I find bards the pretty hard... spamming blanknot juse before all your song afflicts go off can mess you up. Daedalion has gotten some huge bleeding on me, and Yini has put me to sleep a few times. I might just suck though.

A bard can keep you in the room for quite some time if they put the effort into it.

Alright, so it appears that Music is fairly useless, except for certain skills. I suppose Acrobatics has the two best skills at Mythical and Trans....and Soulless is the Tarot specialty. Time to brainstorm...

Don't even try that skill - it's stopped by deafness. Simple math will show you that it is impossible to keep someone from eating faeleaf before it finishes no matter what is wrong with them.

Hrm... and yet bards (if used right) are so deadly in achaea... highly amusing.

They're still relatively new here. Hence all the discussion.

Oh! Sorreh. bards just got upgraded in achaea, they were better before though personally. Don't ya got ways of stripping deafness so you can use the music thingy? Auralbless removes deafness, then you can sing. Uses eq, voice balance, then you can tarot whatever afterwards. Bards were deadly since they can, strip deafness/stun/deliver a venom/sing a song/songbird sings a random song.

Strip deafness + two controlled afflictions + stun + randomAffliction = Ow.

At 3 seconds a round, although, with race things here like eq regain and balance regain it could be faster. Le deadly.

Maths lesson complete for today, tomorrow, trigonometry! 1-2= Negative fun!

Remember that our eq and balance bonuses/penalties are only 7% a level here instead of the 10% it is elsewhere. Thus, a level 3 bonus here is a level 2 bonus in Achaea. This was done because Stag has a skill to hasten eq or balance recovery, and having level 3 of either when they were 10% each was too insane for any race.

Still, 3 seconds is mega deadly for 3 afflictions. guessing that herb and salve balance is the same here?

I can hit with five afflictions at once as a Celestine *shrug*

I think I can hit six as a druid, and BT might be able to do seven... All differnet curing balances though pretty much.

Which is what that arse Visaeris did to me in the FFA last night... then he soullessed me while I failed to escape.

Annoyance.

But then again, what else is deafness good for? I know it helps against the barghest (or whatever that fae is called)...anything else? Bellow in Stag? Some other fae I think?

How unbalancing would it be to just eliminate deafness period?

Deafness will ALWAYS block what it currently blocks, acording to the Admins, no exceptions. Sorry. We tried our best to make them see all the problems this would create, but they said very clearly that this is the way it will be, and we need to work around it.

So far, as a result, there have been MASSIVE "phantom" upgrades to: Barghast (good thing Glom has no fighters), transfix gems, bellow (one bard + two stag followers = permanent stun for everyone! Yay!), niricol (yay for whoring blind+deaf every hit? That's balanced, right?), etc. All of this because the admins *refuse* to even consider justifyable corrections to a serious design flaw.

/rant

Oh well. Best thing I can do is pretend bards don't exist.

Ego vice + Debate = Death for Loboshi :/

Er.. how?

Ego vice deals the ammount of damage to your health equal to the damage your ego takes.. now, considering that a loboshi has very low ego and very nice health, it should do no more than tickle you.

outr horehound
eat horehound

I've tried it in the arena, no luck. You'd squish me after I shattered you, if nothing else...

What bards need is the ability to afflict. An ability like hexes or some weird mix like that. And in some things, if you have your PvP better than what it could be.

I've found in my own PvP battles that if I am fighting a knight, with pureblade or axelord, I will have the upper hand, except for the cleave ability. That is my primary concern, because AVOID works like a shield, and it's bypassed with CLEAVE. Egh...

As for guardians, That is when you will actually realize how much you suck in PvP. When you are being afflicted by ten-twenty different things, even if you have a good combat system, with the current abilities you will be hard pressed to kill the target.

My personal technique is to imbue the room with an Octave, BLANKNOTE the target, princess farewell, MINORSEVENTH, and in 3-4 hits the target is dead. I'm right now 83% to maestro, and I found that without any resistances on the target, I've reached 1120 damage per hit (with MINORSEVENTH). If I need to afflict, it is usually limited to breaking limbs with forwardflip, or taking away the constitution, or shredding the defenses with Highmagic. The chances that the vials will be destroyed, isn't sufficient enough. We need something that actually AFFLICTS in Starhymn, with not chance involved.

Illusions is quite handy for defensive abilities, and I would love to see some of it's abilities given to certain ranking members of society. Imagine, setting up posters on the walls on doing this or that. Not just for illusions. And tarot is useful, beyond useful for bards, but still I would like to see something like Hexes for City bards. Or something that can afflict.

As with the dodging, when you hit gifted, you will be dodging about 76, 77% of attacks if you handstand, 44-46% if you are normally standing, and if you have the AVOID ability, you can dodge every single attack if you have a fast enough equilibrium.

I don't see why we can't just stick coltsfoot plugs in our ears when we see a bard coming