u/Sphynx87

I made a post a while ago about general bard stuff, you can check it out here. Now that it's not beta and I've had more time to play on live and max out more stuff there are a few changes I have to my recommended Symphonic Aura if you are a melee focused damage combo and a few other things. I'm Clr/Mnk/Brd for reference so most of my damage is coming from melee + the dot melody.

First the actual SA lineup I've been using. Chant of Battle, Verses of Victory, One of the AoE slows (your choice, dot one for more damage less slow, or more slow no dot), Psalm of Mystic Shielding (or Shield of Songs, or Niv's Melody), Amplification.

I used to always use Katta's, the dex song, the biggest thing is that the dex boost from Katta's is not worth it at all on bosses. After doing a ton of d3/d4 runs on all the bosses their resistances are so high that at 150 dex or 350+ dex you are still only landing maybe 3 procs the entire fight. The dex debuff proc on it is fine on the few encounters that proc (like EoV if you can get it to land) but in general it's just not worth it unless they make changes to procs/dex. Katta's is fine against less resistant non boss mobs if you want to proc more. But generally it doesnt seem worth it unless there are changes made to procs in general. This is also dependent on your procs, it could be better in certain situations like if you are using the cleric mana regen proc mace or something not focused on damage / resist checks. Personally I think this is something the devs need to take a look at and rebalance (procs in general + their effectiveness on high level raid targets).

Why Verses of Victory over Jonathans Provocation?

With end game gear you don't need the extra haste, and Verses will stack with Chant of Battle like Jonathan's Whistling Warsong did while leveling. If you are melee the Str and AC is worth more than pretty much any other song you can stack with the haste songs.

Why Chant of Battle?

I think some people miss out on using this later because its such a low level song and they dont realize it scales so much at 50 with AA's and instruments. If you are melee focused it's a huge str and ac boost and it stacks with Verses of Victory.

Why Amplification?

You don't have to use it if melee is your focus (you absolutely should if you are doing DDD aoe clearing though), Verses and Mystic shielding will both get a boost from it. With Amp+Mystic Shielding I'm sitting at around 290 spell resist with my gear (still get hit a lot though lmao, so is it worth it? idk). I've generally found most alternatives to be sub par, such as...

Why no Regen?

This is gonna be subjective, the amounts you get with regen songs out of combat are great because they are effectively doubled. In combat it's really going to depend more on your gear and DPS and how long you are actually in combat for. If you are running out of mana you are probably better off taking Cassindra's Elegy over mana regen, esp if you have a wis caster with bard. The overall mana pool boost is very large, and you would have to be in combat a very long time to get the equivalent amount of mana through regen. If upgrading regen songs actually boosted their regen they would totally be worth using all the time. In general I feel like an upgraded cat necklace is a better choice.

What other stuff is good in SA? What's not good?

Song of Shields can be really good in more melee focused fights, same with the various damage shields. Psalm of Warmth / Cooling can be nice on the dragons instead of Mystic Shielding. Cassindra's Elegy is awesome if you want a bigger mana pool. Again I don't think regen in combat is worth it but that's going to be more dependent on your combo and what you are fighting. It's pretty easy to calculate how much benefit per tick you are going to get, get the timing of your fights through a parser, and then see what the benefit actually is. Again this is going to be a bit combo dependent, since I have cleric in my combo health regen is pointless, and I almost never come close to running out of mana even on d3/d4 bosses with my gear so Elegy is pointless too. Rizlona's Embers is a good choice if you have a combo that actually has some DD to choose from, mine doesn't so I just ignore it.

What's worth upgrading?

Slows, Dots, DDD (it gets a damage boost but no mana cost reduction), Charm. None of the buffs are really worth upgrading from my testing.

SA enable / disable macros?

So its possible to set up a macro to disable SA and melody songs that normally would be in SA to essentially twist more than 5 SA compatible songs. This has nothing to do with melodying dots/slow, this is basically if you want to bypass the 5 SA song limit. So is it worth it? No not really imo, there aren't enough extra SA compatible songs that actually stack to make the hassle worth it. If you are going to do it then I guess Amplification is a good one to do it with since it lasts longer than other SA songs even without upgrades, but again it feels like more hassle than its worth. It's not like you can use this to stack multiple damage shields, or even most of your resist buffs. You can get in an extra dot or slow or a regen, but this takes even more space on your bar. In my combo I only have 2 cleric spells on my bar, everything else is bard, and I just dont think anything is worth swapping out to do this. It will be even worse if you have other casters in your combo. You can try it out but I think it doesnt work well enough and makes playing the class more annoying.

Any other stuff?

It's unfortunate Ervaj doesn't bypass the global haste cap, it really should because it's essentially pointless in EQL, which is kinda terrible for a level 50 song (devs, take a look at this!). I probably forgot some other stuff.

Check out my previous post if you are a new bard. If you aren't a new bard post about your combo with bard here, what you are using, what seems to work and what doesnt. I know lots of people are very committed to using regen in combat, so I'd love to hear why it works for you vs some of the other stuff i mentioned.

Happy singing :)

Hi, new to zoom player. When I'm playing youtube videos using the default Iframe settings it seems to always enable captions if they are on the video. I made sure any auto subtitle stuff was unchecked but that seems to apply to normal media not the Iframe player. I also tried enabling mouse interactivity but since its a minimal pop out version of the youtube player i dont see any buttons to disable the subtitles.

any help would be appreciated!

I use potplayer for playing youtube videos a lot, i know occasionally there are issues where it asks you to log in and other stuff because of google's api crap. Today though I tried playing some videos and the bottom of the player by the play head sorta will flicker and i will see the quality setting drop from 1080p or whatever the source quality is down to lower options and then eventually it just says can't play. It was working perfectly fine literally just this morning. Even the same videos i was watching this morning don't work. Tried resetting pc and the player, updating to latest version, and running without any other apps or anything.

Anyone have any clue what might be going on? Could this be a recent google api change? Is anyone else experiencing this issue

I've seen a few posts sorta confused about Bard which is sorta understandable if you only played it on vanilla and never tried it on "that other server". Even while in closed beta a lot of people seemed confused and I had to help them out. I've even seen some people dropping it early before even hitting level 10 which is kinda funny because right now it's probably one of the top 3 classes in the game (not that you are wrong for not liking it or whatever)

First thing to know about Bard is that basically half of your functionality (using /melody and /queuemelody in a worthwhile way) doesn't really come online until level 38+ when you get your tuyen's chant line. Before that you will mainly just be using Symphonic Aura for passive songs, and then occasional one off non aura songs for things like calm/mez/charm.

So first off Symphonic Aura. I agree with most people that it is worded pretty poorly and the alternating points for it being enabled/disabled is a bit weird and janky. I think one of the things that could help the most is if song descriptions actually just said like "Symph Aura: Yes/No" on them. Symphonic Aura will automatically play songs every tick starting at the end of your spell bar. With the AA maxed you can have 5 songs going at once. Maxing this early on and getting the AA for additional spell gems is absolutely essential if you are going to have Bard in your primary combo. Imo if you are playing Bard the intended way on this server once you turn on Symphonic Aura you basically will never turn it off again (there isn't much reason to).

So now the songs that actually work with it are basically all your buffs and PBAoE songs. For the most part that is mostly just going to be buffs and then one of your Denon's aoe DPS/Slow songs if you have room. It's important to note when picking your songs for Symph Aura that not all of them will stack together! Make sure you either use the song window or have buff icons enabled on your health bar window so you can see if one of your songs isn't applying. For example the late game songs Niv's Melody of Preservation and Shield of Songs do not stack. Some of your stat buff songs don't stack, the attack speed ones dont stack (other than melody of ervaj which is the overhaste song). All that being said some of your songs you get super early in the game are still good at level 50 like Chant of Battle.

Now for the other songs and melody. Imo the first songs you get where melody is actually useful are Selo's Consonant Chain at 23 (single target slow which DOES stack with your AoE slows, does no damage) and Fufil's Curtailing Chant which you get at level 30 (Weak dot with a -spell resist component). After that you don't really get anything until the Tuyen's line starts at level 38. Then you get Tuyen's Chants of Flame, Disease, Frost, and Poison. These are essentially the entire reason to use /melody at all with the symphonic aura system.

So basically this means that at level 50 you can have upwards of 10-11 songs going at once (I usually stick to 10). Your 5 buffs/aoe slow/aoe damage with symphonic aura and then 4 to 6 songs on melody (Slow/Fufils/Chants). The whole point of this is both for balance reasons but also so that you can use your songs with symphonic aura while also being able to cast other spells since we can multiclass.

Last thing to mention is the difference between melody and queuemelody. Melody will just cycle the songs in order, most people understand how that works. If it gets resisted or drops off it doesnt matter, just keeps rotating the songs in order. Queuemelody on the other hand will go back and attempt to recast songs from the start if they didnt land or drop off. For this reason I usually keep the single target slow as my first song in queuemelody so that slow is always up even if others arent. In some situations where you come across enemies that are immune to certain chant elements or have strong resists you might find just using /melody is better than /queuemelody. I had macros set up for both so i could easily switch depending on the situation.

Hypothetically yes it is possible to disable Symph Aura and try and melody your buffs but its not the optimal way to play the class at all and you will just be limiting your power if you do that in multiple ways. Other important thing to note which I think most people already know about but the traditional bard swarm kiting method is a no go here. Mobs have to be standing still for any of your AOE damage spells to hit and they also can only hit a limited number of enemies. At high level DDD is still good for AOE killing mobs but you are only gonna kill 5 at a time (maxed out AAs and end game instruments DDD can crit for around 7k from my experience, definitely still strong).

My main combo in the closed beta was Clr/Brd/Mnk and I was able to do pretty much all the raid bosses at the highest difficulties. In a lot of cases basically the only spell I was casting that wasnt a bard song was stopping melody to do cleric heals and an occasional cure to get rid of slow, or possibly stripping enemy buffs.

Kind of a long post but maybe this will help clear things up for some people. Or maybe it will just make them more confusing! Also I suggest checking out the bard songs part of the EQL wiki if you are confused about what any do, be aware these numbers are WITHOUT instrument scaling or anything though, so the actual numbers you get from the buffs end up being WAY higher.

edit:

one last additional tip, your instrument effects can be pulled out of your instruments and put onto your primary/secondary weapons, or you can stick them on things in your any slots as long as they are also primary/secondary slot items. Certain shields with instrument focuses on them in the any slot can be great for stats+AC+instrument focus. Keep in mind too though that for the most part your most important instruments for the songs you will be using most are percussion and stringed. If you can't fit in focuses for brass/wind its really not the end of the world. Also once you are in the high 40s and doing the planes Overchannel Invocation will be your best friend so that your melody songs basically always land.

edit 2:

I should also mention your tuyen's chant line and fufils and your AoE dot spells all can crit with the DoT AA's like critical affliction, so those are actually worth getting. the dot's might seem weak at first but once you have the best instruments and AA's its around 400 damage per tick w/o crits at level 50 which is good steady additional dps and keeping them up doesn't interrupt your melee at all.

Also there are several things that affect casting speed that will affect the speed of your chants like the cleric cast speed blessing.

In terms of upgrading your songs right now there isn't a ton of reason to do it until they add the 2nd half of the spell upgrade system where it will actually boost stat numbers, and when that gets added probably things like chant of battle will benefit a ton. For now if you hit 50 and want to upgrade your songs upgrading the chants does shorten their cast time and it does add i believe -15 resist per level, which can be helpful on some endgame raids even with overchannel on all the time. but right now most of the symphonic aura spells there's no reason to upgrade them.

edit 3:

mentioned it in a comment but I should mention it here. you should 100% make a macro that is just /stopsong. there is a bug right now (has been an issue for a while) where if you get stunned while in /melody and your target dies (pretty sure this is the cause) next time you go to cast ANY spell or use /melody again you will just see the timer rapidly go down and nothing will cast. this can be very bad if you don't know how to fix it, but the fix is just to do /stopsong so an important macro to have somewhere on your bar if you run into this bug. another comment below also has a solution for using macros for spells with /stopsong at the start of each one if you dont want to have to double click a song to stop using it. personally i dont do this but it's an option if it bothers you.

I'm still pretty happy with my Y1 but got the Y2 for some of the obvious improvements. That being said I'm a dedicated Rockbox user, I knew it wouldnt be available at the start, but just wondering if there is any kind of timeline or expectation of when there might be a new port and installer tool.

If i remember correctly the original Y2 post a while ago said it was planned to be supported early on.

I looked on the purchase page and didn't see. Anyone know if there is any way to just buy and give someones account email address to gift it?

I've tried so many different styluses (styli?) and man i hate pretty much every single one that exists for capacitive screens. Just got another new one and its "fine", but still nowhere near the convenience and responsiveness of something like the S-Pen on the high end samsung phones.

The mesh ones are annoyingly imprecise sometimes, the disc ones are more precise but if you hit at the wrong angle it doesn't read the input. the bluetooth smart pens are big and have just ever so slightly more latency.

I'd kill for an actual Thor Pen integrated into the body that also charges/syncs automatically with the device.

I'm just curious to see what other people's thoughts are, whether you are in the beta currently or have just been watching videos on youtube/twitch whatever. This post isn't meant to be negative or anything so be constructive (if you can lol). I've really enjoyed the beta so far and am excited about the full release.

I'm trying to setup and test out a game that uses its own launcher, on each launch it has to verify the game files. In total its only about 5gb but its spread across like 10k files and it's very slow in game native. Even on a very bad pc it's like 20x faster. I have both gamenative and the game files on internal storage, not a microsd.

I noticed if i browse the main folder while doing stuff inside the container it also loads super slow. The game's root folder itself has like 3000 files in it. all fairly small, just stuff like txt files, but it takes forever to load.

I tried searching around but didn't find much info, is there a way to improve the file indexing times or build a cache for that particular game or something?