Well, in Imperian bards use feign for their performances, to my knowledge, and nothing else. Whereas, Saboteurs use their illusions for combat purposes as well as other things. I'm not sure if Feign is under player-imposed control, but I think its pretty much an unwritten rule that feign just isn't a combat sorta thing.

Hmm kind of like the jesters illusions in achaea they could do 10 line illusions until people started to use them for combat then they got nerfed.

One way for something like feign to be good I think would be for it to use up both balance and equib, but does not require it to be used. Also, the balance/equi would stack so if you used it in succession you would have a 10 second balance etc.

That would be insanely abuseable in a group fight.

I think you miss the point.

It's meant to be so that it's not you dong it. If I did:
EMOTE waves his hand, and, all of a sudden, the room fills up with engulfing smoke, and with another wave, it dissappears, leaving behind a loarge, wooden door.

If I did that, it would be much better if I could then do:
FEIGN The door slowly creaks open, and a tall, shadowy figure staps through. He pulls the hood back from his face, and you see a terrible, burnt visage, grinning eerily out at you.

In Impy, people mostly use a combination of Feigning and Emoting for their performances.

If we are gonna do this, we need to make it better than Imperian's! We should be able to target the feigns, so that only one person sees them, then you could show a different thing to each person in turn, and freak them all out when they go away to chat, and realise that they were seeing different things!

Mwahahaha!

Of course, you could always do:

EMOTE waves his hand, and, all of a sudden, the room fills up with engulfing smoke, and with another wave, it dissappears, leaving behind a loarge, wooden door.

and follow it up with:

EMOTE stands back, looking quite pleased with himself at his bit of summoning. The door then slowly creaks open, and a tall, shadowy figure steps through. He pulls the hood back from his face, and you see a terrible, burnt visage, grinning eerily out at you.

Like I said: be creative.

You could always just hire a mage who has high enough illusions or dreamweaving to do illusions for you want it that much. Really there's so much you can do with illusions for this kind of thing.

Creating something like that IS an illusion anyway. How can you create a doorway out of nothing by just acting?

How? everybody sees it including yoru allies.