How EQ PvP really was - No bullshit guide

[Bockscar]

Uh... both chant dots are classic, do like 30 base damage (multiplied by instrument) and debuff resists. Two chants for like 50ish damage/tick each? That's considerable damage when you can do nothing about it. You can absolutely run around chanting people to death while they have no way to touch you. Assuming you're outdoors (why discuss indoors PvP for a bard?) you can simply run at maximum range, pop into range for three seconds to apply a dot, and pop back out. It's so easy with selos. Chants have the same range as spells and there's no way someone will get off a 6+ second nuke or dot off when you can move like 100ft per second and spells have a range of 200ft. Bards are so completely safe outdoors that the best their opponent can hope for is to gate away. Resist songs make them nearly impossible to cast on, and if you do land a root, they'll just dispel it right away. If you somehow hurt them, they'll run off and regen or click an invigorate bp for a minute and come back at full hp. Chants get resisted a lot, but since you can keep trying every three seconds at no cost, they will land and they come with a resist debuff. If you're a caster and your resists are kinda low, the bard could even stand there and melee you while just singing mez and resist songs.

[tmoneynegro]

Originally Posted by Bockscar [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

You can absolutely run around chanting people to death while they have no way to touch you.

Once again, those bard chants did not land worth a crap during Kunark and Velious. All these people giving their "bard tales" are reliving their glory days of attacking people with 50FR/50CR. I pvp'd with over 100MR/100FR/100CR and was never at any time in danger of dying to a bard no matter what they did. They would never be able to get 2 dots going at the same time and would only be able to get 1 going intermittently so racial regen + fungi tunic pretty much nullified the entire thing. That's how real EQ was.

Some people might think that isn't balanced but if you change resists so bards can easily land dots + perma snare people, then warrior/monk/rogue and a few others will probably be free, 0 skill kills to any bard while standing in an outside zone. So the choices are between making one utility class slightly weak (bard), or making several melee classes suffer huge imbalances and basically be unplayable solo due to that class. The EQ devs chose to balance by whatever resulted in the best outcome for the most classes instead of helping one class and causing several others to be unplayable.