Kall

Source = Allakhazam's Magical Realm: Everquest II: Guide: SOE Fan Faire 2007: Mechanically Speaking Panel

It's all hearsay from Fanfaire at the moment, so take it with a grain of salt until it shows up on Test. I normally wouldn't post anything without some sort of concrete proof (like Test update notes or a direct dev quote) but these Dirge forums have been dead lately.

I don't know why they keep making changes to the bard self buff. Having it as a damage shield in the first place is absolutely ridiculous because the most effective way to solo anything worth a damn is to not get hit and kite the mob. The only thing the buff is actually good for is soloing the scarab ring events in Poet's. Why they continue to keep tweaking this buff is beyond me.

A raidwide regenning (with AAs) Noxious Dissertation might make the buff actually worth running on occasions. It'd be a lot better if they actually make resists mean something though.

It looks like Magic Rebuff (lvl 53 upgrade of Zander's) is going to be in the game afterall. If you're the 1 dirge worldwide thinking, "Cool, I use Zander's every chance I can so an upgrade is going to be awesome!" remember that the power cost is going to increase as well. To make the spell more appealing they should just remove the power drain component from it because each bard subclass already has 3 power draining debuffs each which is already arguably too much.

Hopefully some Test Notes come out soon so we actually know some specifics on what will be coming our way instead of all this speculation.

Firza

The bard self buff is a joke, even the dev's must be aware of that by now. The only solution for it is to make the proc do 5 K dammage on hit, continue giving us defensive abilities on our fabled set gear and thus making us the ideal dps encounter tanks.

Zanders update is nice. I will bet you 50 c that they forget to make the update a part of the degradate aa line though. Thus costing more power per tick then our other debuffs.

And why they would make our resist song raid wide is beyond me. With the fubar resist system, and the limited encounters where its usefull this spell is so underused that my group always has to poke me when we do DT's master fish..

Windraa

If they are going to change the selfbuff, change it to a non-conc. weapon proc or something... screw changing it if it's still going to be as useless as now

RogueFrequency

A while back on test before GU36 they had higher versions of the lvl35 spell implemented. It was when you could auto-level a toon to 70 and 100 AA and get all master 1's. When I got all master 1's I noticed a higher version of Zander's Choral Rebuff, I think it was just called Choral Rebuff.

I also noticed chanter's Mana Cloak had a T6 replacement called Mana Cover.

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Kall

It was called Magic Rebuff. That's obviously how I knew the name of the spell.

It was also 848 mit decrease for those wondering @ M1.

Cronoise

Thankfully the dirge-boards have been spared all the trashtalk this forum gets flooded with these days. And yes, that counts me in

As for possible incoming changes: Who cares about our selfbuff anyway? Same goes for resist-buff if they don't fix how resists are working. Zanders... could be interesting, but until we actually get Magic Rebuff to test on live, noone's going to know if it's bugged or actually useful.
I'd rather see the dw/1H-changes go live! (and I bet 50c that they won't make it in gu38)

Kytar

Given the issues with the resist system, I wonder if a level 53 800 point debuff will make any difference at all.

They apparently stopped Zander's from actually increasing the mobs mitigation, but at least for me it currently does literally nothing at all on even mid 60s mobs.

I suspect that we will notice no difference in damage at all with an extra 300 mitigation I would be suprised to see it make any difference at all and shocked if it was worth the power cost.

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I would prefer to see an additional alternate self buff rather than changing the one we have.

I actually rather like the current one as I do alot of tanking, it adds a little defence and helps me keep agro on groups with the extra Int and damage reflection. That being said, I only use it in duos or solo, for 99% of dirges though it is pretty useless. <Take a deep breath...I did agree it was useless for 99% of us hehe>

Another advantage of making a totally new self buff for us would be that SOE would not feel constrained by its pre-existing abilites. They would maybe feel more free to scrap the last idea totally and give us something brand new and shiny.

If I were to make a wishlist, a self buff that simply increased the effect of all of our other buffs on us would be high on the list. That way the effect of the self buff changes depending on what other buffs we are running.

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I look foward to maybe seeing a use for the Nox Resistance buff. I only bothered to get that spell out of a sense of completeness. I don't recall ever keeping it on.

Lint

From the GU38 update notes:

Well it got buffed.....

Firza

i am impressed.......i think.......oh well, who cared anyways.

Windraa

Doh...they did'nt listen