Two of the more unique fighting styles in Lusternia, the Spiritsingers and Cacophony focus on killing someone by making them exhausted or starving. As most people know, this has big issues. In an effort to help envoys decide on how to moderate between making them weak, but still somewhat effective...here we go:

SPIRITSINGERS- They focus on making a person tired. Metawake is the issue. It is VERY difficult for a Spiritsinger to kill someone with metawake. The issue? If my enemy doesn't have metawake, I can almost guarantee I'll kill them. Metawake needs a way to be moderated so that I won't have it so easy, yet the enemy still has an equal chance of withstanding me.

Spiritsingers give tiredness in two ways:

Selenelullaby will lower a person's tiredness when it hits IF they're not rested above a certain point.

Pixiedust gives an enemy more tiredness with each hit of a poison they're afflicted with, regardless of whether they shrug it or not.

Together, it takes me about 36-ish doses of poison to get someone to be collapsing. Yes, people can suggest 'Why don't you drain their mana? Use manabarbs? Maybe make their willpower run out through bleeding?' I don't know about you, but I don't want to use 200 weed/sage and 20 minutes in a fight to get someone's willpower down. It's also fairly difficult to stack herbal cures, so sticking manabarbs is difficult. Smudges aren't very effective against metawake, either. Breaking a sleeping person's limbs can be nice, but Mountain Smudge is FAR too random to be useful.

Using minorsixth to drain their mana is difficult, as it has NO DAMAGE SOURCE OR TYPE. It cannot be boosted or dampened. It's about a flat 600 every time- that's not very difficult to recover, regardless of your intelligence.

CACOPHONY- They focus on starvation. Orange and Constitution defenses are the issue. If you make them both strippable, you're almost always going to die against a Cacophony unless you bring a lot of food with you. They need you unconscious to kill you most of the time. If you make Orange and Constitution strippable, you'll go down fast. If you moderate the effects, you may not be unconscious long enough for their kills to be effective.

If you make Orange strippable with power (like it is to set up), it really becomes a sort of a power duel. I personally don't know how effective that'd be, but I doubt it'd be good.

Constitution is a warrior defense (I think? I also think maiden gives it) that halves the effects of hunger. If warriors can put it up as a defense, making it strippable still has its problems.

If you've got any ideas on how this sort of thing can be effectively remedied, but not overly or underly so, please post them.

(If I got anything wrong, I'll edit the new information in. I'm not really a Cacophony expert, and this's to help the envoys. That, and it may be a bit difficult to read- lot of pent up anti-metawake frustration in me lately.)

Constitution does not block hunger - it only halves the effect of hunger attack effect.

And bleeding is not a way to reliably drain willpower. Trust me, I've tried.

Sticking manabarbs is a bit of a bardic specialty, though, especially with octave's lowered cost. Besides, you don't actually have to stick manabarbs to drain mana. Majorsecond gets the job done just fine. Manabarbs is just a perk.

I don't really see how Necroscream is based around hunger drain, there is a whole one skill. The major point of it seemed to be more about entanglements and keeping them tangled, with QueensLament and Despairweb. The mainly problem I see with Necroscream is that is has no theme what so ever, Starhymn has quite a few skills which work together, Shadowbeat has all the bleeding skills, Wildarrane has sleeping, while Necroscream is stuck with a few decent skills, which dont work that well.

Torturesong is basically useless, it would be decent for group combat is it actually drained something decent, and Darkmaster is really not that great for a high level stanza effect. The only upside I can see about Necroscream compared to the other specs is Threnody looks cooler.

I'll admit that Cacophony don't seem to have a lot of synergy when I looked over their skills, but the general idea I always got from Bards is 'Cantors, aeon/cure preventing. Cacophony, hunger. Spiritsingers, sleep. Harbingers, bleeding.'

Perhaps a song that slows down waking even with metawake active, not sure how long is needed, but this is the kind of thing that can be tested. Alternatively, a song that stops metawake from working 50% of the time like the Cantors?

As far as hunger goes, making both strippable would be fine in my opinion, since Warriors can put it up anyway, and really, I don't think it's that tough to carry around food and eat when needed. Or maybe a song that worsens the effects of hunger further than already possible.

Just throwing some suggestions out there.

After fighting Alianna, I gotta say...without Metawake, there's no chance I'd ever get a hit in, between dodging, rebounding, webbing and normal shielding.

Why not leave the mentioned skills as they are, and refocus the skillset slightly?

Any tiredness / starving offense is necessarily a long-term strategy. Think soulless - you give up your offense for a while to set up a nearly certain kill at the end. What ways could these classes kill, in keeping with the theme without needing full tiredness / starvation?

Would Spiritsingers with narcolepsy and daydreaming be viable against foes who aren't in bad need of sleep?

As asides -
How could the ego regeneration / hindering songs be tied in?

Do you actually have any pipe afflicts for that mist song?

Cacophony -

Not actually sure about the hunger theme when I look at the skillset, as per Tenqual.

The only affliction I know off the top of my head is an Aleutian fetish to give Shyness, and that's pretty counter productive when you want them to stay put for Bardoon.

As for narcolepsy and daydreaming- I never quite thought of that. I should look at dreamweaving skills a bit more.

Something that makes metawake itself painful.

AB WILDARRANE ABEYTUHARANGUE
Stanza: High (7-9)
Targetable: No
Most people can just kind of tune out when Abeytu starts swearing and cussing and ranting about whatever, but those who have Metawake up are so alert they can't do so. This makes them so irritated, distracted, and unfocused, that they can no longer use herb cures while this song is playing until they lower Metawake.

Now you can go revisit all those base Music skills for alternate approaches. The other guy's going to try to drop metawake, cure, and raise it quickly, so you will have to time things carefully.

Abeytu would so so enjoy teaching you this song, too. Isn't it time Abeytu got to have some fun?

So great.

I think the reason that Cacophony kills with hunger is because all the other Necroscream skills have no synergy and no way to effectively kill so they stick with hunger whoring. They have two skills revolving around entanglement in Necroscream but it's not like they an do anything special to an entangled player.

Since being able to strip metawake would be either useless or imbalancing, here's an ability that changes the purpose of Spiritsinger sleep: to try to spam sleeping the opponent repeatedly instead of trying to just keep them asleep. You could always change the Albion song to additionally affect opponents upon falling asleep instead of having double the effect if it ticks while they're asleep.

I have fixed Spiritsingers. kthx

As for Cacophones, they need a way of killing that doesn't involve hunger, as hunger is unspeakably lame.

That sounds pretty sweet, come up with a skill idea for Harbingers now plz?

How to fix Cacophones:



How to fix Harbingers:



Also, change CrowCaw to CrowTalons that causes massive bleeding and make ShadowPulse slow clotting (make you able to only clot once per second or some such).

I accept tributes in the form of credits.

Thinking about the Harbinger one a little more, it should probably be every 150 health with a cap of 4 seconds.

Please no more bleeding. I bleed far too much already. kthx.

qft

I can beserkfetish once every, what...2.5 seconds? With power regeneration, I can probably get 11-12 in if I want to completely dump my power into it. I like the idea for Spiritsingers, but it does seem fairly powerful.

(I mean berserking with morphite. That -always- puts them to sleep.)

I'm still waiting for Illusion specs. While I'm no longer up to date on combat in Lusternia, it really doesn't seem like an Illusionist bard of any sort can kill anyone.