voice laden with enchantment. The lines and colours of the displayed artwork begin to lift off the page as he speaks, taking on a life of their own as they assume the tangible form of [whatever the item is].

    Then you would see the standard short description for that item whenever you look at the room, for example:

    A painterly sailing ship rocks gently here on invisible waves.
    A painterly caricature of Roven has positioned itself here in a most unflattering way.

    And the Bard would be able to customize the long description if they wanted, like an illusion:

    > PROBE SHIP
    <optional description that was entered when the sketch was first drawn>
    This is a magickal illustration that you can SMUDGE to destroy.
    A painterly sailing ship bears the distinctive mark of Roven, Student of the Arts.

    An illustration would be stationary in the room that the tale was told, and there would only be able to be one of each type of them, and a maximum of three from the same Bard. Anyone could SMUDGE a magickal illustration to weaken it, and after a certain amount of time elapses (or enough SMUDGEs), the integrity of the image would be lost and it would disintegrate into nothing more than a pool of ink. Using them in wet weather or underwater would also cause the colours to run (obviously), and so reduce their duration by half.

    Most illustrations could be interacted with to cause various effects, each interaction causing a slight smudge in the ink and hastening their demise, although some would be reactive to certain actions that take place in the location. With the exception of revealing hidden players, I've also tried to avoid multi-player attacks as much as possible, because I think Bards probably have enough of that with their songs.

    Anyway, I've created a full sample AB list at http://wiki.imperian.com/User:Roven/Suggestion:Artistry, if anyone is interested and wants to provide some feedback. Obviously I don't know enough about the combat metagame to really know what afflictions/tactics are going to be both balanced and useful, but that's easy enough to tweak. :)
    Avatar image by Luxuris (NSFW)
  • ZarimZarim
    I really like the style of your ideas, Roven.
  • DiceneDicene
    Agreed. The only place that I see RNG as reasonable is on ents. When you're looking at skills when trying to plan out combat, RNG is a deal-breaker.
    image
  • RovenRoven
    edited May 2013
    Kalon said:
    I agree, the flavor is very unique and appealing, though the mechanics may need a bit of tuning. One major thing that came up a few times is that fairly standard passive effects should never hit only one random enemy in the room-- in the group-oriented environment that is Imperian, hitting one random target in a room full of enemies is essentially hitting no one at all every time the tick doesn't hit the current target of the focus fire.

    More generally, any time you see yourself using words like 'random' and 'chance', stop and think very carefully about why you feel that it is necessary to randomize the effectiveness of the ability you are proposing. Often, what emerges isthat  either a) it is too powerful in its current state, and either needs to be toned down or given some other necessary condition for operating, or b) it is fine as it is, and the chance can be turned into a certainty.
    Thanks for the feedback, it's very good advice!

    I've adjusted the illustration abilities slightly (ships, landscape, ruins) to remove the chance component but still hopefully avoid room-wide attacks.

    I'm not sure that the randomness from instrument boons are so much a problem, because the benefits don't seem to me to be all that overwhelming or critical to specific tactics, and I like the idea of having some variability involved. I'm sure the balancing team could always come up with better effects if that's a problem though.

    Edit: Thinking about it further, I've also adjusted the randomness of the instrument passive benefits. (Flute, Drum, Panpipes in http://wiki.imperian.com/User:Roven/Suggestion:Artistry updated.) Again, I don't really know what is most useful in actual combat (hopefully some Bard combatants can give feedback), so I'm probably erring on the side of underpoweredness rather than overpoweredness.
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  • MathiausMathiaus Pennsylvania
    Think of this too when next classlead come around.

    1. Instant kantae will be gone.
    2. Nuarinyu won't have it's double masked afflicting.
    3. Myried will be uncomboable.
    4. There are 4 ways bards makes afflict, so adding any random or chance mechanic will complicate things further with the nearly unstoppable offense bard has.
    image
  • RovenRoven
    Mathiaus said:
    Think of this too when next classlead come around. 1. Instant kantae will be gone. 2. Nuarinyu won't have it's double masked afflicting. 3. Myried will be uncomboable. 4. There are 4 ways bards makes afflict, so adding any random or chance mechanic will complicate things further with the nearly unstoppable offense bard has.
    So, are you saying that the revised suggestion is too powerful? I don't think there are any masked afflictions in what I've written at the moment, if that's the concern?
    Avatar image by Luxuris (NSFW)
  • SarriusSarrius
    edited May 2013
    On the core of my answering your concerns: The reason Artistry is a mix of 'worthless' craft skills and PvP skills is because most of the selling point of investing lessons in skills in IRE games is being able to be PK capable. Sure, people that want to PvE can stop after their best bashing attack - but you don't really need all that much from your guild skills to roleplay being a Bard or a Knight or a graceful, sword-slinging acrobat. All of the not-crafting skills in Artistry are designed as a core portion of the Bard kit's combat potential - they always have been. The sketches are meant to replicate/mimic having a slave of a Magick class next to you performing certain skills that mesh with the kit. Cooperating with other players and 'class viability in a vacuum' are utterly separate ordeals of balance or design. You cannot argue that cooperation is a reason why class sketches aren't interesting, or powerful, or should be replaced. The largest portion of skills in Imperian serve, theoretically, some form of PK function. Are some (most) of them worthless? Absolutely. It might also be because afflicting mobiles is impossible in Imperian, but hey, that is what it is.

    On the actual concept: The Magick circles doesn't need more stationary abilities. We are deleting/remaking Crystalism for this very reason. We deleted Groves for this very reason. An illustration being a stationary, powerful skill will only serve to root the class down and then we have to give it something to prevent people from fleeing - which is another nightmare to consider. Not to be insulting, but I don't believe that the actual meat of your idea supplies what the game - and the class - currently needs for Bards to stay functional within the Magick circle. The balancing point of 'SMUDGE', as well, sort of makes a momentum or tempo mechanic (there are good and bad tempo/momentum classes - Bard is currently a bad one) that we want to draw AWAY from - what is the cost of smudging? What is the cost of storytelling? Comparably, are you creating a point of pressure that an opponent is forced to do nothing but smudge illustrations instead of attacking back? If SMUDGE is costless (in which case every single one of my commands will be truncated with SMUDGE ILLUSTRATION#;), why give it to players in the first place? Why not just make illustrations do something weaker and make them uncounterable? These things are things you, as a person with little PK experience, likely don't think about day to day. That's fine, absolutely, but it should also illustrate that class design and concepts aren't all just ideas. There is a muscle behind every piece of skin, and that muscle needs to function in an effective and fair way.

    Excuse my ranting: The Bard class is a steaming pile that should be utterly revamped - but I said that 10+ posts ago. While it might not 'suit' some people's RP, we definitely endured Canavas' whining when we took away his reflexed-bow-level 3 'RP' and the game is better for it. I wholly endorse the existence and propagation of RP in Imperian, but you don't need a set of guild skills to be a precise way to RP your character how you want. The class is schizophrenic mess of 'themes' and the mechanics. To continue on this, I will say that our Bards are probably the worst out of all three available Bard classes in IRE - Lusternia's Bards entirely embrace the fact that they are meant to be a team-centric support class with 'RP tools', and Achaea's Bards have a simple, elegant theme and kit. No amount of theoretical 'revamping' can beat just razing the class and remaking it ground up with autocuring in mind and the design philosophies Garryn seems to subscribe to (considering he has yet to really do us wrong). I guess my point is that I don't hate your ideas - I just hate the idea of spending more time 'fixing' Bards when we'd be better served axing the class with a rewrite in mind.
    <div>Message #2062&nbsp; Sent By: (imperian)&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59</div><div>"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a right</div><div>ass, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."</div>
  • RovenRoven
    edited May 2013
    Sarrius said:
    On the core of my answering your concerns: The reason Artistry is a mix of 'worthless' craft skills and PvP skills is because most of the selling point of investing lessons in skills in IRE games is being able to be PK capable. Sure, people that want to PvE can stop after their best bashing attack - but you don't really need all that much from your guild skills to roleplay being a Bard or a Knight or a graceful, sword-slinging acrobat. All of the not-crafting skills in Artistry are designed as a core portion of the Bard kit's combat potential - they always have been. The sketches are meant to replicate/mimic having a slave of a Magick class next to you performing certain skills that mesh with the kit. Cooperating with other players and 'class viability in a vacuum' are utterly separate ordeals of balance or design. You cannot argue that cooperation is a reason why class sketches aren't interesting, or powerful, or should be replaced. The largest portion of skills in Imperian serve, theoretically, some form of PK function. Are some (most) of them worthless? Absolutely. It might also be because afflicting mobiles is impossible in Imperian, but hey, that is what it is.

    First, thank you for taking the time to give such detailed feedback. I do appreciate it, even if I might not necessarily agree with all of it. :)

    I completely understand that a good portion of skills in any IRE game are going to focus primarily on player-vs-player combat, but I don't agree that that justifies making 90% of a skillset worthless (apart from a token "bashing attack") for players who might spend the majority of their time not dueling.

    Are sketches interesting and beloved by a majority of Bards? Maybe. If that's the case, then I certainly wouldn't want to take away from anyone what they enjoy about their profession, and a revision of the skill would not in the best interests of making that profession more appealing. Personally, I'm a bit underwhelmed. 

    I like the concept, I just don't see a reason to use most of the skillset very often at all (a new instrument every what, 2 RL years?), and being trailed by afflicting ents (that just replicate existing abilities) doesn't seem to me to offer much in the way of a uniquely Bardic flavour to combat, even the PvP side of it.
    Sarrius said:

    On the actual concept: The Magick circles doesn't need more stationary abilities. We are deleting/remaking Crystalism for this very reason. We deleted Groves for this very reason. An illustration being a stationary, powerful skill will only serve to root the class down and then we have to give it something to prevent people from fleeing - which is another nightmare to consider. Not to be insulting, but I don't believe that the actual meat of your idea supplies what the game - and the class - currently needs for Bards to stay functional within the Magick circle. The balancing point of 'SMUDGE', as well, sort of makes a momentum or tempo mechanic (there are good and bad tempo/momentum classes - Bard is currently a bad one) that we want to draw AWAY from - what is the cost of smudging? What is the cost of storytelling? Comparably, are you creating a point of pressure that an opponent is forced to do nothing but smudge illustrations instead of attacking back? If SMUDGE is costless (in which case every single one of my commands will be truncated with SMUDGE ILLUSTRATION#;), why give it to players in the first place? Why not just make illustrations do something weaker and make them uncounterable? These things are things you, as a person with little PK experience, likely don't think about day to day. That's fine, absolutely, but it should also illustrate that class design and concepts aren't all just ideas. There is a muscle behind every piece of skin, and that muscle needs to function in an effective and fair way.

    They're fair questions, but they aren't as unique to stationary abilities as you might think at first blush. How long does it take to kill an ent? What is the cost of resummoning? Without the drawback of having to redraw them in a different location, what other balancing mechanics are in place to allow an opponent to use a large entourage against their owner? Do all professions have equal access to these penalty mechanics, and how easily can the ent-master prevent or recover from them? How much of the ent-master's offense should be "out-sourced" to their more fragile but passively capable entourage, and why has it been substituted in place of active abilities in the first place? The balancing questions are not more difficult for world-based effects compared to ents, they're just slightly different.

    On your other point, I did suspect that Magick would have an oversupply of room-wide effects, as you suggest, though I would make the distinction between stationary (you lose the benefits if you move to a location where you haven't yet cast something) and room-wide.(a stationary ability that persistently hits any enemy in the room). Too many of the latter would definitely cause balancing issues when they overlap, but surely too many of the former is no worse a situation that multiple professions that all seem to use a large entourage? That is precisely the reason that I attempted to focus on avoiding room-wide attacks from illustrations that hit all enemies in a room, because in combination with songs and vibes it would be too much. Similarly, the limitation on three illustrations at once from a single Bard in the one room is intended to reduce the potential for Grove-like castling, where every harmful attack is thrown up at once in the same place, and you try not to move from it. Instead, you might need to redraw a few times if the fight becomes mobile, but those objects would persist beyond the length of time the Bard is actually standing there.

    Sarrius said:

    Excuse my ranting: The Bard class is a steaming pile that should be utterly revamped - but I said that 10+ posts ago. While it might not 'suit' some people's RP, we definitely endured Canavas' whining when we took away his reflexed-bow-level 3 'RP' and the game is better for it. I wholly endorse the existence and propagation of RP in Imperian, but you don't need a set of guild skills to be a precise way to RP your character how you want. The class is schizophrenic mess of 'themes' and the mechanics. To continue on this, I will say that our Bards are probably the worst out of all three available Bard classes in IRE - Lusternia's Bards entirely embrace the fact that they are meant to be a team-centric support class with 'RP tools', and Achaea's Bards have a simple, elegant theme and kit. No amount of theoretical 'revamping' can beat just razing the class and remaking it ground up with autocuring in mind and the design philosophies Garryn seems to subscribe to (considering he has yet to really do us wrong). I guess my point is that I don't hate your ideas - I just hate the idea of spending more time 'fixing' Bards when we'd be better served axing the class with a rewrite in mind.
    I don't think the Bard profession is quite that bad - though I will bow to your greater experience with them. One of things that I think is often overlooked with profession redesigns though is that 'flavour-of-the-month' combat superiority isn't as valuable as ensuring the class can appeal to a variety of different playstyles. I've played some classes have amazing skill synergies and really focused, effective and diverse tactics available to them in how quickly they can kill another player, but in the 'downtime' between large or small scale fights they don't really have a lot to do that's profession-specific. IRE games are generally rather good at avoiding this trap and ensuring that there are multiple uses for various skills, or that there are a significant number profession-specific crafting, world-interaction or social abilities that sit alongside the more purely attacking ones.

    I'd like to think that if we can identify places where that balance isn't quite right, then it is possible to rework that particular area without just deleting the whole class. I've been through complete class replacements (Luminaries in Aetolia come to mind), and if you're not a fan of the surprise new direction and flavour, it can be really quite jarring and unpleasant. Looking at how bards have been depicted in other games (the jack-of-all trades, the clownish performer, the goth rock star), I'm not sure I'd like to take the risk of a completely new interpretation.
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  • GurnGurn
    The trouble with flavour RP skills in combat skillsets is simply that it tries to do two things at once and ends up being useful to just about no one. Learning to get a skill, only to find useless RP skills jammed pack in the middle of your PvP dreams, while people who want to RP and not PvP end up having to throw X amount of credits into those PvP sills they're never going to use in order to make the instruments that work for their RP.

    I love RP, and I also like PvP, but even with a lot of credits and lessons, it's a bit annoying to learn through something and figure out which are ones I can use in combat and which ones are more flavour things. The newly designed skills with Hunter and Druid seem to not have these sort of issues, though.







  • KhizanKhizan

    Having read all these posts and skimmed over your suggestions, I think that the best way to sum this thread up is: "I really liked the idea of Bards, but I liked the idea of Bards that are nothing like these Bards, so here's some awful ideas!"

    You want to remove all their mobility and tie them to pseudo-sketches with crappy effects that you've anchored to rooms. You want to add a whole bunch of fiddly things to it like "Count song ticks and time your attacks to fall after certain ticks."

    What exactly is your goal with this suggested change? Because there HAS to be a better way to go about it than "awful it up a bit."

    "On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."

  • RovenRoven
    Ah well, if it isn't good enough, it isn't good enough. Hopefully someone else will come up with something much more amazing to make Artistry a wonderfully original, fun and entertaining skillset. It might just not be me!

    @Khizan: I'm not sure what parts you skimmed over, but I don't understand at all how you came to the conclusions that you did. "Bards that are nothing like these Bards"? Because Bards who use Artistry to craft 15 types of instrument giving minor boons and paint illustrations that turn into real things in the world around you seems not that far at all from Bards who use Artistry to craft 5 types of instrument that play specific songs and draw sketches of people that turn into living paper dolls. Different, certainly, but not "nothing like" at all. If you were actually addressing @Sarrius, who was advocating a complete revamp of the profession and not myself, then my apologies.

    I also don't agree that sketches are likely to be the only mobility that Bards have, so that if you take away those ents they can't possibly move out of a single location and hope to compete in combat. My personal preferences are such that I'm not usually interested in playing ultra-mobile pet classes, so I'm certainly slightly biased in that regard, but then I wouldn't have thought Artistry was a pet-master skillset. 

    Crappy effects? Maybe. I definitely thought I was erring on the side of underpowered, because an overpowered suggestion is much more likely to be dismissed as little more than self-interested desire towards an easy-win class. That's certainly fixable though. 

    I don't really understand the bit about counting ticks to time attacks to fall afterwards. the only instrument boon that your comment seems to refer to is the panpipes, and the only one that could possibly play into offense is the Siku - and a temporary stat bonus lasting a few seconds can't be that overwhelming, surely?

    In response to your question, my goal was to try to come up with a skillset that had more unique Bard flavour, more 'artistry' in the sense of crafting, and hopefully more utility without sacrificing the offense support it provides. It sounds as though your opinion is that either that goal wasn't worth the effort, or that I've fallen far short of achieving it. 

    Perhaps you're right. If nothing else, perhaps something can be salvaged or inspire an even better suggestion. Ah well, it was a fun exercise nonetheless.
    Avatar image by Luxuris (NSFW)
  • SarriusSarrius
    edited May 2013
    Don't forget spider sketches, quezdras, towne mobs written (assumably) by docents, etc. Double aeon sketches that also webbed were pretty hilarious.

    EDIT: Oh man, or my mist tendril sketches that aeoned, blacked out, and flung you from the room? Ahhh, the good old days. Sethren got so pissed when he saw those the first time.
    <div>Message #2062&nbsp; Sent By: (imperian)&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59</div><div>"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a right</div><div>ass, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."</div>
  • MathiausMathiaus Pennsylvania

    Oh, the good ol' spider sketches with earthquake stun and behead.....

    Or even tossing down three troll sketches to wipe a room...

    Or tossing spider sketches on EVERY person in the room, allowing you to effectively fight 5v1 and win....

    Yeah, bard is slightly, very slightly, better than it was before.

    image
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