What if bards lost parry?

Cheers,
Jhyrb

I'm not in favor of "balancing" bards cause I haven't died to a solo bard since I quit screwing around with them. I can say that it's eternally frustrating to have a 10 hour sleep. I hate all forms of 7+ hour sleeps. I'd be in favor of reducing them all to 4 hour sleeps. Nothing sucks more than getting put to sleep and then having them retrieve that cabal item. That's 7-11 minutes of staring at your screen wishing you had something better to do. But that's my personal grief.

I think if you want to talk about balancing bards you'd have to first accept the fact that they are overpowered, which I don't think they are. If it's a particular cabal/class combo that makes you percieve them to be overpowered, then it's not the bard class that's overpowered. After all that, you'd have to decide what makes them over powered. Is it their defensive/offensive ratio that makes them overpowered? Is it an obscene access to wacked out utility abilities? Or is it some combination of those two?

Obviously from the gist of your post you are leaning on a perception that they are unbalanced in the deffensive/offensive ratio.

What if symphonic echoes only made them miss the bard and not what ever else they fought? What if Symphonic Echoes was made to be a self affect that would affect the bard a lot and the group/cabal a little. And if this change went in, make it so that if a bard had an echoes effect, it was as if they sung it themselves. Would that change anything?

Me personally, I've fought good bards and I've fought terrible bards. But right now, there isn't a single bard on my list of people that can kill me without me helping them to do it or without bringing two other people. The ones on that list are a warrior, another warrior, another warrior, yet another warrior, an assassin, and another warrior. And in the entire life of my last character, that list was comprised of all warriors plus the one assassin and ONE bard named Eoria. And Eoria and Lyrianna both had to have help from me to kill me. I had to do something stupid for it to happen like forget a teleport potion or walk into a summon trap or one of my character's role flaws of not running when he should.

BUT, to keep in the spirit of your post and to get back to the topic at hand, if bards lost parry I think you'd have to lower the level of symphonic echoes and tweak the way it works a bit to give the bards a fighting chance. They aren't supposed to be pansies that get mowed over if they fail the sleep.

Are they a support class or are they a pwn class?

I dunno. No other class adds as much to group fights as a bard does (resistance, healing, blur, nightmare flee, staves, sleep, area damage, and fiend). Also, no other class has as high a survivability build except healers, paladins, and shaman, and the latter two are much more restricted in being more self-sufficient than group-sufficient.

I've never liked that blur does indeed blur -everything- and have always felt that it should apply only to the bard. I'm fine with bards having parry, although Jhryb's idea is worth thinking about, but it's dodge that probably needs to be looked at more than anything else. Whatever scale weight plays with dodge and how weapon type and weight interact with dex and dodge seems rather skewed in favor of dex and dodge.

Alas.

Human bards with dodge working on 23 chr instead of 20 dex is what makes the defensive difference. Add in imperial defense, and well you've got yourself a tanking machine. I'm not sure what the cost/requirements are for swashbuckling, but I'm pretty sure it should be nuked in the cost area, or the effectiveness area, if not outright removed. Just my opinion though, and I never was able to choose it with my human bard.

It also gives you really sweet evade talent.

Imho, imperial bards have too much in the way of defenses right now. A normal bard I can put up with, but imperial training just goes OTT.

I think there also needs to be more kinds of stat malediction across all the classes. Now that -con does a bit more (stunts regen in shifters), get some more of that in there! Get more face attacks that do -chr, more head strikes that can give -int and -wis. Up the number of classes that could do small -dex maledictions. I think it's a much neglected area, and it can open up some great and interesting ways to shove some pizzaz into the rustier class skill sets.

How about getting emetic to have a longer-lasting secondary -con effect?

Faerie fire traps can have some skunk style affects.

Maybe to help balance the spree of Needlers, give Wounding needles the ability to inflict -chr as well.

Bedouins! Trained to use the harsh elements to their advantage, one tactic used is to expose their opponents heads by trying to destroy their masks/helms with a weapon. Has side effect of -int/-wis (cool for animists!). Also makes people more vulnerable to head/face-attacks for the duration (dirt? hunters arrows?)

I'll leave shamans for another post. :)

Yhorian

So basically they just have to gear for str loss.