I decided to make 2 diff topics to help make them easier to track and so they made more sense...

So lets compare bards a moment shall we (offensive and likely to be used songs only)!

Cantors:
-Hinder curing
-Aeon song (for power)
-Passive Blind
-So so Damage
-Slower sipping for enemies

Harbingers (my favorites actually):
-Double mana loss from any means
-Passive bleeding that can paralyze
-Balance loss (believe thats shadowrave)
Basically Harbingers make manabarbs its own kill condition off mana loss skills and clotting

Cacophony:
-Starvation/Plague Affs (same song)
-Longer writhes for enemies
-Very minor passive damage (damage is based on plague affs, and we dont cloak givin them)
-Slower eq to enemies (small amount, but only in taint)
-Passive dominate
-Shackles + blackout (for power)

Wildaranne:
Like I even need to discuss them.. they make all other bards seem to be utterly weak by comparsion (cept maybe harbingers)

Mind you none of these account for tertiarys for bards...

Glamours:
-Focused on escape and protection skills
-Passives are eq loss, damage and affs

Tarot:
-Utility skills
-Soulless
-No bard specifics... as of yet

Ecology:
-Familiar can block for you
-Smudges hit all enemies on a delay
-DMP for a charm is somewhere around 40, divided based on comms
-Familiars can use venoms (programmed passive affs)
-Batbane makes earache longer and music skills cause more damage (Harbinger using this... double mana loss, and manabarbs and egovice do more damage with it? O_O)
-Herbbane causes a cure to FAIL and the person to lose mana and ego

I hope some of this was informative.. hopefully since the secret of the OP that is bards (and pure lack of OP in some cases..) is blown we can get them to be their own guild.

I also propose the Niliphony! We dont need Nihilists anyway right? They have like 1 active combatant and hes changing guilds. Lets just merge em!

Ecology for cities is also on the list (yep, har har!). And Tarot needs to be tweaked if we want any real options for tertiarys for cities at all. Theres no tarot bards, I imagine people assumed eveyrone knew tarot sucks for bards really.. and the lack of defense makes em less tanky).

Anyway I will let the envoys have their fun, and let people make replies. Someone is bound to take offense to SOMETHING, its statistically expected!

Hey!

I see how it is.

You are active?

Oh yes you are a Nihilist again! Ok they have 2. And ones still leaving. Not sure how long Celina will stay, will it be till they get fixed, till she gets fed up like everyone else, or just till she sees another guild!

jk Celly

Lots of Lurve to the Nihi pack

I'm in it for the long haul! I'm enjoying it, even if the combat is total balls compared to every other guild I've been in.

45 seconds to kill people with a sub par offense! It's a challenge! (and sometimes impossible)

You forgot
- Passive affliction healing
- Bleed from writhing
- Health Regen
- A song that allows anyone you turn undead from said song to be effected from your construct
- Portable rubble

I'm not saying that your songs are fine, but if you are going to compare, add everything in, not just the bare minimum to make them look worse.

Yes, Wildarrane got a rather good upgrade, it needs some tweaking which -we- (The Spiritsingers themselves) are working to fix and lower.

Use your envoy, make changes, if they don't do a good job, replace them.

Plus, if you remove or nerf-into-ground the damage from the passive and the 5-spirit attack, it's not like they're going to be able to do anything else. The other spirit attacks simply aren't worth it considering you have to keep attaching spirits and using your eq on that. It'd have some nice tankage, but still.

Cacophony faster eq is WAY better than SS sip bonus in forest, too. And come on..."either they die easily or they have food?" Yeah, and then they run out of food and die easily. So yeah, you do have to discuss things properly.

Really? You're going to do this again? With a new class? That you said was so much better, till you got ahold of it?

At this point I'd take one for the team and invoke Forum Martyrdom. A 10p ultimate power that allows me to force the banning of one individual, also banning myself in the process. Come on Shiri, make the pact.

I'm not sure this affects minorsixth (though I haven't tested it). Minorsixth is straight 700 mana 700 ego attack..nightshadeblues doubles the mana loss to 1400 though

Hahahahahahaha.. I rebuilt Caco initially into a support class, with :censor: like SobbingDread (portable rubble) and UndeadBlues(giving you like 8 different bonuses, a bunch of dmp, undead influencing), WrathfulCanticle(this is a neat skill, use it more assholes. free afflictions just by hitting people).. Oh and that's leaving out all the other :censor: like the level 2 eq/balance bonus THAT STACKS WITH RACIAL BONUS/RUSHING/HYPERACTIVE/QUICKEN/everything. And passive aff curing, stacking regen, and i'm sure I'm missing other things.

The moral of this story: Cry more. Caco are by far the most useful Bard class in the game, hands down, no question. Your offense is not there, but you embody the original design of the Bard: a support role.

Actually, he still says Cacophony is much better than Nihilist (he even made another thread about it) and nothing in this thread contradicts that.

So maybe Malarious can be over zealous at times, but everything he posts is helpful and positive. He doesn't flame people for posting ideas (or for flaming his ideas, which I admire) so lay off him. Geeze. I don't agree with all his ideas, I for one think cacophony is just fine other than their spec race and Wilderrane is the only thing really unbalancing bards right now (Yes I posted that I thought cacophony was crap way back when, but I sucked as a bard, and it's recieved some nice buffs since then)...but the point is he's trying to be helpful and he's not suggesting a bard overhaul.

Maybe if some of you would read and look at some of his suggestions you'd realize they have merit.

Making tarot useful for bards like ecology was made useful for commune bards. Is that really such a horrible idea?

And I assume Niliphony was a joke.

You just switched to Bard. Why are you bitching about it already? Cacophony is the strongest Bard guild right now (well, okay, perhaps Spiritsingers are, but I don't fight them ). They don't need to be tweaked at all. Let's focus on Harbringers and Cantors before you try and beef Cacophony up.

No, I believe you are giving him a little too much space, all things considered. This is how it always starts with him, and it will end up with the drumming of support over minor issues leading to ridiculous suggestions of insane fantasy to overcome his inability to utilize his class.

You can pick out "typical Malarious" by noting all the things he didn't mention about the spec which would make it look better than he tries to play down, while he points to other specs strong points to try and emphasize that the points he listed make his spec "so much less than it could be." It's not that he thought Cacophony was so much better than Nihilist, it's that while he was ramping up (and posting 50 emo farewells on envoys/boards/wherever someone had ears) to leave Nihilist, he was playing Caco/bards up to be the uberclass, where player skill would triumph all.

All I've heard from anyone nearby this amazing mighty morphin spec ranger is how much he has been bitching about various bard abilities. I really wish he would have went knight so he could tell you all just how underpowered knights are and how he now sees the light that while better than Nihilists, warriors are just in need of love so desperately. You see, part of his little rhetoric in the beginning was how he was going bard or knight, whichever would be stronger. Not whichever took more ability or whichever needed that "Malarious Touch."

Tarot is easily useful for city bards, just not as easy-mode as inquisition soulless. You still have various methods of hindering and tie-downs that equate to soulless kills, as well as hangman, lust on demand, empress into octave, etc.

He's likely just going to attempt to create forum support so he can squeeze Bardmore into submitting his ridiculous ideas.

To be fair, I find Spiritsingers to be immensely OP, especially when the Spiritsinger in question is Xiel. I don't know about Cacophony, but Xiel can do insane damage to me, and half of it is passive. Ecology doesn't help it either.

Like every active envoy and spiritsinger has said in this thread:

They have submitted damage downgrades that are being evaluated as we speak.

You should also mention PPK like it's not getting changed too.

Yeah, not going to believe it. Xiel is testing with me, going through all the smudges. Whenever I say one is too powerful, he dismisses me, and whenever one is not really that useful, he says he needs to upgrade it.

I need to spar him to see how bad it is. I know they have some setups that can do a lot of burst damage, but they do take a bit of time to prepare. After the downgrade in the damage from the passive song, I felt the other concern that should be looked into was how Spiritsingers playing the song would all work in the same room. I don't know if that has been changed since the last time I've tested it.

Yes, clearly the post on the envoy boards is a clever ruse. Damn you Xiel, damn you.

Hey, now it's even okay that there is a smudge you can do that means you can potentially keep them off eq the entire time while your songs hit them. I don't know why I try to get better. Can I just have permastun please?

To be fair, he left out things from other bard specs as well. Passive shielding and faster writhe times for harbingers and passive prone for cantors, for example, so I don't believe that he is selectively leaving out things to make cacophony look worse, because he did list more things for cacophony than he did for Harbinger (his favorite).

That's not to say I agree with him, because I don't. I don't support a lot of his ideas (including erasing nihilism and starting from scratch) nor am I privy to what is being said on the envoy boards. I have read his post repeatedly, however, and some of his points should be looked at. I disagree with you 100% that tarot is viable for bards. There is a reason bards are almost exclusively glamours and a few ecologists. To even try and compare tarot to glamours and ecology is kind of a joke. A huge shot to tanking ability and things like transfix and hypnotic pattern for one tarot? Soulless? Aeon will do nothing without anorexia and impatience. Moon is crap. Most bard hindering abilities are in glamours, so I don't see bards and soulless as a terribly viable tactic (I could be wrong! You are more experienced than I am).

anyways, I lost my train of thought. Fain just appeared at the Megalith and Isune did a ridiculously hard to read entrance message.

It has to do with what you're trying to accomplish. If I were a bard, I'd still take glamours 100%. The skillset is just that strong. I doubt you could "equal" it without copying it, which is a no-no. It's one of those things where you could take dreamweaving/tarot/runes/ecology and be good at some odd things, while still being able to kill medicore players. Or you could take the cookie cutter powerhouse that is glamours/tk/tp. Glamours is just a superior skillset, it's not necessarily that the others suck.