Bard Songs
 

For the most part bards are working pretty good, but there are still some bugs present within the casting of their songs.
Whenever a bard casts a song, the timer box will spawn letting u know when the song will be done casting. if u successfully start to cast a song, this will pop up about 60% of the time,while the other 40 it will cast the song without putting up the timer box.

When a song is put on for a period of time, it is not giving the message of its action everytime it lands, only on the first cast as a spell would. for example, if i am using the lvl 15 mezmerize song, it will say " A Orc warrior's head begins to nod" only on the initial casting, and not every 6 seconds after when i leave the song on him.

There seems to be a rare bug with starting a stopping the songs quickly that will lock on to the song that u started, and will not let u cast any other song until u backtrack to whatever song was bugged and click it until it decides to turn off. it's hard to tell how this bug is acquired as i do not yet understand how it begins, just how it ends.
Whenever you are in the midcasting a song, if you are stunned by a mob, i believe it should prompt a message somewhere along the lines of "Mythoxxus's song was interrupted." this message is lacking for the most part and the spell gems continue to be darkened as if nothing had interrupted it, as opposed to lighting up to let u know u can retry the song.


I hope some of this information can help out the bard race.
Also, my woodelf bard was created with bash and taunt, is this classic?

Maximus

I know taunt is, IDK about bash.

This is a EQEMU bug with the "locking spell casting bar" part. It's really aggravating, and the reason I wouldn't play a bard on P1999. As you know on live there's a lot of broken things on bards, and on EQEMU there have been many attempts to perfect it. My personal theory is a clash between the client and server on stopping song playing, some op code being expected by the client the server isn't sending. /melody has the same issue. The fix was to allow a #melody command, but that one is too powerful on the emu's that do it since it never fizzles, and isn't interruptable. You have to say #melody again to stop it.

Your bash and taunt buttons are likely due to titanium, but if you try to use the buttons, it won't work. Just remove the buttons, and I don't think you'll even find them in ALT+M (menu buttons -> actions or whatever).

So these kind of bard mechanic things are stuff that you would have to wait for a smart dev to put focus on and try to resolve, I've peeked at it a bit and my theory is above, and I know other devs who tried to mess with it usually get lazy and go for faster fixes (#melody), so yeah.

In regards to the casting bar bug, I usually try to change targets, and cast it e.g. on myself, and it will some times fix the chain "can't cast" bug, another is to wait ~3 seconds to let the server finish casting this song it thinks you are, and then the client can sync up with timing and you can cast again. Not a great fix, but it some times work.

there's talk about hotbuttons of /pause /cast /stopsong etc too.

I don't envy playing a bard on EQEMU without #melody, that's for sure. :P

I wanted to also second that since I've started my bard, I haven't seen the song interuptions that Maximus mentioned, nor the "You missed a note and your song has ended." Wasn't sure if this was wrapped up into this entire bug or not. My group members can see my "bard fizzle" but I cannot.

Blah... I wish I'd known this before I created my bard. I am only level 4, but those first few levels are rough enough that the thought of doing them again right away makes me shy away form wanting to play at all.

I think I'll stick with my bard and pray ; p

Yes, in my opinion this is another priority issue to be resolved along with ac/mitigation being bugged.

Maximus nailed down the major technical problems with Bard atm. Its still playable and not nearly as "broken" as the population seems to think. But it would seem between these glitches and the exp penalty bard receives that people want to avoid leveling one as it can be a headache at times.

The missed note message not appearing for the bard is pretty key to timing the twisting of songs. Not knowing you missed a note while trying sleep adds can spell life or death.

Can someone confirm if instruments are not helping any songs or if it's just Chords of Dissonance?

I also want to add that in addition to the mentioned bugs, there is also a casting bug for songs that the bar will actually complete casting, but the spell will not take effect. I've noticed it happen mainly with detrimental songs such as chord line and dd line...the spell will finish, it isn't resisted, but the song will not take effect. Every now and then it will happen with a beneficial song such as selos or regen. All in all, it is a big headache and not a terribly bad ordeal while in a group, but when you are solo kiting and you don't have a song land, it can have serious consequences; which is why I try to steer away from soloing more when I can.

Just thought I'd add that to the list.

The use of instruments in the chords line won't necessarily help it do more damage...if I remember correctly from classic it made the AC debuff greater when using an instrument. I might have made the DoT tick for a little more, can't remember offhand, but I know it definitely made the AC debuff part of it better.