Bard Aggro

[Daldaen]

In light of evidences, new direction for thread:

Bard's Shield of Songs group-rune should be an absolute aggro magnet. Currently it isn't.

[Nirgon]

Go on sir.

I care most about buff stacking for bards. May as well get this in along with it while whoever coding has their head around it.

[zanderklocke]

I could see the clickies not pulling aggro if bards were programmed differrently, although this does seem odd to me.

However, if procs from weapons do nothing related to aggro, what would be the point of an item like this:
http://wiki.project1999.com/Symphonic_Saber

The proc from this is designed to reduce aggro. Would only aggro reducing procs change aggro and all other procs that do damage, stun, or any negative effect have a negligent effect on aggro? Seems weird that bards could be stunning mobs with weapon procs and have no effect on the mob's hate list such as the trochilic's skean.

http://wiki.project1999.com/Trochilic%27s_Skean

I'd like to see some classic information on this.

[Daldaen]

http://www.elitegamerslounge.com/home/soearchive/viewtopic.php?f=162&t=54605

This topic sums it up for me. They mention a few things about people who would spam click things for aggro and all these bards chime in that it doesn't work for bards at all. They also talk about proc aggro there too. When I have more time I'll pull out quotes.

[Daldaen]

Every action increases agro, but bard agro is given a negative agro multiplier. Probably something like 0.25, though it'd be impossible to actually determine it. This was done around the end of the Velious and the beginning of the Luclin Age. Before then, bardsongs caused a significant amount of agro - Shield of Songs was especially notable for this since it was popping a rune on every member of your group. In the Velious Age, that meant instant snap agro. I strongly suspect the change was made for two reasons - buff stacking in the Velious Age allowed bards to get multiple buffs of the same line (Aegolism + Symbol + Glades + Heroic Bond + Focus of Spirit + whatever I forgot the name of) - and in the Luclin Age, AE songs would have made it impossible for bards not to be agro if they actually used them (buffing an entire raid of players would have gained us instant and massive agro without our negative multiplier). The change was undocumented in the patch notes, but one patch bards basically woke up and found none of their songs caused agro anymore.That's why you'll see an Anger or Enraging Blow go off for us and still the mob doesn't seem to notice. Using my pulled-out-of-my-[Removed for Content] number of 0.25, Enraging Blow is only 175 agro. In the end, holding agro on things without hitting them is never going to work for us because of this.

[zanderklocke]

That link above is only posts from 2006 onward.

This is the first post:

"I noticed one vague mention on the EQDiva forums that you could spam click DotB - Drums of the Beast - on yourself to generate a large amount of aggro (insta-click Enduring Breath). I do not doubt the post, but does anyone here actually use the drums or another item for that purpose? I would imagine this would be a great method to prevent being summoned (causing no damage) and still being able to aggro kite a lot of mobs while a raid force picks them off one by one. The method they used was group divine aura to snag all the mobs, run outside of range, click off invulnerability and spam click themselves with the buff while they ran around avoiding damage. "

This would indicate to me that at some point in Velious, drum of the beast could pull aggro.

Only thing I see in the thread specifically referring to Velious/Luclin timeline is this:

"Every action increases agro, but bard agro is given a negative agro multiplier. Probably something like 0.25, though it'd be impossible to actually determine it. This was done around the end of the Velious and the beginning of the Luclin Age. Before then, bardsongs caused a significant amount of agro - Shield of Songs was especially notable for this since it was popping a rune on every member of your group. In the Velious Age, that meant instant snap agro. I strongly suspect the change was made for two reasons - buff stacking in the Velious Age allowed bards to get multiple buffs of the same line (Aegolism + Symbol + Glades + Heroic Bond + Focus of Spirit + whatever I forgot the name of) - and in the Luclin Age, AE songs would have made it impossible for bards not to be agro if they actually used them (buffing an entire raid of players would have gained us instant and massive agro without our negative multiplier). The change was undocumented in the patch notes, but one patch bards basically woke up and found none of their songs caused agro anymore.That's why you'll see an Anger or Enraging Blow go off for us and still the mob doesn't seem to notice. Using my pulled-out-of-my-[Removed for Content] number of 0.25, Enraging Blow is only 175 agro. In the end, holding agro on things without hitting them is never going to work for us because of this."

So sometime in the end of Velious aggro was changed for bards? However, this post seems to only refer to song aggro and not proc or clickie aggro.

Other posts in this thread saying that bard aggro is not strong are from 2006 onward, so it's difficult to determine if this is classic or unclassic.

[Daldaen]

End of Velious beginning of Luclin... Interdasting. That would explain why I noticed it on Mac server.

Time to look around for some posts around then to see if bards comment at all on their songs having less aggro.

But one thing I certainly remember from Mac server is the same thing he notes here, Shield of Songs should create MASSIVE aggro. To the point that you could kite all of a zone and pulse SOS for 5 minutes and no one would be able to pull anything off you other than via taunt.

[zanderklocke]

"A while ago, while helping a lower level friend level up in The Grey, I was able to spam click my Lute of Flowing Waters to pull agro off him quick when he'd get the inevitable agro of creatures walking by (since he was in group, chain casting Wind of Marr on him built my agro up)."

Then another post later disagrees with this:

"this doesn't work i tried using lute from water to spam and hold aggro and it simply just doesn't help at all from my testing... maybe very little help but not enough to do over twisting dots."

Still...all of this is from 2006, so who knows.

[Daldaen]

https://web.archive.org/web/20020208232635/http://eqdiva.com/songs.asp?song=56

One note about taunt and this song: HUGE. In a group of six, think of this as casting 2400 points of healing every minute. Creatures don't like it and they will chew on you. As a case in point, I was recently on a Nagafen raid when two bards in my group. I elected to sing Shield of Songs to help the group absorb damage. Nagafen didn't like it one bit. After the second pulse of the song, I became the primary target of her claws and teeth. In two minutes, I took over 8000 points of melee damage and only survived by the miracle of some very competent clerics.

Shield of Songs aggro was the shit. Don't think it is anything close to that here. And yes that quote is from classic era.

[zanderklocke]

But one thing I certainly remember from Mac server is the same thing he notes here, Shield of Songs should create MASSIVE aggro. To the point that you could kite all of a zone and pulse SOS for 5 minutes and no one would be able to pull anything off you other than via taunt.

Does this work here if another caster/class does 100% damage on the mob aggroed or is aggro for this type of thing nerfed the way low-hp kiting was nerfed?

[zanderklocke]

Shield of Songs aggro was the shit. Don't think it is anything close to that here.

So what you're saying is that bards should essentially be able to "low-hp" type kite how they were prior to the nerf but by using shield of songs instead?

[Daldaen]

Correct! Which requires 49 though, so not all that valuable. But using Shield of Songs to kite a train in Fear or hold aggro on a few mobs should work.

[Tecmos Deception]

Is shield of songs supposed to function like other rune spells? Cause chanter runes are crazy aggro.

[Daldaen]

Is shield of songs supposed to function like other rune spells? Cause chanter runes are crazy aggro.

This exactly. I mentioned it in another thread, but we would use SoS on Mac to do more or less what Zander described. The primary difference being that on Mac, we had the post-bard aggro change, making it harder to gain aggro with.

But even with about... 5~ minutes of pulsing SoS, that was sufficient to hold aggro off about 3-4 Winds of Gelid (roughly 4-5k DMG). I'm guessing pre-bard aggro change 5~ minutes of pulsing SoS would be quite a bit more aggro.

[Daldaen]

Reading more about bards in Era there are some hilarious bugs:



3/7 8:15am - Undocumented change to Cantana of Replenishment in yesterday's patch. You no longer have to stop the song to allow Clarity or Regen spells to take hold.

https://web.archive.org/web/20020613101829/http://eqsongs.com/NewsArchive/Oct2000.htm

^. This is a great post near end of Kunark where bards list tons of issues and a dev goes through the issues. I'm sure there are a few things worth ClassicQuesting. Like Bard epic overwritting Enchanter Haste.

* Singing Short Sword. Haste effect a proc that is marginally better than existing bard haste songs and worse than enchanter haste buffs. Proc effect cancels the better enchanter haste spells.
[Wrinn, Gordon] -- We're reevaluating several of the epic-quest items tomorrow.

I may have to make new posts for this stuff soon!

[Scrubosaur]

Bard was an aggro whore early on but later they did something to the code so that bard generated almost no hate. I got my hands on a BoC after they added the proc which turned me into the MT for my 3 man group. BoC mixed with snare song = super hate. Of course later on bards defensive abilities dropped quite a bit so tanking anything was pretty much death so the code change didn't matter much.

[Splorf22]

I wouldn't trust anything that poster says; he thinks Nagafen is a lady