by hkrile » Tue Jan 17, 2017 2:11 am Bard Support Class
The simple way this role would work is as follows, musical instruments would be able to play songs to boost the abilities and the moral among your fellow troops. Songs would give the power of giving your allies a small SHP boost at the cost of your energy equal to the amount needed to heal over time, A temporary agility boost, so allies can hit faster, the ability to inflict larger openings on opponents, and the ability to close certain colored openings by a small amount. To give these Buff to your allies, you must be in a party with them, and be within viewing distance to give these buffs. To activate these abilities, players would need to play note in a subsistence order, for example, playing X H N V X in order on a bone flute would create a temporary speed boost for your allies. These buff would be temporary and only last for as long as the current combat encounter would. Once the combat ends, all buffs created would end as well. The power of these buffs would be determined by the users Lore skill and instrument q, while the cooldown between songs would be determined by the users Dexterity. All songs would be an "improvement over time" buff. This means songs will have an effect that will last over a certain amount time, and within this time, the songs would build in power until reaching full strength.
Uses For Bards
Currently we have three main ways of fighting in HnH, sword and shield, B12 users, and spear/bowmen. Each can counter a class and can be countered by another one (e.g spear/bowmen can counter B12's, but are weak against shieldmen.) Adding a support class would be like the rouge element to any battle, they can counter everyone, and can be countered by everyone. For example, a bard could use an instrument to increase the agility of his allies for a limited amount of time, giving B12's a chance at hitting spear/bowmen before they can shoot him, bard's could increase the power of spear/bowmen so they could do more damage against shieldmen, and bards could increase the damage to shieldmen so they can have a better chance when fighting B12's. Adding a player who can turn the tide of battle would alter the way people PvP in an interesting and unique way. However, Bards would be weak if left alone or caught off-guard, their attacks would be cut in half, making thier role as a back-of-the-line support class more prevalent.
Balancing and Bots
Of course, in this current state of this idea, it would be WAY too un-balanced, nothing would stop a cheeky player from creating 15 bone flutes for his army of alts and completely wrecking havoc through the land. Which is why there needs to be balancing. To start, certain instruments will only play certain songs, for example, Bone flutes would only be able to give a very short speed buff and only allowed to close a small amount of green and blue openings, whereas Fiddles could play songs that would heal a small amount of SHP, empower your allies to hit yellow and blue attacks harder, and could close green and red openings by some varying amount. Another Balancing issue would be the power of songs played, if someone were to create an army of alts and spam defensive or offensive songs, the other players would have no chance at winning. To prevent this, songs would have a falloff the more they are played during a single battle, for example: if someone were to keep spamming an opening-increasing song over and over, the power of that song would loose its influence over you allies the more it is played in a row, from 100% power, to 75%, to 55%, to 40%, to 30%, to 25% at its lowest. Songs would never become useless during a fight, but their power would dwindle depending on how often you used them during the fight. Another balancing issue would be people switching instruments during a fight to gain all the benefits from an instrument's available songs. To counter this, bards that switch instruments would have a cooldown increased by 6 seconds, the same as a weapon user, and when bards change weapons, all buffs from the last instrument drop. This is to stop someone from mixing and matching all the best buffs from all instruments. One last balancing issue would be the amount of songs active at one time. To counter this, only two songs can be activated in a party at one time. This would make having 1-2 bards just as effective as having 15 bards in a party.
Final Thoughts
Now, there are most likely some balancing issue i overlooked while shaping this idea, and i really want to hear from the community. If you think this idea sucks, or if you think it would be too unbalanced, please tell me ways it would be refined and balanced to make this system fun to play and fun to play against. I will edit your ways of balancing this idea into this post with a citation to whomever commented on ways to improve this system. I welcome all criticism, good and bad, and telling me why something does not work helps much more than telling me that something is bad
BIG THANKS to wulf for giving his imput into this idea and showing ways this system could be balanced
