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News Archive: January 2000

Thursday [ January 20 ]

Gordon explains on Bard's getting beat down.
Community News [ 1:35 AM PST ] - Alethal
Found this at the Everquest Gameplay Forum.
Why is that bards are made to be the super taunter of any given group?
I can easily draw many examples from my experience, here are just a few of them:

In any given dungeon, when our puller go get some mobs, they will always target and head for me if I'm singing any song, buffing or offensive.

In PoF, I was instant killed 3 times in a row by Cazic Thule's Touch of Death, simply because the puller is in our group. Three times in a row, and each time I was the second one in group to be instant killed after the puller was killed (he managed to get CT to aggro on him). I was singing mana and heal song miles away at camp.

In dragon raids, the giants always head for the Bards if they are singing any song when the puller returns with some aggro'd mobs. From a technical point of view, in a full group, Bards are actually 'buffing' (or healing) a group of 6 people (self included) with their song, around 10 to 15 times a minute, and all those 'buffing' somehow get add up to the hate list counter on mobs, and that's why bards are always on most mobs' top 3 spot in their hate lists.

However from gameplay point of view, this is not balanced. Bards doesn't have as high AC as tanks, they have half the hitpoints of tanks (even less than Monks and Rogues at times), so the question is, Why make bards the super taunter of all classes?

I'm sure this is not something intended for bards, and I really hope it'll get fixed as soon as possible.

Most of your examples reference that the mob jumps on you when the "Puller" is returning. I can certainly see that happening since the puller has done little-to-no damage to the creature he is pulling. All he knows is that he can't get to the person who he is most mad at, so he might as well eat the person who's buffing the person he is mad at.

But it is balanced. It might not be *fair*, but it's balanced. No other class has the ability to buff an entire party like that. Doing that has to have it's downside, one of which is, you may get eaten. So, you don't have high AC or HP, that's all part of that downside. When you get in a group you have to make sure that they can either kill something so fast it doesn't have a chance to kill you, or you have to be in there with some tanks who can get it off of you.

Sounds reasonble, yes?

-Gordon

Tuesday [ January 25 ]

Bard Taunt To Be Decreased
Community News [ 4:23 PM PST ] - Ruri Kagato
Abashi made another comment regarding Bard Taunt on this thread on the Official EverQuest Forums:
After reviewing this thread as well as some others on the other boards, and chatting with some of our inhouse people that play bards (we have several of those), we've decided to decrease the taunt factor of the bard songs. This is not going to lead to a drastic change to how the bard class is played, as bards need to know when to stop singing, but it should definatly be noticible.

The problem centers around how a creatures hate-list works. Without going into detail, creatures also hate people who cast beneficial spells on people they hate. Since bards do this roughly every 6-12 seconds, it can get a bit dangerous [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

-Gordon