Bard swarming ruins classic experience.

[nyclin]

Bard swarming/AE kiting is the classic-est. The un-classic part is broadband and your modern PC. I levelled a bard for a friend during Velious using AE kiting, which was taught to me by a bard in our guild. My pulls maxed out at about 30-50 mobs due to packet loss and framerate issues, but it was totally possible.

People complaining about bard kiting is also classic.

[fastboy21]

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

Bard swarming/AE kiting is the classic-est. The un-classic part is broadband and your modern PC. I levelled a bard for a friend during Velious using AE kiting, which was taught to me by a bard in our guild. My pulls maxed out at about 30-50 mobs due to packet loss and framerate issues, but it was totally possible.

People complaining about bard kiting is also classic.

most of the bards who do it are really just trying it out or curious...the truth is that bard AE kiting is a boring hard monotonous way to spend your time. and, you'll die enough that if you don't figure out what you're doing it might not even be significantly more efficient.

my experience lately has been that almost all of the bards that are causing the zone disruption AE kiting are mostly causing the disruption because they don't know what they are doing...on live, one of the reasons that folks didn't try this stuff was that they didn't want to ruin their rep or get embarrassingly owned in front of a whole zone of people. there are no such social mores here.

there are only a handful of truly "working" bards out there that can do this efficiently.

[Daywolf]

Originally Posted by fastboy21 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

mostly causing the disruption because they don't know what they are doing...

I don't buy that one bit. Every bard I've talked to about such a situation just acted like an asshat about it, they knew full well what they were doing. Then the ones that say "oh I didn't know" they're just BS'ing you before doing their next pass again.

A good number of people that roll bard, they are doing it because they have played a number of characters and didn't like the time commitment to level. They really don't want to grab their enc or whatever and group with you, to do the mundane grind with just normal gear. They're lazy and want the shortcut to level cap and then maybe later ultra-twink that enc they wont play with your broken wizard etc. You and your slow leveling ways are just in the way, man, and your camped mobs are up for grabs at all hours of the day or night.

[eqjayme]

This really has little to do with whether it's possible - it has to do with being a D and the PNP. It's sad but true that every bard I see swarming lately doesn't just pull 10 or 20 mobs - no he pulls an entire zone area clean. And it doesn't matter if it's Dreadlands, CB, OT, LOIO, EK, BW, SF, or anywhere else - I NEVER see a fair pull that leaves some behind unless I complain.

I actually got a good result once by sending a tell "hey I know you're swarming and that's what your class does, but someone not as nice as me might petition you for taking the entire area. I've been sitting here leveling and you have now left me to wait for full repop. It is against the play nice policy just so you know, and you can get in trouble for not sharing mobs".

The bard apologized and offered to share some swarm xp. I didn't take him up on it, but he pulled significantly less mobs the next time and I went on my merry way. I think it just takes some nuance in dealing with these guys. They aren't all asses but there sure are some out there, and usually (I don't blame anyone) people react pissed when it first happens to them.

[Mandalore93]

If you can't consistently land both chord of dissonance and denon's disruptice chord then you should stop because you're bad. If you can, then bard on young man. As for disrupting zones, I still have no idea why people go to places like OT and then expect it not to happen. It's like getting pissed that there's some wizard quadding in TD. I can't think of a zone where the bard will reasonably pull everything in the same level ranges simply due to mob differences. In OT you can't really pull tigers anymore with other mobs and that's always been true of the rhinos. Pulling sarnaks can get dicey as well. In DL you would never pull the yetis, brutes, and drachnids. In BW you never pull the giants or wurms and I personally never Sarnaks.

Really, the only time I ever get complaints is from quadders who need a certain mob type. In almost all instances though, the bard kiting zones are almost always the worst zones for those levels no matter what class you are. Although, I do mine at off-peak hours exclusively so I wouldn't know about prime time for EST people.

[Daldaen]

If we had classic mechanics this would be less of an issue.

Swarm kiting would be an option and allow bards to kill in several other zones. Also for some reason PBAE DoTs from bards don't decrease in value if the mob is moving? This is impossible to prove either way since we couldn't even see DoT messages until LoY.

Speaking of, let's remove those too please. Test the Velious DoTs and then remove the messages $$$.

[zanderklocke]

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

If we had classic mechanics this would be less of an issue.

Swarm kiting would be an option and allow bards to kill in several other zones.

For everyone that is confused, he is talking about charm-swarm kiting here...as many people for some reason seem to interchangeably use swarm and AoE kiting to mean the same thing.

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

Also for some reason PBAE DoTs from bards don't decrease in value if the mob is moving?

Oh man, bards would take even longer to kill mobs. People would love this.

Hmm...I suppose I never really thought about this mechanic though; targeted DoTs increase in damage if mob is fleeing. Why wouldn't PBAOE songs work the same way?

[Atmas]

Kind of sounds like the bards are doing you a favor because most of the places you are trying to group have terrible ZEM modifiers.

[Brocode]

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

If we had classic mechanics this would be less of an issue.

Swarm kiting would be an option and allow bards to kill in several other zones. Also for some reason PBAE DoTs from bards don't decrease in value if the mob is moving? This is impossible to prove either way since we couldn't even see DoT messages until LoY.

Speaking of, let's remove those too please. Test the Velious DoTs and then remove the messages $$$.

That was a Planes of Power update, when bards were aoeing Halls of Honour and getting insane fast XP. Later they made mobs also summon and including removed damage on aoe dots if mobs moves, since even with lower dmg people kept doing it.

I used to Bard AoE in Halls of Honour and Fungus Grove, alot, so i was following those changes at that time, even tho i have never tried to do it here.

[Daldaen]

I've tried swarm kiting on this server and social mobs don't properly assist onto your charmed pet. The only time they do is when your pet goes under 20% and gets low HP aggro.

The only reason they wouldn't assist in classic is if you previously charmed the mob (1 charm was sufficient aggro for them to ignore your new pet and chase you) or if you had DoT'd them once or twice.

To Zander, sort of. But the DoTs don't increase, they instead decrease. If a mob is moving it take 66% of the total damage from a DoT. Meaning your Chords and Denons are doing 33% more damage than they should be doing. Since they don't currently differentiate between a fleeing/stationary or a mobile mob.

That being said, it is *possible* they were special and didn't decrease at all while moving (everything else about bards is broken anyways). But that would be impossible to prove because as I stated before, no one saw DoT damage until LoY.