Originally Posted by
OnnMacMahal
Hello!
Hi everyone, I’m OnnMacMahal, and I want to talk to you about the upcoming changes to the Minstrel class. We’ve converted the minstrel’s ‘Protector of Song’ specialization tree into a passive tree, functioning the same way as the brawler’s yellow tree does. I’m here to answer a few questions up front, and give you a bit of insight into our thinking regarding these changes.
Wait, what’s happening?
With U33.2, minstrels will no longer be able to choose the ‘Protector of Song’ trait tree as their specialization. You’ll still be able to specialize in the other two trait trees, and the yellow tree isn’t going anywhere! While you won’t be able to choose yellow as your specialization, it is still full of exciting stuff. For most players, this means you’ll be able to access unique skills like Song of Aid and Call to Greatness while specializing in either ‘The Watcher of Resolve’ or ‘The Warrior-Skald’ trait lines.
NOTE: Upon logging into Bullroarer with a copied character, you may have a saved trait tree specializing in yellow. For now, you will need to manually click ‘Re-specialize’ in order to interact with the new traits correctly.
Why Yellow Minstrel?
The yellow minstrel line has a strong identity, but while there are good reasons to specialize in the ‘Protector of Song’ those reasons aren’t usually better than the reasons for specializing in blue or red. Yet it still has some very clear utility, and we regularly see minstrels swapping to a full yellow line spec to fire off all the buffs they can before swapping back to blue (or red) as a fight starts. And while it doesn’t have quite enough power or utility to justify using as a main spec, we see a lot of you considering the yellow line and keeping a yellow setup around. We just don’t see many folks staying in yellow line for very long. Obviously there are exceptions, but at the moment, minstrels staying in yellow spec for group content tend to be for niche circumstances.
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, or any other activity.
So, what’s changing?
A lot of things are changing. For the full list of changes, please see the release notes or hop into Bullroarer and check things out for yourself! However, I’ll cover a few broad categories of changes below:
Anthems & Codas
Anthems are an iconic part of the minstrel’s toolkit, but they aren’t always a very exciting part of the class. We want anthems to be more interesting to use, but we don’t want them to simply be a chore to maintain. To that end, anthems all now share a cooldown, have shortened durations, and can only be used in combat. We’ve also added a couple anthems and made sure they’re distributed around the trait trees. This means it won’t be possible for a single minstrel to maintain 100% uptime on all their anthems for the group. You’ll have to be a bit choosier with your anthems, but you also won’t be waiting for your anthem buffs to expire, only to pause what you’re doing and click through all of your anthems one by one to refresh the buffs.
Anthem buffs should also now have greater parity with one another. You should always want to have more anthem buffs, without feeling like any particular anthem is an absolute must-have above everything else.
Anthems also used to apply bonus effects to your next Coda, but these effects could be a bit confusing, and it could be hard to tell which ones were ‘queued up’ for your next Coda. These effects will now trigger directly off of their relevant Anthems, provided you have a point in the new ‘Invigorating Anthems’ trait.
Song of Aid and Call to Greatness
These two are a pair of awesome skills, but their effects varied widely in usefulness and could be difficult or impossible to utilize meaningfully. They’ve been changed so that they now have more unified effects for all of your allies:
Song of Aid is now a strong defensive cooldown, granting a brief Heal over Time and a Damage reduction & reflect, so help you get back on your feet when things start to go sideways.
Call to Greatness now resets a key or capstone cooldown for every trait tree for every class. This means that regardless of your chosen class or role, you should have a skill which will have its cooldown reset by Call to Greatness. This will allow Call to Greatness to be used both offensively and defensively, and make its effects relevant for everyone.
That said, not all classes are equal, and some have more impactful long-cooldown skills than others. So while some classes or specializations will still benefit from the new Call to Greatness effect more than others, there should be better parity overall, and we’re certainly willing to look at outliers going forward.
Stances
While Dissonance and Resonance have clear benefits, Melody has never had a very strong identity. While making changes to the yellow line, we wanted to strengthen the identity of the Melody stance a bit. While it can do some healing and some damage, it doesn’t excel at either, so we made some changes to make Melody better at applying debuffs, buffs, and unique effects.
Debuffs applied by Echoes of Battle and Call of Orome are now stronger while in Melody. Similarly, Piercing Cry only removes corruptions and stuns on critical hits when used in Melody. Additionally, Call to Fate can be used in Melody, though it will do less damage than it will in Dissonance.
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.
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.