Short Duration Spells & Heals Over Time

[Atropine_BB]

Tastian,

Can you possibly bring up the idea that ALL Short duration, single target and group, spells should go into the bard song box?

I'm talking everything here...

Beastlord Paragon (hate it when it bounces off group members due to no buff slots available)
Cleric & Shaman Heals over time
Druid SotW
Necro group mana regen, hp regen, str, atk etc.
SK group regen, ATK, str etc.
Paladin HoT
etc. etc. ...

You get the picture.  It seems like such a waste to have such a fine, useful little box, that never gets any love unless you have a bard around or a high level druid with that neat healing aa ability (not sotw).  And an even bigger waste to have HoT's, Paragon, other abilities go to waste because there is no room in your regular buff box.

[Murkk Dakruul]

That is a great idea imo.

[Tastian]

This is part of an overall problem that I'm bringing up.  You simply don't have enough buff slots as it is.  I remember laughing once as I clicked Frenzy of spirits and it didn't take hold, then noting I had 4 debuffs, and 2 HoT on me already, + dance of the blade lol.  Even when you run with low buffs you can still run into issues.  *shrugs* We'll see what happens...

[Sorenbro]

Only problem with ALL Short duration, single target and group, spells should go into the bard song box. Is that the heal will be gone after you zone. Not that may not be much of a problem for most. But i live on a server where corpse camping and Training the zone ins with lots and lots of mobs seem to be the normly in mass pvp (tallon Zek) I often use paragon to buff my self before going in the zone for the extra buffer to add me in recovering my corpse.

[Skratchen]

I simply HATE when Dance of Blades lands on me.  There is perhaps no more useless of a buff proc than Dance of Blades on a raid.  I wish that there was a way to forever stop that random buff from stealing a buff slot in my limited buff box space.  In a normal experience group it can be annoying, but not intolerable, however during a raid and you're counting how many open buff slots you have for incoming HoTs vs. how many DoTs and debuffs are stuck on you..... there's just no room for that dated Kunark epic buff.  Did I mention that I hate Dance of Blades stuck in our buff window during a raid?  Darn, I think that was a borderline rant.  I'm sorry  :wink:

I only brought up the Dance of Blades buff for illustrative purposes to make the point about how limited we all are in regards to space for buffs in the buff window.  I don't really mean any disrespect towards bards.

[Liga]

Nah, Selo's is worse.  Your movements are accelerated when youre not looking and positioning becomes much harder.  I'd much rather give a buff slot to DotB than Selo's.

[Tastian]

Dance of the blade
10:     Increase Attack Speed by 55%
11:    Increase STR by 30
12:    Increase ATK by 30

I wouldn't call that "useless", but then again I'm an atk whore.  8)  3 min selo's annoys me and whenever a bard pulses song of travel and poofs my pet before I can suspend him annoys me too hehe.  Dance of the blade I sometimes click off, but usually don't mind seeing there.

[Kylaz]

whenever a bard pulses song of travel and poofs my pet before I can suspend him annoys me too hehe.

I admire your calm. Whenever that happens to me i'm DOWNRIGHT FURIOUS . I think Selo song of travel is the single thing in game I hate the most.

Good point on HoTs though.

[Bengali]

This question has come up a lot, and one of the things that SOE has said was that if they put HoT spells in the buff duration box, then they end up recreating the problem of bards not being able to land a lot of their songs because of buff slots being filled (with ward auras going to the box, if you add elixers, quiescence, spirit of the wood, and paragon to it, then the box is filled up again and bards can't land songs).

They are looking into the possibility of adding more buff slots though, possibly through an aa, but no decision has been announced.

[Kashmiir Battlekat]

Simple Answer here really, but Im sure is not easy to implement...

Buff Box: 30 Slot - ALL Beneficial Spells/Songs...

Debuff Box: 30 Slot - ALL Non-Benficial Spells/Songs go here...

30 Slots should be enough for anyone... I would think...

[Tastian]

Yeah I agree.  I was actually hoping they'd just add another buff box (fairly easy to code) that took horses, HoT, and maybe NPC debuffs (that have counters).  This definitely becomes more of an issue later on when you have MGB heals going off and mobs doing multiple AEs, but I don't like the idea of it costing an AA.  Lots would pay it (I would hehe), but seems like a lame use of AA.

[Bengali]

The separate debuff box thing has also been brought up before, and for what it's worth, the response to that was that they didn't want to remove the possibility that a detrimental effect would overwrite a positive buff if you had too many of them.  It's another reason to want to avoid getting those effects on you, and another reason to want to get rid of the ones that are on you.

Mind you I'm not against the idea -- a separate debuff box would make it easier to dispell negative effects for one thing.   But maybe it would make it too easy, which is the reason they don't want to do it.

They also didn't want to have a large limit on the number of buffs because they wanted players to have to make tradeoffs on which buffs they had sometimes.  It also makes combination buffs more attractive -- some people like virtue because of the buff slots it saves, for example.

[Atropine_BB]

The reason I believe that putting short duration buffs into the bard song box is this...

After playing 2 bards, one to 65, there is hardly ever a time when more than 4 songs will ever be up with the rare exception of a raid when you happen to be in a bards group, along with another bard singing AE resists/mana etc.

Either way most bards will only twist 3 songs reliably and consistantly.  This leaves 4 more slots in that box that are never used.  That should be enough to cover any short duration spells... seeing as how they ARE short duration and won't be there for more than a minute at the longest.

However, I do agree that a new buff box for short duration spells and abilities would be the ideal fix.  Perhaps debuffs and dots could go to that box as well.

[Bengali]

Last I checked, there were only 6 slots in the song box, but I could be wrong.

If you're on a raid and grouped with a bard, you can easily end up with 3 songs twisted and maybe ae resists or mana from another bard.   Then some priest uses an AE ward and that's another slot, and then you've got one slot left for the AE sotw/elixir/paragon (assuming the proposed change was made), or for shaman HoT or for cleric group HoT if your cleric divine arbs you.   Unlike regular buffs, trying to click off bard songs so that other stuff will land is difficult, since the songs tend to pop back up.

They could increase the size of the song box and then add HoT to it, though.  That would fix things.  I'm not sure they'd need to increase the regular buff box if they did that, but maybe.

[Sekaris]

30 Slots should be enough for anyone

"640k ought to be enough for anybody"

;)