Bard Soul Discussion

[Reynaven]

I'm just going to wait and not comment on what I want it to be like, what hope it will be like, what it should be like... It's going to be new, and awesome and like no other bard. Not the VG bard, or Eq bard or any other. Think of it as a new adventure, mabye it will have some ressemblances, but nothing exactly like the old!

/cheers

[Amargein]

well Russ Brown did a great job further explaining the dynamics of class building during his interview;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLA7L...layer_embedded

The bard is going to be a great support class in a few different situations no doubt. It's only speculation as to how well a rogue will do though with a full or near full bard spec in solo situations. The bard with few points can add to hp and armor to give a defensively weak dps spec rogue an advantage in melee combat, or a ranger spec rogue during dungeon crawls or over aggro flares.

The Vg bard is probably the last of it's kind since it was a broken mechanic from day 1 of testing with so many nerfs happening on a daily basis, many stealthed in and many that just managed to break small aspects of song components. It gave such overpowered buffs that content had to be designed around the use of a bard with full dmg buffs to give the NPC's an equal or upper hand which managed to ruin many raids that could not keep bards for every group.

Eq bards were great in many aspects, they we're not required for every aspect of raids, they could play multiple roles and you could just have fun with them on every role you played, pulling, tanking, off-tanking, kiting(charm/fear/snare), and man did I ever enjoy the use of fading memories to train prior to the leashing changes.

Hopefully the bard in Rift will live up to it's support calling and allow rogues to kite, tank or heal as designed, but I'm still saddened by the lack of charm, fear and the 8sec mez on a 2minute timer, maybe it's to limit the power of the bard I dunno, but I'm going to test the heck out of the class when I get the soul.

[Raive]

Time for bard to step their game up! Bring on teh carpel tunnel!

[fangGWJ]

That video is terrific!

If they are going to have non combat souls at some point (mentioned in the video), I really hope we get more than 4 spec "saves". Or maybe we can get 4 combat spec saves and 2 or so non combat spec saves.

I really hope they follow through with the way the soul system works. I really hope it offers as much freedom as it seems with viable or at least fun character builds.

[Xilith]

Time for bard to step their game up! Bring on teh carpel tunnel!

Because the other rogues won't be building up combo points to use their finishers as often as they can?

[Schemer]

Maybe I do not fully understand the soul system, but I gues by just picking 2 more soul's in addition to Bard ,without spending point's in it, you will get free root abilities which provide some more damage abilities with combo point generation, so u can get aditional 4-5 strikes. And the Verse of Joy - is it raid wide or your self regen? All other buff's in discripton say it's RW and this one don't, so if it's not RW and you don't want run speed buff 38-40 point's in bard soul will be enough for raiding, and you get 11-13 free point's to sepnd in other soul's.

[fangGWJ]

It seems to me that you do get the zero point abilities in a soul just by "equipping" it. I can't imagine even the 51 point pure class people not taking advantage of that.

Some classes are going to be very popular for those reasons alone, that their zero point abilities are very desirable. Of the top of my head there is a soul that gets a lifetap and I'm not positive but the purifier gets one of their shields at zero points.

I can also see the bard being popular for melee focused rogues because cadence will essentially be a great pull "spell" that generates combo points and damages as you channel it.

[rabb1t]

You have to remember though that said free ability, even if we assume a boost of some kind based on stats, is going to be very very very weak compared to a deeper root ability.

Let's consider even just a 2 class split.

More even split... 26 / 25 - That means you are going about 2/3 the depth into the roots of each class. You are trading the most powerful abilities for flexibility.

Less even split... 36 / 18 - This gets you almost all of the root abilities from one tree, but you are still trading those top 3 or so root abilities to have about 60% the depth of a different class roots.

It gets 'worse' by a 3 class split.

Even split... 18 / 17 /16 - This puts you at only about half the root depth in three trees. You are missing all of the most powerful abilities in all three classes.

Uneven split... 32 / 16 / 3 - This grants you access to all but the top 2 or 3 root abilities of the first class, but is that sacrifice really worth it for those free and bottom most root ability of the 3rd class?

Consider too when splitting classes, some classes may have abilities that work against one another. While I'm looking at Cleric and this calling likely has more 'opposition' than most, it really wouldn't help to have a split which mixes a few points of say death damage, when the class I'm deep in uses all life.

I can see the potential for splitting into something by just a few points (I'm even considering looking at druid for the healbot slave), but you really have to think long and hard about if that's worth sacrificing deeper root abilities by increasing your class point split.

[fangGWJ]

With spell ranks though, I am not seeing the huge gap in power between the lower root skills and the higher ones. I don't have any numbers but I am confident that the damage for your level 0 spells will grow as you level. Whether its through stats or spell ranks or both doesn't matter to me.

We can just look at say the pyromancer soul tree. I think this is going to be common for all souls, fireball and flame bolt are going to be your bread and butter spells all the way to level 50. The other more powerful spells are either aoe, on long cooldowns or have long cast times.

You can also check out the Bard tree, I don't see a replacement for Cadence anywhere. The more and more I look at soul trees as they are revealed the more I see that you get the major flavor of the soul in the first 10 points.

[Schemer]

Right now 2 final root abilities from bard tree doesn't look too OP (unless Vers of Joy IS raid wide) so 38 point's is enough to cover most usefull buffs, and then you still have 13 free point's which you can cpend for exemple in to assasin tree and some zero point abilities from nightblade.

[Thoreau]

I would think there will be a lot of people doing 1 primary and 1 secondary with minimal points in a third. I think bard will show up as a secondary to a lot of dps builds and perhaps some healing builds as well.

[rabb1t]

and perhaps some healing builds as well.

I wish. It was my original plan to split Paladin / Bard, or Cleric / Bard, but once the Class Calling system restricted things that became impossible. I don't know of any Rogue which qualifies as 'healer' more than Bard. My plans will likely have to be Paladin for tank (if I do a pure tank), Justicar / Sentinel for main, and Bard / Riftstalker for DPS.

My natural playstyle leans more towards a Warrior / Rogue mix, so you never know, Bard / Riftstalker could work out, but in MMOGs I lean more towards those which can do some healing or a pure tank.

[Xilith]

Doubtful it will be secondary to rogue healing builds, as rogue healing (as we've seen thus far) is limited to the bard.

[skeptic]

I really think that I will be making a bard off the bat as my alt. I am loving the utility and support of the class. Some form of cleric will be my main but the bard is looking like I will take a liking to it.
Sooooooo many classes that I need to check out to find which one I am going to stick with.

[Sharkaar]

It's hard to say how the class will play at this point.

It definitly sounds like an EQ1 bard, where you will be twisting songs to maintain a lot of buff up.

Essentially a skilled bard will manage to keep many codas up at the same time. It seems to me that the interesting part of the bard is not it's attack rotation as much as it's coda twisting. If it ends up anything close to an EQ1 bard, it might end up being extremely fun class to play.

It might not be a great soloer, but solo you might just use the coda of fury and just DPS.

The thing is, with the soul system...you're not stuck as a bard all the time if you don't want to. It's also a very unique class, that will definitly bring something to groups and raids. And that's a big plus in my book. The gameplay can be tweaked if it's not fun though. That's stuff we'll see when we get to play it.

What Gorgamesh posted seems to me fit the Bardinformation the most. And i hope it will be like that. My only concern is that i hope i dont have to use the same combat art over and over again to gain the combopoints needed to twist my codas.
Maybe they add some combat arts to the bard which do no dmg but debuff the mob and add combo points and on the other hand add some arts which do o.k. dmg but dont add combopoints. Thats just an idea to make the playstyle more interesting.