Relooking at Bard Healing

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

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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.

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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.

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

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

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

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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.

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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?

They acknowledged in a different thread :slight_smile:

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

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).


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.

This is upsetting. Very very upsetting.

I’m pretty sure bard was never meant to out heal a musketeer. To me bard was meant to be an AOE healer/buff/debuff. It’s just that the buffs and debuffs aren’t strong enough to justify having bard over musky.

It’s not a matter of outhealing. I don’t want it to outheal Musketeer, but the disparity there is enormous. There’s almost no reason to take a Bard over Musketeer with the amount of healing Musketeer has.

Again, I was showing that Musket with a +5 has ~3.5x the healing output as a Bard with +6. That’s ridiculous.

Where did that number come from? Sorry can’t read everything up everytime :grimacing:

The 3.5x was based on values on healing the Tank with the Heal Over Time abilities.

Bard is getting 5488/second with Gentle Healing+Cure Wounds.

Musket is getting 6560/s Charged Turret (Charged but not hit with Cure Wounds), 4224/s Lifewell, 8528/s Renew for a total of 19,312.

I can run the numbers as well for Bard total party healing vs Musket total party healing, but it’s a very rare case when you need to heal the whole party and not the tank lol

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And I don’t blame you for not reading everything. This thread is LOOOOOOOOOOOONG lol. My main reason for pointing out the Chorus vs Solo here was to bump the threads for the Dev Dudes don’t lose the thread :slight_smile:

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I will read everything in the end but had no time for it today, and got curious. There might be something flawed about that num. I am curious to check myself when I have the time :sweat_smile:

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You guys tired of me yet?

More testing today, with more attention paid to equalizing everything as much as possible. This means no potions, no tiles, no armor (with two exceptions, noted below.)

First off, Bard!

Note that Cure+Gentle tick happens every 3 seconds, so it was divided by three for the HPS. Total HPS was calculated by adding the Cure+Gentle HPS and the crescendo values divided by their cooldowns. I didn’t test anything below a +5 today. I tested with and without tiles for both +5 and +6.

Next, Musket notes. I took the values of everything on non crits and compiled it here. I started testing below level 30 because I wanted to see what the equivalent value of a +6 Bard mallet was on Musketeer. The numbers were taken without armor to get base values not modified by Projectile damage increase or other affixes. CTC denotes Charged Turret hit by Cure Wounds. Mostly I was looking at the Per Second Renew+CTC as that value is what you’re looking at for healing the Tank most the time.

If we’re looking at JUST Heals per second, we’re looking at +6 Bard being the equivalent of somewhere between a level 19-23 Musket.
If we add all the healing a Bard can do and put it in Heals Per Second, +6 Bard is somewhere between a 25-27 Musket.
+6 Bard with Tiles gets you between a level 27 and green level 30 musket.

If we add the damage mitigation of a Shield Orb to the equation, +6 Bard with tiles is BARELY better than a level 25 Musket.

It really makes me sad that I bothered spending so long trying to get these legendary +6 mallets when I’d have been better off with a green level 30 musket. I understand that Bard shouldn’t be pulling the same number as Musket due to it being more of a hybrid healing class, but it’s so underwhelming that it’s no wonder most players don’t bother with the class.

As always, if my conclusions are wrong or I missed something, please let me know.

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Glad to see someone actually going into the numbers, which I was way too scared to do. :sweat_smile: I just eye-balled it most of the time :eyes:

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The thing that blows my mind is @Riley_D referred to this as one of his favorite class. But it feels rather neglected. It became one of my favorite support classes due to loving the music mechanics. Myself and Human were the forefront of pushing for some rebalance for Musketeer (I was a Muskie support class super user from preborn). And I feel that class got what it needed. But I feel the bard class that was initially added with a good amount of creativity got ignored. A bit of DPS and healing tweaks would further move the bard to an appropriate place. Musketeer takes so much less skill now to pull of healing than the bard it’s upsetting.

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