Relooking at Bard Healing

Suggestions
#11

There are definitely times when Bard is preferred. Hot Foot, like you said (although see note below), and Raid Boss 2 in particular come to mind. I also prefer Barding on Raid Boss 3 over Musket due to group healing.

However, the two issues for me are
1: Encore, which we agree on needing an overhaul
2: Bard’s healing just being hopelessly outdone by Musketeer. With my numbers being pulled from a +5 Musket vs +6 Bard Mallets, Musket can get 3.5x the healing of Bard easily. Just Renew (which you can bounce to entire party) or the Turret alone outdoes the Bard heals per second, and considering that Musket also gets Shield Orb, Lifewell, and a bouncing Cure Wounds, the numbers are heavily skewed.

I do want to point out that on Hotfoot, two of our Musketeers in Elysium can deal with it just as easily as me Barding. I don’t know how they do it, but Hotfoot isn’t too much an issue there. I still prefer to Bard though, and when Golden Egg comes back, I still prefer to Bard on that!

1 Like
#12

The way that you ultimately heal hot foot on musket is making sure that everyone is in bounce heal range. Whether that is through bouncing off turret or enemies it makes it easy to keep everyone alive. I would also like to note that our rangers normally move while shooting so while they are not in bounce range I can easily give them a lifewell if they need it.

1 Like
#13

What exactly do you mean with “bounce heal” though? Your renew-charged turret or the charged shot (on turret or mobs) itself?

I agree that it’s not a major problem healing out hot foot (I normally do that for mages who don’t want or should move; everyone else actually got time to do so without dmg loss!). However, it still all comes down to the tank - if he needs a turret on him, desperately, it’s a bad idea to focus on group-heal, be it walkin back into ranger-range - and it could be a great distance if they care for their 40m - to charge-shot the turret or be it to let the turret do its thing (spreading renew) and without reaching the tank then; lifewell is also an option but none to keep up 100% of the time, so with several non-moving rangers in the group this alone would not work out.

#14

If people are not standing close enough to the monsters that the tank is holding agro on I will put my turret at a mid point between the tank and dps and bounce regen and cure wounds on it while bouncing shield off of the enemies closest to tank. Because of this if I have to I can teleport out real fast to bounce a cure wounds or regen off my turret I move on a ranger or mage that is staying farther away and only lose maybe 1 or 2 direct heals from the turret to the tank while I move it back real fast.

In essence charge shotting the healing orbs (or any orb) has a specific aoe to them from the point of origin and if I move my turret to be closer to ranged dps I can move the aoe point of origin that the heal bounces from.

#15

Yah ok so the charged shot spreads you meant, just wasn’t familiar with the term ‘bounces’… i’m a musky as well :wink: (and group heal via relocating turret quickly is sure fine in situations where a tank easily survives those 1-2 missing turret ticks… alas some tanks, in some situations, might not).

#16

Testing out Song Shield vs Musketeer Shield Orb today. Against a small mob, I went from 6250 damage taken per hit to 0 damage per hit. To test the extent to which Bard Song Shield will mitigate, I went to the Wastelands with Traffic Cone, me as Bard, him as Musketeer. We took multiple smashes from the same mob. We took them with no shielding, and with Bard shielding, to find that Bard Song Shield, with my +6 Mallets, shielded a consistent 6367 damage. When we tested with Musketeer’s Shield Orb, we took 0 damage.

To test how much Shield Orb will mitigate, we went to Treesus (Bjorn, the Highsteppe World Boss), and took smashes with no shielding, and smashes with a Shield Orb from Musketeer. The Shield Orb mitigated 49,957 damage.

With Shield Orb coming up every 8 seconds, and Song Shield only coming with Crescendos (13-18 seconds average), there again appears to be a huge disparity between support there.

At this point, it’s not even worth arguing that Bard is a good choice over Musketeer. Bard is just getting shafted :frowning: I get that Song Shield is just a Talent that you can choose not to take (in which case you get 5% damage buff to the entire party, which Musketeer’s Weakness orb can do with 100% uptime), but there’s currently no shielding abilities on Bard that are viable for end game. I’m still going to play it, but Upbeat is broken, Protection and Defense Instruments don’t work (and in PvP actually increase damage taken), Song Shield will only block the amount of damage that an overworld single mob does in one hit, the healing is less than a third of Musketeer’s, and the Ultimate is capped at once per five minutes.shield testing

Again, if anybody has any testing that shows different data, I’m more than happy to edit my statements. I just want knowledge about Bard class, and right now, the knowledge isn’t favorable for the class.

5 Likes
Class rebalancing
#17

Just to repost something I posted in another thread that would be far more appropriate here.

Musk has faster heals (the bard heals are slow and chase the person they are after if they teleport. Furthermore if you use a crescendo and a person teleports they take an INSANELY long time to chase after them after reacquiring the target). If you are talking about the pulse healing from the bard the turret has the exact same results. Musk can splash heals off a mob or the turret or shoot at the ground near a group and they reach that point VERY fast. The Musk can also re-apply the 5% damage buff before it drops. So the bard lost its advantage a long time ago. I wouldn’t want Musk to be debuffed at all as I pushed hard for one of my fave classes to be upgraded appropriately. But I feel the bard, a class I moved over too due to love of music and at the time its bonus has lost any of the advantages it had. Crachendos vs 100% reliable recharge rate mean that the musk is a winner every time. If you miss 1 note you’re boned and won’t have that heal when you need it. Musk never has to deal with that. The bard needs some serious looking at as it has a lot more skill vs the musk these days.

I’d also like to draw attention to just how powerful shield orb is. Bards have to make a choice whether their heals provide the shield orb or dps buff. Musk doesn’t have that problem. They also have a 5th orb on their chest that can heal AOE as well.

Really tink the Bard got a raw deal in the end.

3 Likes
#18

The argument that I want to make is that the Bard might be a worse pure healer, if you don’t need the extra heals to keep X alive, then having a class which boosts the group a few % more on average is worth it.

(Still Bard does need some fixing and love though)

3 Likes
#19

Slow chasing heal issue could be solved by taking the distance of player Target and player Bard, giving the heal a starting value for speed(idk, 1meter/s), then accelerating the projectile logarithmic-ally over time spent chasing, up to some maximum value. That way they hit their intended travel time between point A and point B, but going beyond that point the projectile would speed up quite a bit.

#20

Wasn’t this exact thing suggested for Summon Orb on shaman a while back? Might make sense to take a look at it there too.

#21

I’m fine with Bard having sub-Musketeer healing. Just not the huge gap that we seem to be at currently.

1 Like
#22

I made a plea ages ago for increased dps for the bard. I’d forgive the healing gap for a class that has to work a bit harder to heal, but has a greater dps increase not only for the class itself, but for the group as a whole.

I’m still not sure people realize just how powerful damage mitigation is. The musk shield orb has always been the single most powerful skill to date. I used it to great effect for strats in preborn raids and it is used in raid strats in Reborn. Shield orb can close the gap on gear issues on tanks when running high level shards and utilizing some pretty crazy strats. I suppose I wish that bard had its own bonus vs Musk again.

When Reborn was released it was obvious that bard was the clear leader, but I feel the balance that was made for musk should have also found some ground for bard to take a lead somewhere.

Again, I’m not complaining about the Musk upgrade. I pushed for that super hard and was glad for the correction. I just feel the Bard got ignored during the balance.

3 Likes
#23

also the bards song shield is nowhere near as powerful as musky shield.

on the whole heals chasing you and being slow thing, how about getting rid of the whole chasing and make it just an instant AoE heal when you use your crescendo? the musky can already do this by charging their heals(tho with a smaller range) and is way ahead in healing anyways so it’s not like it would be OP.

2 Likes
#24

Also, could we got some illumination on the bard notes?

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The notes are hard to see especially the grey ones. They might as well be invisible in dark areas.

10 Likes
#25

This would be a great quality of improvement, especially when playing instruments with which you don’t have the pattern memorized

1 Like
#26

I did some more testing today, looking at Shaman Shield Totem. Noting that Shaman is a DPS class, at first glance it appears that Shield Totem is mitigating 25,532 damage with the mask that I use. Considering it’s a +6, same as my Bard mallets, I’d like to note that a DPS class has better shielding/damage mitigation than one of the Healing classes. It pulses every ~3.5 seconds, with a cooldown of 44 seconds from placing it (22 seconds from the time it despawns), where Bard Song Shield goes off every 13-18 seconds on average, which also takes up your big healing ability.

Bard shielding, again, proves under whelming.

7 Likes
#27

I looked through this and I’ve seen zero acknowledgement of devs. I get they know but like you gonna do anything about it or what?

#28

They acknowledged in a different thread :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#29

Oh okay. That’s good. As long as they aren’t too engrossed in the DLC :slight_smile:

#30

Now that the DLC has been released and given some time for bug fixes, I wanted to bump this back up to be looked at.

I looked at Chorus vs Solo, thinking that Chorus would benefit Warriors spamming Provoke (I figured Chorus on Paladin isn’t useful since their Empowered Heal brings them to full already).

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The top numbers (Solo+Warrior and Chorus+Warrior) shows the total amount of healing per second when doing X Provokes a second and Bard Healing.
The Provoke+Cure/Solo/Solo shows how much Provoke is healing with the appropriate talents, and the 1.05/1.04 shows the % increase from the row above it.

If the Warrior does 1 Provoke a second, Solo is better.
If the Warrior does 1.5 Provokes a second, Chorus increases total healing by 0.6%.
If the Warrior does 2 Provokes a second, Chorus increases total healing by 1.3%.

However I was told (and I don’t play Warrior enough to test this) that Warriors cap at about 1.6 Provokes per second. It’s hard to justify dropping 20% healing on everybody else in the party to increase the healing on Warriors for ~1%.

The only time I see Chorus coming in handy is if you’re in a Raid and there’s another healer.

Again, this is assuming my numbers are math are correct. I’m notorious for being bad at this kind of stuff, so feel free to double check. I’d love to be wrong and see that Chorus is coming out ahead a significant amount, but as of now, Chorus looks rather useless.