I’m having a hard time aiming the marimba, since it now follows your torso. I also find that it ends up aggroing enemies I didn’t mean to attack, since the shots fire off at random angles.
There is a bug where the crecendo animation can get stuck on an orb.
All 6 crescendos active at the same time! (Not really…)
I was able to consistently reproduce this by building the crescendo on the orb with the red ball inside, then without using the crescendo whack an inactive orb. The red ball moves to the new orb, cancels the ultimate on the previous orb (if you smack the inactive orb with the crescendo animation nothing happens), but the crescendo animation remains until you re-log. You can continue to use the ultimate on that orb if you reactivate it, you just can’t tell when it is not active since the animation is stuck.
We should have a fix for this soon.
I hope this changes. It’s my only gripe with bard now. It seems to just limit your options without opening up much meaningful play.
(Seriously though, I gave bard a quick try in the last beta and was unimpressed. Talents and the rework really make the class sing, pardon the pun!)
We’ll try this out in the next build, letting you keep playing notes even with crescendo filled and see how it is and if it causes any issues.
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This is an improvement, however the reason a lot of us wanted more notes was to play cool songs in highsteppe. Some of course wanted it for more difficulty however it was a lot of asking for more notes to play more songs. These 7 notes are not enough to fulfill this want, the desire to play these songs in highsteppe; the reason for this would be two factors: 1. We have what seems to be an incorrect scale for what we can play on the marimba; what I mean by this is that the scale should realistically be on a c major or a minor scale. The far left note on the marimba sounds like it is A2 or two notes below middle C. Due to only having 7 notes we are only able to play songs in A minor. The second reason is due to not having sharps and flats, not only do they help considerably in finding which notes are which, let us play different songs that include sharps and flats (almost every song besides a couple) but also allow us to play in a different key and therefore let us play even more songs.
I guess this change is fine,makes it easier for me, but as a bard it was less about using your crescendos right away, but instead saving important crescendos while using others. For example if you put on both your damage orbs and then gentle healing, you are going to want to use your healing when you need to, rather than right away. So, save your healing crescendo and with only the two damage ones non-crescendo you should be able to keep your bar up. With other orbs it’s more about finding a good rhythm between which crescendos to save and when you need notes to be falling.
Something like this is fine, it just removes a bit of the skill aspect away from from bard, something that I could compare this to is if you could passively generate orbs as a paladin in combat (or you can turn it off because in some fights this wouldn’t be good, but still it coincides with my point that it takes some skill away).
Ok, so I think I finally found out why crescendos would randomly not work (I created a new thread for it here after a while of it just not working sometimes). It’s dragons. Apparently while we were doing a dungeon one of my party members told me that my crescendo had healed my dragon. I then told everyone in the party to take their dragons off of themselves and my crescendos started working like they’re supposed to.
Still not 100% on this because not much testing, but this is probably the solution?
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Hmmmmmm…I put in a check for this just in case in the patch going out later today. It doesn’t look like that’s what should be happening, but doesn’t hurt to try it out.
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I also made it so that all smart heals always fire and go to someone even if eveyrone in range has full health (it will still prioritize lower-health targets), that might help clear it up too.
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So they kept failing without dragons this time (like I said not much testing, maybe just got lucky) but either way there are two other things that could be happening. 1. The crescendo are just hitting the ground (because for some reason when the crescendos are used they go downwards then back up when they do work, which means that I could be sitting too low for them to work?) and 2, they are hitting my hitbox and not working (I think this happened with some other classes just forget which ones).
It’s really bad in dungeons when a game changing crescendo just doesn’t work.
The way they work they should ignore the ground and also only ever be able to hit their intended target; let’s see what happens with them always active, that might give more info.
could this be similar to the scoundrel hitting his hitbox or deck?
Bard is a blast so far! I like how it’s somewhat solo capable. Only changes I’d make - with a given set of orbs, it seems the song is set in stone. So once you’ve memorized the pattern that’s it. Maybe add some randomization? And having some kind of backup cool down would be nice, ideally a nice big knockback with a mid-long CD. Something to get a little breathing room, yknow? And maybe make the kalimba itself an offhand equipment, with different ones having different sound effects! That would be a great creativity outlet!
I do hope we actually get more bard orbs on release, I already made a post about some ideas, but I’m pretty sure you devs have really good ones as well. Mainly just because having 8 would be alright, if we weren’t able to equip 6. This only leaves two interchangeable orbs, which I think there should definitely be more options for a support buff/debuff class.
Also I wanted to mention, for the instrument of defense that puts a debuff on nearby enimies that makes their projectiles deal less damage, I, at least from experience, haven’t seen this debuff on any mobs or players.
The instrument of protection and defense’s crescendos are quite buggy or do just not work. The instrument of defense’s in pve should be able to remove things like bolster (if is a buff, not even sure what it does?). Meanwhile the instrument of protection’s crescendo seems to sometimes take of one of the buffs I’m giving whether it be the +5% damage buff from my talents or a random buff from one of my orbs (which get’s replaced instantly, but also means it doesn’t get rid of the debuff the target has).
Let’s talk about the real Bard problem. Getting into combat to make sure your passives are active. A healing Bard with no offenseive instruments active has three ways of getting into combat. Walking up to an enemy, throwing his baton which is basically the same as walking up to it because you need to be in melee range, or to heal someone in combat. Unfortunately the Bard’s smart heals are not always so smart out of combat. First if we don’t have any crescendo’s saved up we can’t heal with our passive healing until we’re already in combat. So small fights may already be over while we’re trying to charge up or First Heal to actually get into combat. As you can guess this is not very productive when trying to level up fighting mobs that five other people are fighting for. I think the bars passive abilities need to be more intuitive. Like only being active if you hit a note correctly the past 3 seconds, even out of combat
I agree that bard aggro is pretty messed up (talked about it in many previous posts), although I’m also guessing you weren’t around for the first beta. Let me give you a rundown:
Bard range was immense on healing and damage. This meant that everytime someone got in combat, you did as well. This was then fixed, but then it went a little too far over it’s mark and bard could aggro nothing. No running into something, baton throw wasn’t around then, so only way to even fight with your team was to have a damage crescendo.
Bard has definitely come a long way from that, but I also haven’t come up with a way to aggro things better than what we have, and to be honest, I’m fine with where the bard is right now in terms of aggro, just think it could still use some improvements in the future. For now I’m just happy it’s playable.
Baton throw works really well for this because of it’s short cooldown. For large groups you are just going to have to understand that you won’t get all of the mobs unless you have a crescendo ready and your damage orb on. Mage DoT spread was just nerfed so your groups should also be more single target oriented (one mob at a time) as well, which will help.
Smart heals are messed up right now and sometimes don’t work, been trying to find out what causes it, but nothing has been coming up.
Would write more on this, but there are some secrets that I don’t want to spoil. I’m going to just say that there is no issue here. 
Also welcome!
I noticed a couple of things while playing bard. I really, really enjoy the challenge of this class. However, I had issues with a couple things:
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Visual feedback is lacking for both passive damage and healing effects. I’m comparing the over time passive effects of the “instruments” to the over time effects of the Musketeer turret. Would some sort of visual effect (particle “explosion”, attack animation, etc.) to show when the bard has healed/attacked be possible? Even if it is only every few hits, that’s still better than nothing at all.
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I did realize there is a healing buff applied to those affected by the gentle healing, however it can be difficult to see (I only realized it was there after two weeks of playing the beta…)
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Please find a way to improve “combat entry” for the bard. Throwing the baton isn’t always feasible (though it is hilarious). What about the bard automatically entering combat any time a party member enters combat who is also within a certain distance? Or at least start passive healing for any party member who is in combat and in range?
First sentence wouldn’t be very good, because if a party member pulls (even though they aren’t in the game yet) for example an aberration on accident, since the bard would be healing them, it would instead attack the bard for their mistake (cause of healing aggro). Secondly, passive healing is always active soooo… no problem there I guess.
I would agree with this buuut in a raid the bard could be healing 9 people. The particles would surely lag. I was going to say a damage visual effect would be fine, but again my point stands with large groups, the particles would cause unnecessary lag.
Played bard for the first time today and entering combat is terrible. Left a pretty bad taste in my mouth.