But their total of surviavility, lethality, supporting power, flexibility and brute force strength puts them so far ahead of other classes that I felt it had to be brought up for discussion :p

What do you think?

(with "imperial bards" I meant those who have gotten to imperial training echelon)

Assuming you can avoid that, they aren't that bad. There's a lot of classes with some ability to stop singing, ala deafen, hurl throat, etc. My last chars had no trouble with bards who didn't get off the phantasmal killer (though, phantasmal killer raped my evil conjie something fierce).

Granted, I couldn't kill them that often, but I didn't die to them either.

But damn were you pretty freaking sweet. We traveled together a bit with one of my shifters then with Thrakazhaar we had some good battles. Had a feeling who might have played the char when I noticed your times dwindling...

Thanks for the compliment. I enjoyed the character but at one point or another I started not being able to keep up with the hording-rot timers. I put the char on dormant when I started to just wind up spending half my time getting wands, pking to get some gear, then repeating the process next login. I was also Trevant, who I felt was versatile in PK but had a terrible role in general.

I'll say this though, imps are pretty damn smoove.

Having recently played Desabarun. I don't think it is just imperials.

They are decent in the hands of an inexperienced player, but the staves and scroll combo with experience makes them sick.

Personally I'd take away staves. Then they are less likely to have sick dam redux (owing to inventory space etc), and can't do many other things as easily (like dispel).

Maybe also reconsider their defenses (because it feels to me as if bard defenses are particularly good, maybe to compensate for having no shield most of the time). If they are better than warrior equivalent (say), then perhaps now that hard to parry things tend to be easy to dodge, this could be revisited?

My shortlist of overpowered classes(not in order), would be:
druids,
bards,
muters.

They have overpowered aspects, and are incredibly offensive...

But even the best druid player will easily get caught with some simple tactics. They have one or two glaring weaknesess, one of them being that they're a hit-and-run style, or complete offense style class.

The point where I might agree is Telluric surge. I think it should reduce moves to 0 like iceball does, instead of spiralling people who have been entangled, insected, and whatever else, into serious negatives. This supp can take 50-150 moves off you and only has 1 round lag. That's too much, and can leave anyone disabled very rapidly with no chance to really save. People argue 'just remove your metal armor!!' but it's a lame thing to have to do when you've been jumped by druid, and forcing anyone to not use any metal when it was already a disadvantage versus a druid is just stupid. It goes into the territory of 'not a cool disadvantage against an already powerful offensive class'. This goes triple for mages, who rely heavily on +hp gear from that metal armor.

But the trends I've noticed are that other pieces of gear give more HP than metal gear, unless you're talking about a few specific metal pieces.

Mages have the least problem with druids out of all the classes unless they insist on being retarded about metal because nearly all of their crap can be replaced with cloth, leather, flesh or energy items.

I'll be honest with you... I just don't think telluric surge is all that good. It only really shines against an opponent too dumb to flee for a really long time because they're not taking very much damage -- in other words, people who are gear farms for shamans, necromancers, and A-Ps already.

NT

No, I didn't add an extra 0 in there. She used telluric surge to knock me down to -200 moves, each one knocking between 40-80 then proceeded to entangle to double the number until I was miles below.

I posted it to the bug board, but got no reply. So I have no idea if the post was missed or if it is by design.

It's also part of the reason why I thought it'd be a lot smarter if it just reduced you to 0 moves. The damn spell already tries to disarm, lag, feint and everything else.

The question you have to ask about people who get killed by Telluric Surge is "What would have happened if the druid had cast their one-round pure damage supplications (Thorn, Sunray, etc.) instead, and the victim stayed fighting?" In several of the logs I've seen, the answer is "They would be at -500 hp, and possibly gotten one of the cooler corpses that only showed up when you got completely tooled."

Suffice to say "-150 moves" is very, very optimistic, and relies on you wearing a pile of metal which doesn't help your saving throws much.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

It was probably an oversight that certain very good sources of Dispel Magic on a stick were never made limited. I went ahead and adjusted that-- it's a powerful ability, particularly in wide-area form.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com