By popular request, an overview of the new Wildarrane changes and the associated triggers.

The new Wildarrane powers all revolve around the summoning up of the spirits of the Spiritsinger's ancestors. A single Spiritsinger can have up to 10 such spirits summoned at a time; these can either be attending him, or with a later song stanza, can be sent to haunt someone else. Up to five can be sent to haunt another target, but these still count against the total ten summoned. Since the spirits are that Spiritsinger's personal ancestors, they can't be shared between Spiritsingers. (Not even related ones!)

You can see how many spirits surround a Spiritsinger with a QL or LOOK in the room:
They are called up by the ticks of a song that play AncestralCall.


The Spiritsinger can see how many spirits they have with them in either DEF or SONGSTAT:
They are also left behind when the Spiritsinger moves:


Various song effects will depend on how many spirits attend the Spiritsinger as follows:
AncestralCall: +1 DMP damage resistance per spirit for the Spiritsinger only.
SpiritGuard: A chance of intercepting attacks, per spirit.
AncientCurse: Afflicts enemies; number of spirits determines chance of one or two afflictions.
AncientFeud: Does damage, and has a chance to block exits (like carcer).
AncestralFealty: +1 DMP damage caused by allies (similar to Celebrate).

Here are the triggers for the various attacks:


Where it gets really interesting is when the CairnLargo song effect is put into play. This is a targetted effect which can do a number of things. First, the Spiritsinger can send one of his ancestor spirits to haunt a target: this still counts against her maximum of ten, so this will reduce the impact of all the other skills each time it's done. A single target can have up to five spirits haunting them. The only cure for being haunted is to spend time away from the Spiritsinger: one will vanish every 20 seconds. The Spiritsinger can also recall them from a target. Here are the triggers for becoming haunted:



Once a target is haunted, the Spiritsinger can use her song to direct the haunting spirits to perform any of five actions; each action requires, and uses up, a certain number of the spirits haunting the target. Here are the actions and their triggers:

So the spirits take 1 eq each to send to haunt?

The 5 spirit attack is a bit much. If she had minorseconded instead of webbed I would have died.

edit: I was fully deffed with nightkiss and cold proofings and everything.

Yea, if a Spiritsinger times the stun with AncientFued, and then Minorseconds during the stun (for which there is plenty of time), the target -will- die.

Running is a Bad Way to balance things.

Yes, and then another one to fire them off.

I think you're supposed to imagine the haunting buildup as similar to soulless rubs. If you stick around, and don't mess up the attacker, and don't go deaf, long enough for the six consecutive actions it takes to pull off the freeze, it's not quite an instakill, but it's meant to be awfully close.

(Yes, as always, deafness blocks everything.)

Hm... looks slightly OP, but the flavor of the skills is awesome! Good job Lendren.

Yeah, this all looks pretty awesome!!

Are all of the bardic guilds getting the same sort of revamp?

:dusts off his cantor:

Judging from that log, 2k damage on a Faeling with Nightkiss DMP is a -ton- (if it scales with health). It's more akin to Inquisition (Inquisition being Freeze, and the Minorsecond following being the charged Soulless). Need better logs plz.

Way it looks to me, you'll have to build up the 5 "rubs", hinder with glamours as best you can, and then try to spike them with the stun while leaning on the passives. The four other active powers are irrelevant since they use up spirits which take ages to get back - you either kill them in one go or you don't, since you would have to waste upwards of 12 seconds to get the spirits back. Shackles is particularly sad given that it's active, since you may as well just use web.

That said, it IS more like inqui than soulless, because soulless still gives you time to tumble. This doesn't unless you're a warrior. (I also am not convinced as to what other options you've got though, since you're not significantly dealing out hindrances to help with your glamours and put them in minorsecond range anymore. And it's kind of "brittle" - if you were to nerf any part of it, the whole thing would fall apart.)

I only consulted on the flavor, and maybe tossed a tiny idea here and there, but I really didn't try to consider the tactics or offer any opinions on it, that's not my specialty.

But I'm unclear about the comment about tumbling. If you see you're haunted by four or five spirits, maybe it's time to tumble then (or just go deaf), right? If you wait until after the sixth action, yes, it's too late to run, but that's kind of the point -- you should be hindering, running, or at very least being deaf, long before that point. (Deafness seems to be the key -- we can't either send you a spirit or have it do anything if you're deaf, so if you keep going deaf, it could take more like a dozen actions to set this up, and that gives you plenty of time to run, hinder, attack back, etc.)

But again, I am definitely not the person to be commenting on this stuff. Other people will figure it out and maybe I'll be lucky enough to benefit from their wisdom.

The issue is that it forces you to run. Running is a Bad Way to balance things because it effectively forces the person to end the fight. Hinder up with three spirits and if you start to lose at all attach another and the person -has- to run away for a full minute?

You're right in a sense, but the Spiritsinger doesn't actually invest power unlike the inqui line, so they can just keep doing it until you fail to run and probably get wrecked. I haven't considered how well this is integrated with deafness though. At first glance it just seems to mean you have to keep blanknoting whenever they earwort, which slows you down (and further removes it from any practical use other than this 5-spirit spike) but doesn't actually make it any harder. Also, unlike the inqui line, hindering etc. doesn't even work in theory - you have to actually be out of the room 20 seconds, because the decay doesn't happen while you're in the room so you can never really whiff.

I dunno.

As for what Synl said, though: running probably isn't -meant- to be a cure - there isn't supposed to be one, otherwise it would suck. It's more of a "we don't want a cure, but we also don't want them staying forever" move.

EDIT: Unlike the inqui line though, the spiritsinger can't effectively chase because of the spirit running decay. Obnoxious for the user.

Run, hinder, or eat earwort. Running is probably the option of last resort, not the only option.

But maybe there should be another method of curing hauntings. Focus Spirit seems the obvious choice.

Yeah, but that would make them TERRIBLE. You have no realistic way of punishing focus spirit, focus spirit is spammable faster than the spirits can be afflicted, and the effort for focus spirit is significantly less than the effort for afflicting with spirits. That's why I was saying the setup is brittle. The only thing I can think of is to nerf the cold damage spike from the 5-spirit attack a little so non-warrior targets have a chance to get out if they didn't let you rainbowblind them too much beforehand.

Wow, that looks really cool style-wise, if a bit overpowered. Makes me wish Ciban was still a bard so I could take him Spiritsinger.

Why don't you just reduce the stun a bit on the five-spirit attack so the target has time to sip between that and the inevitable minorsecond?

Really impressive on the style and concept Lendren.

So it looks like this haunt/summon mechanism is the Serenwilde Bard's answer to chaindrag?

Edit: Is the summon blocked by shielding? Or is it not blocked by shielding because the spirits disappear in 20 seconds.

Edit2: I also really like the management of resources game where you can apply the spirits to different tasks. Very creative and flexible.

Dunno. It doesn't seem suited to splitting up groups since you have to be in the group (for a few actions too) to set it up. It seems more intended to pulling people back to keep up an offense, at least once.

Thanks everyone for the kind words about the thematic elements. I didn't know it was going to be made public that I helped out with them. But don't forget, it was the admins who actually decided what the skills would do -- I just wrote the message texts, and maybe tossed one or two little ideas. So they deserve the credit for the design, which is a lot bigger than writing the texts.

The summon's only blocked by being deaf, or curing the spirits, or leaving the local area.

Not going to lie, when I sat down and looked at Bards a long time ago - and discussed it pretty extensively as to why some of the specializations were 'gimp'- I kind of thought of ways to make them useful. It was just a fun little exercise, so to speak.

Looking at the way Wildarrane works now, I applaud the people who helped come up with this - the game needs more of this kind of stuff. This way it pretty firmly separates every archetype's guild. I now look at the Spiritsingers as, to be quite honest, an entirely unique entity and not just any other Bard guild.

My question is, do Starhymn, Shadowbeat, and Necroscream (I think Necroscream already got one, but my memory is oddly hazy) need treatment like this too? Do other archetypes need this? I think the method used to look extensively at one skillset is actually a very profitable and effective way of changing a skillset drastically - and it's how it's mostly down for envoy/classlead changes in other IRE games.

Various skillsets have large special reports going through. This is just one of the first few. Sortoflikeclassleadsbutitsnottakingtwoyearslikedranor.

I'm not used to seeing regular updates. It almost makes me suspicious.