Bringing the Minstrel back Up-to-date

[DJ_JD]

I’ve played minstrel since Mirkwood days and have seen it through many different iterations. In my view, the version of Minstrel at level 85 was the peak. Right now, the Minstrel is at its all time low, and the latest round of Minstrel updates completely missed the point. So with that in mind, the following changes are what I think should be made or reviewed to bring the Minstrel back to being a fun versatile class.

The goal is to:
a) Remove bugs, whether old or new.
b) Undo changes that made the class trivial / boring.
c) Buffing / updating the skills that have fallen behind.
d) Removal of useless traits.

I’m pretty keen to hear other minstrels thoughts, do you agree? There’s some points where I can see the current trait isn’t my cup of tea, but I’m not really sure what to replace it with. (For example, every single trait relating to a bubble.)



General Changes:
Generally speaking, the Minstrel relies heavily on Critical hits, with our base non-crit heals and attacks being extremely weak. Actually, I suspect this is an overall trend impacting most classes. I don't know how practical it is to make the following changes, but they would start the process of smoothing out gameplay to some extent.

Stats
o Critical Magnitude to be reduced therefore allowing:
o Effect of Outgoing Healing to have higher impact on healing potency of skills.

Skills
o Duration of Anthems needs to be severely reduced. The current durations makes them a boring trivial element to the game.
o Inspire Fellows needs a heal potency buff.
o Raise the Spirit needs a heal potency buff.
o Heal from Major Ballad needs a heal potency buff.
o Fellowships Heart needs a heal potency buff.
o Coda of Resonance needs a heal potency buff.
o Remove induction of Story of Courage.
o The Melody of Battle needs serious updating.
o Echoes of Battle, and its variations need updating. The damage needs to be buffed, and the debuff potency increased.
o Piercing Cry change to Immediate. (As it is our only interrupt skill, and the game breaking 0 second cooldown sets no longer exist).



Blue Line
Although this trait line works, it is very underwhelming to play. There is a large amount of skills/traits that see no use as they are simply far too underpowered in the current state of the game. Bringing these skills up-to-date will not overpower the class, but will hopefully expand potential rotations and versatility.

Class Traits
o Resolute. Lets change this to something that actually benefits the minstrel.

Traits
o Inspiring Finish. The duration and magnitude of this buff make it underwhelming. If the buff was +30% for 20 seconds, it would make using the coda potentially worthwhile.
o Resonant Piercing Cry. Can we replace this fairly useless trait with one that grants a threat reduction skill. (NOT PASSIVE, a skill that dramatically reduces threat for a short time
o Improved Coda of Resonance. The base duration of this buff again is too short to be worth using.
o Inspiring Cries and Calls. Resetting the cooldowns of our dps skills while healing is not useful. Maybe instead have a chance to reset the cooldown of Call to Ioreth?

Skills
o Improved Chord of Salvation. The heal overtime of this skill does not work. The +1% heal bonus applies to the caster instead of the target. When the HoT is fixed, the value will likely need to be updated as well.
o Triumphant Spirit needs a big buff.
o Perfect Ending needs a big buff.
o Soliloquy of Spirit needs a buff.
o Call to Ioreth. Change to immediate.
o Perfect Ending needs a big buff.



Red Line
In general, most traits in this line are good, and I find this trait line to be fun to play. The downfall of this trait line is that the base outgoing damage of Minstrels is lower than other classes. Therefore, when we do not crit, our damage is very low.

Class Traits
o No changes required.

Traits
o Enduring Morale needs updating so that the morale is relative to our morale pools.
o Heralds Strength. Investing 6 trait points for a 2.5% debuff is underwhelming, especially even when fully buffed the skill isn’t useful. It’d be much more useful if the buff was stacking and lasted 20 seconds. (Therefore a max debuff of 10%, but that would require using the skill every 5 seconds). This would make us a useful group member for dps races.
o Echoes. The DoT applied by this trait needs to be buffed.

Skills
o Other than a general damage increase to make us more competitive, nothing really needs to change for this line.



Yellow Line
Sadly, this trait line keeps reaching points of great usefulness, and then needlessly being nerfed.

General
o Currently, every +damage buff from yellow line simply adds to the targets Outgoing Damage. This means, that when running about +40% worth of buffs, we see only about +15% of actual damage increase.

Class Traits
o Song of Restoration. This trait is more of a nerf than a buff.

Traits
o Shield Focus. The most pointless trait in the game! Minstrel's do not need block!
o Extended Anthems. The duration of anthems is far too long. The potency of this trait should be reduced.
o Weakening Echoes of Battle. The debuff potency could be increased.
o Raise Our Spirits. Lets remove this trait that doesn’t work, and replace it with the old Improved Raise the Spirit. (That is, remove the cooldown, and reduce the induction to 0.5 seconds).
o Strength of the Hammerhand. The buff needs a huge potency increase.

Skills
o Song of Aid. Nearly all of the buffs received from this 10 second channelled skill are extremely mediocre. All of them need to be completely redone.
o Call to Greatness. This is in the same position as Song of Aid. With the exception of Hunters, all of the buffs need to be completely redone.

[mkcraft27]

Traits
o Inspiring Finish. The duration and magnitude of this buff make it underwhelming. If the buff was +30% for 20 seconds, it would make using the coda potentially worthwhile.
o Improved Coda of Resonance. The base duration of this buff again is too short to be worth using.
o Inspiring Cries and Calls. Resetting the cooldowns of our dps skills while healing is not useful. Maybe instead have a chance to reset the cooldown of Call to Ioreth?

Based on this im guessing you dont really use your coda. If that is the case you are missing out on a large part of mini healing. In case you missed it, codas no longer cash out anthems so they are definitely worth using. By not using it, you are missing out on insta cast bolsters (a big increase in healing) in addition to +incoming healing, -incoming damage on the target, and +outgoing healing on yourself. In addition the cries and calls reset also applies to cry of the chorus. This you to quickly stack ballads after using coda, so you can use more codas.

Raise the Spirit needs a heal potency buff.

I think it would be fine if the HoT trait actually worked

Other than a general damage increase to make us more competitive, nothing really needs to change for this line.

Competitive with what? Red is DPS is fine for landscape solo stuff.

[Seschat]

Speaking as a 110 Yellow Minstrel duoing, Coda of Melody saw an annoying nerf to it's healing output during the Balancing. And at 110, I wasn't benefiting from the whoe "double rune" thing in the first place. I'm willing to admit it might have been a hair overpowered before, but it was chopped too far.

[Moondog548]

This appears to be redundant to at least 2 other current threads, but it's such an important discussion that needs to be had and all the threads have a LOT of great posts!

fwiw here's my contribution from my perspective as just one slice of the overall problem pie, cross posted from one of the other threads:

I am and have always been (since beta) a Protector of Song (yellow) minstrel. I can't speak to how things currently stand for a Watcher of Resolve (blue). All I know for sure is that my heals have little to no effect on green bars regardless of stance and skill synergy.

I feel like being primary healer for T1 should require me to make the most effective use of my PoS toolkit and stances. I believe only T2+ should require spec'ing blue to be primary healer.

But currently in yellow spec, no matter how clever I am, I have virtually no burst healing at all, and that rules out being the primary healer. Chord of Salvation and my Coda are the only heals that even have a CHANCE (via crits) to provide the necessary burst morale. (the only thing I know I haven't been using to its potential is Fellowship's Heart). And I know my gear is not optimized for healing (even in terms of what optimized SHOULD mean, nevermind what it means in practice given the current catastrophic state of stat-balance), but again, I'm talking about T1 and about being a player taking full advantage of the versatility offered by the trait line specifically THEMED on it!

I think luckily despite the extremity of the problem, the only URGENT fixes needed are:

1. fix the bugs (make skills work per their descriptions),
2. make Bolster Courage substantially more powerful. I don't want to go back to the bad old days BolsterBots, but I say without hyperbole that it are virtually useless currently.

• BC should be our most reliable tool. It should be the one thing I always know I CAN do but have to be prepared to do exclusively until the emergency is over.
• Currently, casting a (nonzero-induction) BC is literally A MISTAKE! Outside of a tank class making full-pro-tank use of their tank tools, any target WILL take more damage during the induction than BC can even crit for. And that's just in terms of typical sustained incoming dps. Like I said my only recourse in the event of a damage spike is to pray that my CoS or Coda are ready to cast and pray also that they crit.
• Currently Bolster Heal takes SEVERAL casts to refill MY pitiful morale after combat on landscape! That's insane!!!

Other stuff needs tweaking and the other heals need slight buffs for the class (or at least the trait spec I know and love) to be where it should be. However those 2 fixes need to happen asap to make the class fully functional.

EDIT: and if being primary healer on even the easiest difficulty is meant to require a healing trait and/or gear spec, then why do stances even exist? I could live with the PITA implementation of swapping trait lines if fundamental game systems weren't telling me I shouldn't have to.

EDIT2: oh and to be clear... obviously I don't think PoS peak healing should come anywhere near WoS healing, but I don't think PoS baseline healing should match WoR baseline healing either. I think a PoS should be able to primary heal via tactical use of his abilities to maximize overall fellowship defense, offense, and utility (as well as the minstrel's ability to maximize their own situational healing) to the point where heals are only needed as upkeep.

That doesn't broken nature of the status quo nor the urgency in needing a fix! So all of the above still stands as the "easy" fix! The "hard" fix would be to more meticulously buff some TBD combination of skills in the PoS spec to indirectly result in their current heal magnitudes being adequate.