Minstrel Changes and Feedback

[DoRonRon]

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.

Stance switch to spam heal ballad to activate anthems, no? I didn't last long enough on BR for even the live servers to come online admittedly. Sickened to /heaving tbh.

Must be the co-hosts mini game-play the Dev is using for guidance or the woeful OF streamer minis.

Strike - who puts their mini in melee range to "strike"?
Codas - Who uses a Coda to potentially loose all buffage unless desperate?

Who wants to micro manage buffs when your focus has to be on nuking or healing? Fixing us to a 20/15 sec sequence/pattern rather than when suits us and the current encounter.

[Neinda]

I expect stance swapping under this new design will get stopped very quickly after these changes go live. This change gives blue minis the illusion of choice when the underlying choices are slim to never will use the buff.

[Arabani]

Can we just go back to the old concept of stances, which is no stances? Every skill and passive was accessible regardless of the War Speech mode. The later only modified the Coda, increased damage and blocked healing.

Because the way I see it now, Melody is pretty much the default stance for a Blue Mini and probably for Red as well, at least outside of dps spot in the raid (if it ever happens).

[Belechael]

I also am one of those players that do not like drastic changes to a class.
Having said that, and accepting that nothing we write here will make any difference to the whole endeavor, lets see if we can have some small changes at least!

First of all bugs:
1. There is a trait that reduces the duration of the anthems by 20 seconds. I think it is the Tale of tales.
2. Raise the spirit and coda in healing do not say how much healing the fellowship gets. It is blank.
3. Same for the damage reduction for the coda. It is blank.
4. Thunderous Codas extra buffs. This has got to be a bug, right? Spend 1 trait point for a meager +1% increase has got to be a bug!

Second, weird choices:

1. Agility for the Anthem of Prowess... seriously??
2. Giving the melee bonus to the anthem of prowess and the tactical and ranged damage to the anthem of war. Only a red traited minstrel will be able to get both of these anthems, not a blue traited one.
3. Removing the stun from the piercing cry in warspeach and healing!!! What kind of tests proved this to be game breaking??? It is a fantastic saving tool for solo and I will be really sorry to lose it.
4. Song of restoration being a targeted skill. With all the lag and the chaos during an encounter you add another effect that will make us lose time just to clear 1 more wound? Easy pass.
5. So, now we have 5 anthems that we must chose wisely in the heat of battle depending on the situation... are you kidding me??? Every encounter in the game will have a footnote giving instructions as to what anthem to use there, perhaps 2. There is no way that while healing I will be able to figure out what anthem is fading out and what anthem I must use in time in order to keep all of them up! Of course, the excellent players will be able to do that for T4/5 raid content, but are you telling me that this is to make them feel more busy and that you will create content with that in mind??
6. Call to greatness 7 minute cd. Way to much to even consider taking it. I will wait all the semiprofessional testers to come up with a verdict. No way I am testing this for every class it affects.
7. Same with song of aid. The healing seems small, so it must be the negate effect that is so powerful that it dictates a 3 and a half minutes cd.

Third, where the minstrel is heading with these changes:

1. Blue traited minstrel for healing with some anthem usage.
2. Red traited minstrel for solo
3. Red traited minstrel for fellowship play with all the anthems
4. Blue traited minstrel for fellowship play with almost all the anthems.

Are 3 and 4 supposed to be used while in Melody stance? Is this your intended gameplay? Thsi will require a 4th trait configuration (100mc) that I am not willing to spend before someone else comes with the must have traits for specific encounters. I have tried the Red traited melody minstrel (I don't think there is a point to talk about yellow minstrels anymore, you either trait red melody or blue melody), but it will require a lot of fellowship play to reach a verdict whether this is something that will earn a place as a dps/support in raids. Blue/support with both anthems of war and prowess will cripple our healing, and as it will require a 4th configuration I don't think it will work for the majority of players and situations imho.

Tldr:

Some few bugs, a lot of weird choices, a dps/support (old speech: yellow) minstrel looks to be good.

Verdict:

As I said I don't like drastic changes, especially to a class that was working good with one great role in fellowship play and very nice soloing capabilities. I am afraid that wanting to give the minstrel another sure spot in a raid will make things complicated and it is not something that the majority of players will be happy with, or even bother. If it was up to me I would concentrate on fixing several small things in ALL THE CLASSES, balancing the whole fellowship environment, polishing and ironing some other things, instead of a major overhaul of the minstrel class.

But what do I know, right?

PS. Are you planning to do the same thing with the Brawler’s and Minstrel’s yellow tree to the other classes as well? Hunter, guardian, champion and perhaps captain and warden could benefit from such a change, but the uproar would be huge for some of them

[Seschat]

I am glad Yellow line is going away, it has been useless since the beginning, even before the trait lines. Noone ever played in it, the line was just a means of prebuffing or passive increase to something. The talk about bard identity and red-captain replacement/addition is just a desire of a dps class to push his numbers further, which is not bad on its own, but does not change the fact that Yellow line is a boring 3 buttons buff-bot with bad dps and little healing. It has its place in the groups only because people are overgeared or can't find a red captain. Gameplay wise Yellow is even worse then playing a red captain.

So good riddance and thank you for the change.

I play Yellow. I am happier in my usual, small group gameplay with Yellow. Not only does my group not raid, we don't WANT to raid. Please stop encouraging the devs to min-max the raid experience at the expense of our fun.

[Seschat]

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

Seconded. (OK, I paid for Red line, as I main Yellow, but still...)

[Seschat]

Strike - who puts their mini in melee range to "strike"?
Codas - Who uses a Coda to potentially loose all buffage unless desperate?

That would be us filthy casual non-raiders on landscape. Melee range happens no matter what your intentions. Ending the fight with Coda means you're not just abandoning it while en route to the next fight.

[hillard1959]

PS. Are you planning to do the same thing with the Brawler’s and Minstrel’s yellow tree to the other classes as well? Hunter, guardian, champion and perhaps captain and warden could benefit from such a change, but the uproar would be huge for some of them

Oooo... You're right. I should buy some popcorn.

[theultimatekyle]

I imagine the point of starting with minstrel here is two fold. One, they want to see how players react to having trait lines stripped out, and two, they want to stop stance/line swapping for raid buffs.
A lot of these changes don't feel bad to play, and probably wont effect raid viability for the minstrel. You'll still want a mini in raids, no debate necessary.

The problem isnt the buffed damage or the buffed heals. The problem is they could have made a lot of these changes without cutting out yellow as a specialized line. Instead of trying to fix the identity problems of yellow line, they'd rather just take away part of the minstrel's identity as a whole. The dedicated support lines are a standout part of lotro, that other MMOs like WoW and ff14 just dont have. This isnt an update for the players, this is a quality of life update for the devs, who have had trouble balancing three trait lines on each class since trait trees were first introduced. Thats why this feels lazy. Its just easier for them to justify taking more from the player base by "buffing" the class. A lot of players will probably enjoy this change though. They'll do more damage in runs, and they'll heal more. The class will just be more tedious to play, but the average player wont care. Increasingly shallow game play design will be forgotten when players see the bigger numbers.

If they want to go the route of reducing trait lines on each class down to 2, theyre going to do it anyway. Our feedback here wont matter. If it did, the outrage over the reputation scrolls would have elicited a response, we wouldnt have issues obtaining the correct traceries (and no, the delving system isnt fixing the problem. they could have just put tokens to choose the traceries in instances instead of random drops. delving system is to encourage people to use missions, which have flopped), and the hidden hoard raid on t3+ wouldnt be in the state it is.

I just want them to stop pretending like this is for us, and come out and say they plan to strip down the trait tree system. Stop playing coy. And dont try to just do this one class at a time. If you want to change the system in a major way, do it for all the classes at once. Tear off the bandaid. One class at a time will just make going from one class to the next feel awkward.

[LoraE]

I transferred my level 140 mini over to Bullroarer, adjusted her traits, and then ran a few solo things to test out some of the changes. She is a character I have been playing since 2010 and one of my favorites.

I am not a fan of these anthem changes. They are an important part of playing a mini solo. Only being able to play one anthem at a time forces us to choose between a buff that boosts our survivability or a buff that boosts our damage. Additionally, trying to manage the anthem buffs every 25ish seconds isn't easy when you are trying to kill things and stay alive. There is not an easy way to see what buffs needs to be refreshed in the heat of battle. And not being able to play them out of combat also makes things difficult - when you have your anthem CD almost ready and your last enemy you are currently fighting dies, they are immediately greyed out. This is frustrating when are trying to move through an area.

These changes DO NOT make anthems more interesting to use. It makes them more frustrating. It makes them MORE of a chore. The anthem cooldowns are just terrible.

Perhaps, if it was desired to make anthems more dynamic or whatever, we had some sort of element (like the warden gambit meter) that would allow us to put in three anthems. Then if we played a 4th anthem, it would override the spot of the 1st anthem. This would make it easy to see what anthems are active and change them out depending on the circumstances.

I also do not like removing the stun from piercing cry. It is also something that is important to our survivability while soloing. Switching stances during combat isn't an answer to this problem either. I only switch if I'm grouped with someone and they really need a heal.

Regarding the changes to yellow stance - I didn't have a chance to test that out in a group setting. I played around with a red trait tree and a blue trait tree- I was able to get lots of yellow traits in both these set ups. I have played some in a yellow/blue set up on live - it seems you could as well. But I haven't run a lot of group content lately so I may not be the best judge of that.

Please don't make it harder for minstrels to level up!

[cwswim03]

Wrap Up
We know this is a lot of changes all at once, but we hope it improves overall gameplay for Minstrels, lets you access some of the unique abilities formerly hidden behind the yellow specialization, and helps you all feel like protectors of song.

Keep in mind that this is Bullroarer, so some of these changes may not be final, but we want to know what you think, and we look forward to seeing your reactions and feedback below.

Basically to recap what you did, you nerfed coda, you nerf OGH, you nerfed legend of the hammerhand, you nerfed the anthems, you nerfed inductions, you nerfed PIERCING CRY (!!!!!), and you gave mini CTG, which is essentially only useful for Hunters, blue LMS, and cpts.

So your stated goal of having some class diversity in raids actually just got worse because you just added ANOTHER buff for only hunters.

[Eloriena]

Playing an Anthem every 20 Seconds or so to keep tiering up the Tales Buff and keeping up a rotation to be able to play them on CD feels a little bit like yellow LM where you are keeping up your Debuffs and Pet Rotation in similar just a little bit more hectic timeframe, and I enjoy yMinstrel, because you have more opportunities to react to situations and have time between your Buffs(Anthems) to do something else and be more than a Buff machine. I love my yLM, but I don't want to play two classes that are too similar. The long durations of Anthems gives us opportunities.

[DoRonRon]

That would be us filthy casual non-raiders on landscape. Melee range happens no matter what your intentions. Ending the fight with Coda means you're not just abandoning it while en route to the next fight.

Haven't raided in years, but then haven't stood still in combat even longer so a strike is a third corruption removal skill at best with the prime one reset with critting ballads. Coda use buffs trumped by always active Anthems, until this decimation.

[Ohri72]

Okay so here's my experience with the changes. Will be focusing on only the changes that affect blue minstrel.

About me: I'm a minstrel main and have done the highest tier raids for the past couple years and have been among the first groups on my server to complete them. All that is to say I have a lot of experience on the class and know how to play it.

I went back to Lotro and hit the training dummy for a few minutes to get an average parse. Using Anvil set, 3 yellow raid set, induction cloak, 2 new crafted induction crafted traceries and ranged heal extension (replaced with inductions on beta to give it a fighting chance). I averaged 170-180k on myself. Here's the skill breakdown of one of them:



Note that Bolster is the most used heal and the fast inductions allow me to use more perfect endings, so it's higher in the list. There's also not a single Ballad being used (a lot of people seem to ignore that its a bad skill but it is)

Now compare this to what I got in a few minutes on bullroarer (it's not perfect, but I don't have hours of time to perfect this super slow rotation). Results on a dummy are 125-135k. That is without keeping all anthems up and I swapped my ranged extension tracery to skill inductions and anthem of war for cry of the chorus tracery.




This is a difference of around 50k hps for 3 minutes, which will probably get bigger if you use all anthems. It's roughly a 25% heal decrease.
It feels extremely slow even when using every induction bonus possible. It’s also a huge nerf because you don't get as many Perfect Endings off, which is one of the best single target heals, because the building of Snowball is slower.


Cry of the Chorus and Ballads
I struggle at understanding why you got rid of the Cry of the Chorus reset for blue line only. With a cooldown of 57s (with tracery) you can’t even keep up the +3% incoming healing buff from Coda of Resonance (on live its 5%, I wonder why you nerfed it) for the fellowship unless you use ballads.. It feels like you try to force minis to use ballads, but Ballads are just bad. 8m range, relatively long animation, the heal is far from strong and you might as well use a Soliloquy instead. If you want us to use Ballads, then make them worth using. Also the incoming damage on Coda of Resonance was nerfed from 10% to 5% and no longer stacks. This makes Ballad/Coda spamming worse as well.


Anthems
Its extremely frustrating to have to take the time to use these Anthems every 20s, especially if you are in a raid and someone needs focus heals, but you have to hit an anthem instead in order to keep all of them up cleanly. You say it gives flexibility, I don't see that. Being forced to rotate anthems every 25s is not fun game design.



TLDR:
Minis healing on live is in a good spot, it’s arguably the best 6 man healer. It's better than rk healers in many ways, but not overpowered. So I don't understand why these changes are affecting blue mini. Slowing down inductions is fine, although I don't personally like it. If you want to go that route, heals must be compensated elsewhere and I am not seeing that. Also being forced to rotate anthems every 25s is not fun game design.

The proposed mini changes right now are horrid. You are making blue mini no longer fun to play and nerfing its healing capability. Please keep it fun to play and don’t turn blue mini into a support healer taken only for its buff. Mini has always been a strong pure healer with good buffs. I see blue mini easily being replaced in raids, because red mini can do the buffs and you can just bring a better healer like rk or bear. But red mini dps is also bad, but that’s for another day

[cwswim03]

TLDR:
Minis healing on live is in a good spot, it’s arguably the best 6 man healer. It's better than rk healers in many ways, but not overpowered. So I don't understand why these changes are affecting blue mini. Slowing down inductions is fine, although I don't personally like it. If you want to go that route, heals must be compensated elsewhere and I am not seeing that. Also being forced to rotate anthems every 25s is not fun game design.

The proposed mini changes right now are horrid. You are making blue mini no longer fun to play and nerfing its healing capability. Please keep it fun to play and don’t turn blue mini into a support healer taken only for its buff. Mini has always been a strong pure healer with good buffs. I see blue mini easily being replaced in raids, because red mini can do the buffs and you can just bring a better healer like rk or bear. But red mini dps is also bad, but that’s for another day

This is correct. The changes are bad. Don't let these go live.

A fix: Make anthems combat only and keep yellow line. Update CTG.

[gladenn]

Hey hey!

I am super excited and glad to be seeing new changes, and new things being added to one of my favorite games and one of my favorite classes. I think first and foremost it is important to accept that change is necessary for growth in a game, and in ones character development. I believe we would all be silly to think the classes are staying the same forever... however lets talk about these changes and the issues they bring. I hope you can listen and read each and every one of these concerns because trust us, some of us have truly put in the time playing and testing and however good it may sound on paper, playing them in the game.... it doesn't work.




Bugs/Tool-Tip Issues/etc:

1. The tooltip for Raise the Spirit still is reading a heal over time, however it is acting like mentioned in the patch notes, a "small AOE heal after a brief delay". This is still confusing especially when referring to traceries that have to do with AOE heal vs HOT crit etc. Please correct this!
2. Raise the Spirit AOE heal also doesn't have a value on it just shows a cooldown before expiring.
3. Anthem of Prowess has a global CD of 15s where the others have a global CD of 20s (with traits + traceries). If you use prowess before the others it actually is lowering the global cooldown for the rest of the anthems as well. This doesn't seem to be correct.



Main Issues/Concerns:

1. As a few others have mentioned I am pretty confused by the anthem of prowess giving agility seems to be quite a waste of a stat.

2. Referring to prowess, I am quite confused why melee bonus is now split from Anthem of War. If you're trying to balance more and make it more streamline why now break it apart and make it more difficult and more steps? Further more on this note, given this update, people are taking more hunters over champs anyway, so are you just wanting us to not play with Anthem of War? If anyone who has even logged in to play and test would now know you pretty much have to go fully into red to even be able to touch Anthem of War, leaving out the most important stuff from the Protector of the Song traits (CTG, SOA, etc etc.) Your words, "Our goal is not to remove yellow line or yellow line’s identity, but to fold yellow line back into being a core part of the minstrel, accessible regardless of whether you’re in red line doing landscape quests, blue line main-healing a raid" hold actually the exact opposite value after testing because we are now left with choosing do we:

a. heal with very little anthem use
b. red dps only
c. red all anthems
d. blue most anthem and throw points wherever.

3. Piercing Cry stun? Lets all agree change that back and everything will be fine. Seriously.. please just revert it. It doesn't make sense. Referring back to what was previously said. Instead of "folding yellow in" you are now forcing us to stay melody to use certain skills? Again.. please change this back for all the healing minis out there. <3

4. Lets talk useless traits // the way the trait obtaining process works. If you want us to stay Resonance and Watcher and Heal, how can we heal and get CTG/Tale/SOA/Anthem duration etc when its all at the bottom filtered in with useless stuff like the breakout/the coda etc etc. Seems like since everything has been merged to be used in Melody stance having some of the stuff that we could actually benefit be near the top rather than the bottom. Breakdown of what I mean below.

- Echoes of Battle would be cool to see it effecting something in Resonance, not just the other stances. Or wait... do you want us to just play Melody?
- The third row on Protector of Song seems to be a massive point waster where one has to decide how to get to the bottom.

a. Tactical Mastery is either take all or take none because the only useful bonus is the tact mit.
b. Prowess.. I guess we take it
c. Song of Restoration, pretty useless
d. Word Spreads again useless unless you take all the way, and we don't have the points for that.

5. Induction speeds have now been nerfed? Why was this change implemented? Still would love to find out taking the flat "induction speeds" to now "healing induction speeds" really has slowed the class way down. Slowing the heals on top of the anthems (see next note) really has made the class feel SUPER sticky, and slow to play.

6. Lets talk anthems. Since we can't even try to get anthem of war without literally losing every thing in Protec of Song, we now have 5. I am actually not mad at their being more, that doesn't bother me one bit. I am okay with adapting to learn to rotate them, etc etc. Here is where the main issue comes into play.

A. Cooldowns of the ANTHEMS. Why are they shared? This literally makes no sense to any of us. I understand one could argue that you don't want us to pop them all stand and heal and seem to be doing nothing, however now have to rotate them and not provide as much heals seem to be going against what you were trying to accomplish.

I believe one solution to this method would be to implement a new trait in place of Invigorating Anthems. Lower the anthem cooldowns back to what they were, and maybe changing Invigorating to allow each tier to unlock an additional anthem. Again this would be a rather new change compared to what you guys have, however that still limits how many you can throw at once if you don't have all the traits into it etc.

New Invigorating Anthems
Allows the use of multiple active anthems for the entire raid
Rank 1: 1 Active anthem
Rank 2: +1 Active anthem
Rank 3: +2 Active anthem
Rank 4: +3 Active anthem

This would allow your guys new idea to be more represented. We as minstrels would have to adapt based on the fight and decide which 4 of the 6 anthems we would want to use. Where as now we are trying to keep them up in order every 20s doing very minimal healing.

7. CTG cooldown 7 minutes? It seems to be a little long? Maybe include something like Hunter Rain of Arrows cooldown where critical heals or something reduces the cooldown slightly?

8. Cry of the Chorus Reset. Again, another crucial piece to minis that seem to us as a very odd choice to remove. It seems as if you want us to spam ballads/Coda however you guys also nerfed that (incoming damage) from 10%-5% creating all the more reason to not do that.



Closing Remarks:

As a mini main, and high end raider who has done pretty much all content from 100+ I really want to like these changes. I want to support them, and truly figure out how to work around them. However the more time spent on BR (trust me we've spent too much already) we keep finding the same issue. Or better yet we have the same question.

Do you want us to heal, or support?

With these new changes if they make it to live, minis will no longer to successfully heal and provide a streamline system when it comes to buffing their fellowship or raid. We will now have to decide not only what anthems we want for our group and try to keep them up, but we will now have to decide what exactly to do. Do say screw anthems, trait blue and stay in Resonance and try to heal? Or do trait blue, stay in Melody and support? Or lastly do you want us to just go Red now, with every anthem and be a full support?

Our main concern and question would be if you want us to still be viable to the healing realm in the same degree we are now, without it being slow, clonky, and down right not enjoyable, changes have to be made to what we just tested.

Thanks for reading <3

[infinitewhimsy]

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?

You can't use anthems out of combat anymore so there is no such thing now. It takes about 2 minutes to get all of your Anthems up now, same thing with maxed Tale of Tales. All of these things you effectively had instantly before.

In many ways both Tale of Tales and the Anthems are worse now too. You lost -5% attack duration on Prowess for example. It's been moved to Third Age Resonance instead, which means you don't get it at all if you want to be DPS and buff. Third Age Resonance itself also lost 5% Induction reduction. Of course if you were strictly blue line as a Minstrel you get a fair amount of new buffs, but they definitely come with a heavy price. The loss of CotC CD and Inspiring Cries & Calls for example.

Cry of the Chorus and Ballads
I struggle at understanding why you got rid of the Cry of the Chorus reset for blue line only. With a cooldown of 57s (with tracery) you can’t even keep up the +3% incoming healing buff from Coda of Resonance (on live its 5%, I wonder why you nerfed it) for the fellowship unless you use ballads.. It feels like you try to force minis to use ballads, but Ballads are just bad. 8m range, relatively long animation, the heal is far from strong and you might as well use a Soliloquy instead. If you want us to use Ballads, then make them worth using. Also the incoming damage on Coda of Resonance was nerfed from 10% to 5% and no longer stacks. This makes Ballad/Coda spamming worse as well.

This is an underappreciated angle I think. On live I use Coda a lot more when healing because I can immediately get back into 3 Ballads with CotC and it gives the tank 10% damage reduction through Improved Coda of Resonance on top of the 5% Incoming Healing buff to the group, which you can maintain permanently without using a single ballad.

I'm not going to do this after the changes, because not only does CotC have a much longer CD now, you can no longer reset that cd with Inspiring Cries & Calls which has been removed. This means Improved Coda of Resonance is worse now too, I probably won't be traiting it anymore because you don't want to Coda while healing now unless CotC is up since it means a large loss of time/healing having to spam Major Ballad (which sucks), so at most you do it once a minute. Which of course also means losing the 5% Incoming Healing buff from the Coda at least half of the time.

The buffs from Thunderous Codas are kind of amusing because of this, having to trait for a worse version of what you once had by default (seems to be the major theme of these changes) and the HoT added to your Coda is totally negligible. This trait is only good in Redline because you want to regularly use Minor Ballad in red, you do NOT want to use Major Ballad while blue, and of course Red line still has its CotC reset via Improved Coda of Fury.


We got the trait Inspiring Finish instead in Blue...I don't foresee anyone using it. Not least of all because we likely don't have the points for it, and because it's pretty bad. The duration is short, the effect is small, and the time investment and opportunity cost are massive. I don't even think the average Minstrel will have trait points for Anthem of War anymore in blue, which definitely makes the new yellow tree less appealing. You're losing plenty to get this new stuff, which requires a lot more time to setup and maintain - - time spent not healing and thus falling behind on healing. I didn't really think about point allocation before because the yellow traits seemed so cheap but I was definitely wrong before when I said at least the blue minstrels will be happy with the changes.

Eyeballing it and predicting how I'll trait on BR...you're losing all of the following in Blue:
- 70k morale from Enduring Morale
- Anthem of War (simply not enough points)
- CotC reset via Inspiring Cries & Calls
- 30s CD on CotC
- 100% uptime on Coda Resonance Fellow buff (5% incoming healing)
- 10% incoming damage reduction through Improved Coda of Resonance (which you won't use anymore)
- 10% induction reduction from Anthem of the Third Age Resonance
- Call to Earendil debuff is now 1/3rd of what it used to be
- Legend of Helm Hammerhand is now significantly weaker
- Anthem of Composure is now significantly weaker (Resistance Rating is like 1/3rd of what it was, tact mit loss is compensated for if you also do Anthem of Compassion to cover all tactical types...so more trait points and GCDs for less)

And all of this is in exchange for
- the new Song of Aid
- Anthem of the Third Age Resonance now gives your group a minor buff
- Anthem of Prowess (with halved attack duration, the important part)
- Anthem of the Free Peoples
- Call to Greatness (which is still useless for half of its effects)

And all of this is assuming we don't also stay in Resonance, which most will, which means losing the stun and corruption removal in PC too. Remember, they didn't JUST remove it from DPS builds, you will no longer have it while healing unless you switch into Melody which...why the hell would you? For the lower heal numbers? For the paltry Finesse bonus on the Anthem? To fish for Anthem resets with RNG procs that cost huge amounts of resources even though you can maintain 5 Anthems without it? So you are forced to use another 2 seconds reapplying Melody of Battle? So you can then have the pleasure of then switching OUT of Melody? Yay for for time wasting ridiculous inductions you're forced to juggle back and forth to retain your past functionality, lol.

I don't think I'd make that trade given the choice. The more I look at the changes the more I am convinced they are bad for every Minstrel playstyle, that's pretty impressive in itself.

Suggestion: You should remove Melody as a stance and instead make it a decaying buff that changes the effects of skills imo, but also change those effects because currently they are aggravating, it's just giving us back some of what you took away. The effects should be damn more substantial too, if you keep it as modifier for the Orome debuff duration it should be much more than 10s, just increase the CD of Melody to compensate. Quit being such Indian givers, SSG.

[Saephellar]

Whoa.. I never thought about this! You're onto something I remembering doing the Anthem of Composure deed it was torturous.. and that was with the 5s cooldown imagine now. They will have to definitely reduce the amount of times its needed for the deed.

[Saephellar]

so Anthem of the Third Age Resonance was nerfed too? The induction buff and healing buff from it are lower? If this is the case it's going to be harder for healers to be more effective at healing which is defintely not good at all! Also i feel like only those near end game will have enough points to benefit from the yellow line trait points now since you cant specialize it from the beginning. That's a bummer :/

[Bio-Flame]

Playing since launch, haven't logged in the forums for years and years now, but I needed to for this one.
I am an experienced mini, did almost all raids in T2-T3. Meaning: I know a few stuff about minis.



Blue and Yellow minis were in a good shape. Some tweaks needed here and there, especially on Yellow but all in all, in a good spot.

Nobody asked for a major overhaul to Mini.
Why are you changing a core class, with unneeded, unwanted changes?
Why the overhaul?
Nobody asked for this overhaul. Why would you waste time with this?



And why a change for the worse?
Anthems now are a boring spam fest. At least pre-whatever-this-travesty-is, we could fire Anthems and forget about them. With these changes, it's a spam fest.
If you want to change Yellow, change and improve Yellow. Keep yellow as it is in Live, but improve it. Tweak it.
Don't remove yellow.
And definately don't destroy Blue and Red to make Yellow work.



I take it you don't like how minis play but most mini players were happy with the playstyle. Content.
If you don't like how minis play, don't play them.

What is this need to remove what players enjoy, so late in the game's life cycle? Why remove options for players to play with (two trait lines instead of 3) ?
You're just alienating paying customers for no good reason, and with changes for the worse, not for the better.


I apologize if I seem harsh but seriously, we like minis as it is.
It's not too late to turn back. Don't go ahead with this pointless change for the worse.
Seriously, if I were your boss, I'd would applaud the effort but I would veto it.




PS - I know this is worthless because SSG never changes anything substancial due to feedback, unfortunately.

[J-Moneyforever]

Feels like a lot of these responses are knee jerk reactions without spending time on bullroarer. I think this is a really positive change. Yellow wasn't a particularly fun spec to play imo and this allows minstrels a lot more freedom in fulfilling their role while being able to take more stuff in yellow due to the changes in point costs. I like the idea of yellow as a utility tree to assist and customize the way you play red or blue.
My main feedback would be that it honestly feels bad not being able to put up at least one anthem before a fight starts. I get the need for "ramp up time" but idk. It is frustrating to be several seconds into a fight before you even consider a 2nd anthem.
The removal of the PC stun in red war speech is tough. It's been an iconic part of red mini for a long time. Not sure I'm a fan of losing it.
Finally small thing to ask but I was very excited to see anthem of the free peoples return. But was disappointed when i found out it no longer grants the HoT that it used to grant when you used Coda with the anthem active.

[infinitewhimsy]

Finally small thing to ask but I was very excited to see anthem of the free peoples return. But was disappointed when i found out it no longer grants the HoT that it used to grant when you used Coda with the anthem active.

Former Coda cash out effects are applied automatically now upon using an Anthem if you trait Invigorating Anthems, you get a HoT from Anthem of the Free Peoples, it's about 30-40k personal heal over 10s (ie, negligible, like all of the other effects from the trait except for Third Age).

[J-Moneyforever]

Former Coda cash out effects are applied automatically now upon using an Anthem if you trait Invigorating Anthems, you get a HoT from Anthem of the Free Peoples, it's about 30-40k personal heal over 10s (ie, negligible, like all of the other effects from the trait except for Third Age).

Oof I must not have tested that trait. That's a shame. The old hot wasn't crazy but it definitely felt noticeable at 75/85

[Bio-Flame]

Feels like a lot of these responses are knee jerk reactions without spending time on bullroarer. I think this is a really positive change. Yellow wasn't a particularly fun spec to play imo and this allows minstrels a lot more freedom in fulfilling their role while being able to take more stuff in yellow due to the changes in point costs. I like the idea of yellow as a utility tree to assist and customize the way you play red or blue.
My main feedback would be that it honestly feels bad not being able to put up at least one anthem before a fight starts. I get the need for "ramp up time" but idk. It is frustrating to be several seconds into a fight before you even consider a 2nd anthem.
The removal of the PC stun in red war speech is tough. It's been an iconic part of red mini for a long time. Not sure I'm a fan of losing it.
Finally small thing to ask but I was very excited to see anthem of the free peoples return. But was disappointed when i found out it no longer grants the HoT that it used to grant when you used Coda with the anthem active.

Or maybe we did and we still dislike them?

Unneeded, unwanted changes.
What for?

[J-Moneyforever]

Or maybe we did and we still dislike them?

Unneeded, unwanted changes.
What for?

I'm sure that's true of some. But also true that a lot of people didn't I think. And saying unneeded and unwanted is perspective. Like I said I personally think they are positive changes and look forward to them. I spoke to others who feel the same. There's fair perspectives on both sides of this.