Minstrel Changes and Feedback

[hillard1959]

Is there any tracerie that is yellow line specific in the first palce? Besides you level up a socket, so the progress is sitll here. All you need is a scroll to replace a tracerie. Hardly an issue.

Not a major issue, no. Depends on what traceries a player has slotted and what their intention was. I think some red minstrels may be a little put off by needing to shoehorn in Anthem traceries if they weren't using them before.

[infinitewhimsy]

Piercing Cry no longer stunning in Dissonance is a bad change. I understand you are trying to add incentive for people to finally use Melody but doing that by paring down the identity of Dissonance/War speech will not make people happy. That definitely seems to be your approach though, for example drastically reducing mitigation reduction offered by Orome (it looks to be about 1/3rd of what it is on live) and then giving a teensy bit of it back in Melody. Of course the difference offered is small but I guess the buff stacks now so you can apply it several times...so you can spend much more time and GCDs to accomplish what you used to do before in 1 skill usage. That seems to be the key idea behind the new Tale of Tales trait too and the new Anthem of Compassion and Free Peoples, recycled but less convenient. And of course you've removed the semi-permanent reflect from Piercing Cry that used to be in Yellow and threw it in with Song of Aid instead... I understand landscape is a joke so who will really have grounds to complain outside of (lol) "PvPers", but just in terms of design principles, this kind of approach is stupid aggravating, don't you think?

But a lot of these changes have a kind of incoherence to then...Call to Greatness now resets Oathbreaker's Shame huh? It's too bad Oathbreaker's applies a 3 minute debuff preventing its use on the same target. Some of the resets are pretty hilarious, nothing like using a 7 minute CD capstone trait to reset a 30s cooldown that is also reset every 25s anyway (Cry of the Wizards). I mean I expect every Warden I'm grouped with to beg me "please use Call to Greatness, I desperately need to reset Javelin of Deadly Force!". In case it isn't clear, the joke here is that this is completely useless.

And Agility on an Anthem? lol, why don't you bring back Song of Balance while you're at it going backwards a decade via overly specific buffs that do nothing for half the group so you can produce the illusion of choice through skill bloat.

If you want strong identity you should make trade offs count, the fact you can't heal in Dissonance should be worth something more than, idk 15% damage on a few skills? Especially since stance swapping is just a short induction nowadays, skills need to be very different for these stances to feel impactful and like a real choice. I guess Blue Minstrels will be happy (precisely because they make no choices now, they just get everything), but you've blurred the line so heavily between Dissonance and Melody and in such a lazy way that, if anyone ever actually used Melody (lol) I'd imagine both groups would be unhappy. You lost utility in Dissonance and in Melody you are just mediocre at both damage and healing so you can...idk, spam corruption removal with Piercing Cry? Try and fish for Anthem resets which is RNG and a massive time investment and this despite the fact you can maintain 5 Anthems no problem with decent gear so it's totally unnecessary anyway? The only distinctly worthwhile thing I can see in Melody is the trait Strike a Chord, which if anything is annoying to use since it requires spamming Minor Ballads so it's bad for healing (removing your useful ballad buffs) and it requires Melody so it's bad for damage too even though the best time to spam Minor Ballads like this is specialized in Red for traits like "Haste" which appear to be bugged anyway and doesn't actually apply the CD reduction with Ballads. Go ahead and try it, the skill lights up as available but you can't use it, the debuff uptime potential is clearly not what it should be. At least it didn't for me on BR.

And in many places this reshuffling slight of hand is done poorly too, so there are instances you are worse off now than you were before. For example you've halved the Attack Duration from Anthem of Prowess and gave 5% to Anthem of the Third Age Resonance....but not Dissonance. Which instead has the significantly worse 5% Light/Fire/Frost damage. If you specialized Yellow and went Red/Dissonance to add DPS and buffs (which is reasonably common in high end content), you are now worse in groups where Prowess was a huge part of the appeal. And of course Anthem of the Free People's is just a worse version of the old Anthem of the Third Age Melody. Unless I'm missing something we've also lost a 10% Incoming Healing buff to the group with the replacement of Tale of Tales/Anthem of the Third Age Melody with Free Peoples and the new Tale of Tales.

Also for the record, you also haven't actually made Anthems interesting. They are still mostly just fire and forget, it just takes longer to reach the point where you are constantly reapplying your buffs. I do like the fact Anthem of the Third Age Dissonance resets Call of the Second Age immediately now with Invigorating Anthems...but the rest of the Anthems offer totally negligible effects, I would go so far as to say they do effectively nothing - - except for Anthem of War which I think actually does do nothing (it says Coda crit chance, but there's no buff). And 5% threat reduction from Anthem of Compassion? You could make it 500% and it'd still be useless with the way threat works in the game today. Why don't you make the buffs offered by Codas stack or actually make Herald's/Dissonant Strike good somehow outside of the raid 4 set? There's a lot of negligible or useless effects/skills that could be made interesting instead of...this.

Minstrels have three core skills which change depending on stance: your strike, your piercing cry, and your coda. Strike skills have been rebalanced slightly against one another, so their healing and damage values change more depending on your stance. Likewise, Piercing Cry now has more utility in Melody, does more damage in Dissonance, and is weaker offensively in Resonance. Codas (when traited) also now have bonus effects related to their respective stances.

Your Strike is useless 99% of the time without the HH 4 set bonus. The trait Resonant Piercing Cry is completely useless, if it does something idk what that something is. A 5% increase 5% of the time? If you want to differentiate these skills based on stances to give them a real identity you're going to have to do a lot more.

Put it this way, the fact Composure gives you a power restore is a clue just how out of touch the dev team is...the same way Perfect Ballad's bonus ( I think there's 2 now in fact) is still a thing or the fact traits like Pause for Breath still exist....Power is simply NEVER a consideration anymore. I'm still seeing a lot of useless traits in the trees. I mean consider how every trait in the first row of Yellow is completely useless to you while specialized in Red for damage (no, Echoes resistance is not useful 99% of the time, and no Dissonant Strike is not good, I could give details but this post is already too long and these things are obvious to anyone who actually plays this class) so you just need to eat a big bunch of useless traits to get to the parts of the tree that matter. The fact all of this is left over after a comprehensive pass is not encouraging.

Well, I guess we'll see. Historically once it's on BR that's the best and all you're going to get, surprise me SSG. You've made Minstrel stronger, but you haven't made it more interesting.

By and large you're going to play the exact same way you did except now it takes longer to come fully online with all of your Anthems to have slightly bigger numbers once you do (or not depending on how significant the Orome debuff is, lol).

[jevvy]

Is there any tracerie that is yellow line specific in the first palce? Besides you level up a socket, so the progress is sitll here. All you need is a scroll to replace a tracerie. Hardly an issue.

Unless you've used one of your gold traceries... say for Anthem Duration. Gold tracery tokens aren't that easy to come by exactly.. will we be reimbursed for these?

[Kotal]

amazing changes. playing yellow in a raid was like playing an awkward weak version of red interrupted by more anthems and the occasional ctg. fusing it into the gameplay of blue and red is making it so much better! also thank you for making song of aid a useful skill now! great job, and i hope other lines will come to follow (*cough* yellow guard *cough*)

[Dervacus]

...I freakin' like it! Sure it's different and all of us Mini's will need to take some time to read the tooltips, reconfigure our rotations a bit, but I'm impressed! Overall, EVERYTHING feels more powerful. The new Yellow line doesn't require you burn trait point to get to the next tier of traits which is brilliant! Red line, my DPS was CRAZY and I felt more on par with a Hunter. Blue line, while I did not get to test out in a group, it looks great! More fellowship buffs and benefits? Yes please! Several single-target heals can now be group-wide if we choose? Nice! More amazing heals without taking away heals? Awesome! More anthems to play around with? Uh huh, yes! The more anthems you have active the stronger they become! Now I'm feeling like a real bard!

I'm going to suggest that Mini's take screenshots of their trait trees before this goes into effect, not so you can replicate them, but to use as a guide for building the new trait trees. With the same amount of points I ended up with an additional 4-5 traits!

I haven't done much with trying to make a "Yellow" mini, but there are definitely some interesting choices. Traits that can change how skills work, but just bump them up, but change how they work! There's some fun flexibility to play around with there!

[hillard1959]

So... My red minstrel is definitely doing more damage on BR than on live. Self-healing in dissonance stance is actually effective. You're only able to cast one anthem at a time, which means you need the Anthem Duration tracery to make them worth using at all. Have all your anthems go on cd after casting one is a bit weird. Even with the duration tracery, it feels like anthems take much too long to come off cd.

[infinitewhimsy]

You can still maintain multiple anthems, and though the base duration has been lowered, you can still achieve a nearly 2-minute anthem buff duration. You can also potentially reset anthem cooldowns with Coda of Melody.

This is in the notes and on the skill as well, but the Call of Orome light mitigation debuff stacks with itself twice now, and it has a stronger & longer debuff when used in Melody. You won't be able to achieve the same mitigation reduction you could previously, but the potency of that effect was simply too high for a long-range, AoE, short-cooldown skill.

Damage output for red-line/dissonance has also been increased. Red-line minstrels being brought into a group shouldn't be entirely dependent on one debuff.

Consider the following: purely out of respect for solo play, do you think it's reasonable to take away an extremely iconic, reliable and resettable stun, corruption removal, and damage reflect in Piercing Cry as well third the light damage debuff from Orome in exchange for marginally more PC damage, 5% attack duration, 10% damage, 5% more light damage, 10% more call Call damage BUT ONLY after you get 3 Anthems up which takes about a minute of being in combat? I find that shocking frankly. Especially since you actually want 4 Anthems up (Anthem of War) which means you're missing out on yet something else you used to have until after you do get these shiny new Anthems up. And the fact you can sort of get these effects back by swapping into Melody actually makes it worse because it means even more time wasted trying to do what you did before and in exchange for worse damage in the process. Do you know what the word clunky means?

It's like you said, well...we want to do a give and take....but the give requires a tedious ramp up that probably doesn't actually outweigh what's taken. Obviously Minstrel is 'better' now after spending like 2 minutes in combat, but that's not always the nature of gameplay is it? The stun removal is particularly egregious imo. Just the thought of having to stop and switch into Melody when I want PC to stun something makes me nauseous, what a disgusting gameplay mechanic, all it does is interrupt and annoy the player. And it's not like Anthem usage is somehow interesting now, it just has new artificial barriers to get them up and is still 99% fire and forget for 100 seconds since 4 out of 5 self effects, every one except Third Age, is completely nugatory. Arguably it's actually less interesting now...Anthems are off CD? Use them. It's the opposite of decision making, automatic rotations based on what skills are light up or not.

And it's not like there's only upsides here in long encounters. There are times when you want to reset Call of the Second Age multiple times via Anthem of the Third Age in a small window. You can't do that anymore because it has a 25/20s cooldown. Your AoE potential is reduced. And the reduction in Orome's potency might well outweigh all of these supposed increases, you might reasonably be doing less damage at the end of day outside of a group even when fully buffed.

f you currently play a yellow-spec minstrel, we aren't taking away your tools at all.

In that case I think you forgot something.

And what about Change of Pace? You've removed the Crit Chance buff from heals for damage skills from the trait. I mean you don't have enough trait points for it anymore so who cares, but arguably that could be what makes Melody functional.

[Saephellar]

SSG please bring back Symphony of the Hopeful! Heart and Song of Soothing as minstrels have no real way of reducing threat because Still as Death is barred from use 955 of the time!!! Also minstrels do need some type of skill that heals the fellowship some power. It's surprising as the main healer of the game can't heal others power in any way. This would be a welcome change! also Piercing Cry needs to keep its stun associated with it as it makes no sense to remove it! This skill has saved my life so many times!!

[Atrixzia]

So when can i expect SSG to refund the 100 MCs i paid to take the yellow line.

[hfe]

I don't like this trend at all. Instead of fixing a class traitline, just stomp it, and put some candles on top to call it a pie . I'm nervous for all the non-meta builds I've enjoyed playing. Yellow Hunter, Burglar, Warden among others.

[DoRonRon]

Frankly I don't particularly look forward to learning a new class and being a n00b again so radical changes to the ones I play are not to my liking.

Having several classes being disrupted at the same time and having their rhythms go out of whack 'til I can get a handle on them will be somewhat tiresome.


Unless Shield Focus is trashed ofc otherwise it appears to be a exercise in trolling and making assumptions on how we play our characters. Just the resource cost of LI tweaks makes discovering our "ideal" builds so much more difficult. With 99% not having a look see on BR it's going to be another chance to just give up and not bother and resign ourselves to plodding on and forget about cutting edge and the expense that has become.

But everyone having to get to grips with all of the classes they play is a huge endeavour we are expected to make, just to satisfy the class devs ego's? It's too much for me, it's going to beyond the majority.

[wispsong]

SSG please bring back Symphony of the Hopeful! Heart and Song of Soothing as minstrels have no real way of reducing threat because Still as Death is barred from use 955 of the time!!! Also minstrels do need some type of skill that heals the fellowship some power. It's surprising as the main healer of the game can't heal others power in any way. This would be a welcome change! also Piercing Cry needs to keep its stun associated with it as it makes no sense to remove it! This skill has saved my life so many times!!

Removing the stun worries me as well. Really don't see any reason why they insist on stance switching. I won't...actually I'm not fast enough to do. I use Melody when I quest with a friend so I can heal them but otherwise it's Dissonance which is natural for a red mini. The whole anthem change sounds rather complicated and I can already see them breaking us for questing. I love my mini but whenever they do changes it hurts because they never consider players who don't have all trait points, are low at virtues and play without the best gear/traceries. Getting really tired of this.

[Eloriena]

After respecializing several times I am still wondering why the tier of a few traits have been changed significantly instead of keeping them as close as possible to the current live version to minimize confusion. Is it really necessary to move induction in blue from tier 3 to tier 5+ or anthem duration in yellow from tier 2 to tier 4?

I understand that you wanted to migrate a few things from yellow to blue but it would have been great to keep the old blue trait icons for the unchanged traits, making it easier to transfer from the old to the new system.

[Faudyen]

Why are we keeping melody stance? Why not merge the coda with the other two and get rid of the stance? I don’t understand the changes to the stances.

[Thanatos88]

It's not the Anthems that tier up, it's the Tale of Tales buff - so now you have to wait for Anthems CDs to reach tier 5.

Ahh. Thanks for the clarification.

[Tralfazz]

Anthems currently have a non-shared cooldown of 5 seconds. It is expected that this will change to a 25-second shared cooldown.

Multiple Minstrel skill deeds require the use of specific Anthems X number of times. In the case of the deed involving Anthem of Composure, X=1000.

Since the cooldown is being multiplied by 5x and changing from individual to shared, the value of X for each Minstrel skill deed involving an Anthem ought to be reduced.

[hillard1959]

So, now that I've played around with it some more...

Using Anthems in solo play just feels bad. By the time you're able to get up your second Anthem in Dissonance stance the other one is a good way through its duration. In order to get the most out of your anthems, you need to be in Melody stance. Meaning you either stay in that stance and lose over half of your flat Damage bonus that Dissonance gives you, or try to do some stance dancing. Even at a 0.6 second induction, stance dancing can get you killed solo. Either the inductions need to be removed from stances or Melody needs to be excised completely, with its ability to reduce Anthem CDs migrated over to both Dissonance and Resonance stances.

Also, please put the Stun back on Piercing Cry. Losing both the Stun and the corruption removal from Piercing cry is a bridge too far. I can deal with having one less corruption removal skill. Not having a stun is just uncomfortable.

[Moondog548]

I've been a Protector of Song specialized Minstrel since 2007 long before the traits split into trees.

I am shook by this news. That's ME you're erasing, man!

But, your explanations for what you want to do and why have me cautiously optimistic. Sounds like I *should* still be able to play the minstrel I've always wanted to be (in-the-fight buffing, boosting, and un-focused healing).

But we'll just have to wait and see where all the chips fall of the trait/skill rearrangements.

I will say that what WILL MAKE ME MAD is if I have to have different trait loadouts for landscaping vs grouping. I appreciate the value in having the option to swap specs for optimal performance, but if (as I fear) landscaping in blue specialty is tedious and grouping in red spec is non-viable then that's a total failure IMO. Changing stances should be all that's needed to adapt one's build to be effective (if not optimal) in any (t1) content!

[DoRonRon]

OK

That was horrible.

As a Red Soloer these days it was activate three anthems and nuke everything. Now I can purchase multiple anthems but only apply any as combat comes to an end, if lucky. Bring back Cry of the Chorus functionality (and fix the OOC 9 sec bug).

Who is advising on minstrel play? Hasn't multiple stacking/changing buffs only added to performance issues?

No option to copy over the tracker...

Cry of the Valar was miss-firing on Obelisk Mission.

Turned the class into a Warden/RK type wild "stay in combat" to maintain/build powers from a more considered one. Except you have to wait on the "anthems" CD. Ruined the cadence/rhythm.

[xadoor]

Sorry but the new state of anthems is pretty horrific at first glance (time will tell)

Anthems are the new LM PETs and that's the most unfun role i've ever seen in this game.

Also they need to understand:
* % damage buffs are a joke compared to mit debuffing, they are just additive to our already bloated outgoing damage so basically divide them by more than 3 to get actually damage buffs
* mit debuffs are the meta and need to be avail to all support classes in some equal way or classes are gonna be left out of raids, the diff between a mit debug and not having one is NIGHT and DAY on any T3+ content. NOTHING in here accounts for the nurf to light debuffing, not even close


Aren't having all these anthems basically gonna mimic the same problems weapon swapping caused? The math to figure out damage is gonna CONSTANTLY be changing for every toon? A mini's the new lag monsters?

[Elaelin]

The stun removal on piercing cry is a less than ideal change. That skill makes landscape activities doable and makes a difference in surviving on landscape. The play dead skill is only good for landscape so not sure why you are taking that away from us. Again, that skill makes a difference when questing on landscape and makes some things doable. It really doesn't hurt anyone. Some of these changes are OK for instances. I anticipate going back to the old days where leveling a mini on landscape was anything but fun. If you are doing that, give us back our medium armor please.

Not sure why you are killing off the yellow mini. The mini currently has 2 opportunities for group content, blue and yellow. I happen to be one of those minis who plays yellow and stays in yellow line. With these changes, mini will have limited opportunity to participate in group content and probably only get to heal in instances. No one ever wants a red mini for DPS. Mini was in an ok place with the most recent changes. Now, mini is going to be limited in surviving solo landscape content. I don't even want to imagine missions with piercing cry nerfed and still as death rendered useless.

If you want to get rid of the multiple buffs just change them to be short duration epic type buffs (sort of like call to greatness started out) that are only good for 10-15 seconds and please don't make us swap stances in the middle of healing during an instance in order to buff or use those skills.

This change seems to rely on constant stance swapping while in combat in order to provide group benefit. I do not see that it will be sustainable in the long term. It won't be useful for a solo mini on landscape with the you must be in combat first, swap stances, use the anthem, swap stances and go back to combat. If the mob is alive long enough for the mini to do all those steps, chances are the mini will be dead if not dead already. It may be helpful in a raid if the minis coordinate who will use which buff but having to swap stances to update an anthem is just another word for a long induction time. I can only imagine what constant stance swapping will cause with the current server performance issues. I envision the no swapping stances while in combat being next on the list after this change is implemented.

If you are implementing these changes because of the yellow mini buffs prior to a boss fight and then swapping back to blue, maybe just fix that rather than kill off the yellow mini completely. This is killing off the yellow mini and allowing the blue line mini a taste of what the yellow buffs currently do. It expands a bit for a blue line mini, hurts the red line landscape mini (DPS increase is not a trade off for the losses) and kills the purpose and function of a yellow mini.

[Soragrim]

Why did you change the induction reduction from Anthem of the Third Age, Quick Melody trait and Follow Up buff from "-skill induction" to "-healing induction"? My Bolster Courage induction went from 0.1s to 0.8s compared to live. This will severely hit blue line's healing output. Description of induction duration buffs is bad throughout the game. Please decide if you want to make -induction duration buffs additive or multiplicative or at least tell the player how it is working. 95% of the playerbase don't even know there is a difference between additive & multiplicative induction duration buffs.

[Dervacus]

So when can i expect SSG to refund the 100 MCs i paid to take the yellow line.

You can still utilize that 3rd trait line though! Let's say you have a Yellow specialization that dipped into Blue. Okay, specialize in Blue, but then put most of those points into Yellow. I get it that it's not the same because of new traits, removal of old traits, traits being a little different, but the point is there is plenty of opportunity to make a 3rd trait line that is still very different from the other 2

[DoRonRon]

I'm only guessing but how does the raid pre-pull mini buff routine go these day, still a 30 second trait tree swap? Does it means a 95 second anthem application process now?

[Eloriena]

I'm only guessing but how does the raid pre-pull mini buff routine go these day, still a 30 second trait tree swap? Does it means a 95 second anthem application process now?

On BR: No Pre-Pull Buffing possible, because new Anthems are in-Combat only.

On Live: The RP-Talk pre-fight gives quite some Time to buff and switch to blue.