Is the bard song nerf in 2.1 intentional?
BelgarathMTH
Member Posts: 5,653
I'm a little surprised no one else has asked about this.
BG:EE 1.3 and IWD:EE have an un-nerfed bard song that has a good range and is easy to keep cast on the whole party at all times.
BG:EE 2.1 has gone back to the old vanilla nerfed bard song range, where it is no more than 10 in-game feet, and constantly winks out on party members while walking around, even when the bard is right behind the suddenly unbuffed character.
This is very familiar annoying behavior of the bard song to me from the vanilla game. One of the things I loved about the EE's was that they made the bard song range very solid and easy to use.
Was going back to the old behavior intentional? If so, why? Or, was this an accident of upgrading that can be fixed in a future patch?
BG:EE 1.3 and IWD:EE have an un-nerfed bard song that has a good range and is easy to keep cast on the whole party at all times.
BG:EE 2.1 has gone back to the old vanilla nerfed bard song range, where it is no more than 10 in-game feet, and constantly winks out on party members while walking around, even when the bard is right behind the suddenly unbuffed character.
This is very familiar annoying behavior of the bard song to me from the vanilla game. One of the things I loved about the EE's was that they made the bard song range very solid and easy to use.
Was going back to the old behavior intentional? If so, why? Or, was this an accident of upgrading that can be fixed in a future patch?
11
Comments
I thought it was just me. Since I learned that the Blade bardsong gives +1 luck my Half-Elf Blade chick has been sitting in the back giving orders and using her bardsong until she has 2 pips in dual wielding.
I noticed sometimes Jaheira would be right next to me and the Bardsong wouldn't be on her and that my Bard essentially needed to be in melee range to give everyone the buff.
I can still remember how
That music used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those NPCs dance
And maybe they'd have +2 damage for a while
But Patch 2.0 made me shiver
With every bard song I'd deliver
It would fall on deaf ears
It's really grinding my gears
You, dear sir, are an officer and a gentleman. And a true bard.
I could swear that fixing the bard song range problems was one of the things they did in the EE's in one of the early patches when BG:EE first came out. Am I remembering incorrectly?
I'd tag a developer to try to get an answer, but I'm pretty sure we'd just get "Create a ticket and file it on Redmine". Onto the huge list of things that may or may not ever get fixed.
On the whole, I'm a supporter of this update, and I appreciate everything Beamdog's done for our game, but this bard song thing and the problem I've pointed out about the class description window not scrolling do bother me a little.
It got nerfed significantly like Poison Weapon for (in my opinion) no good reason.
Same as always.
I also tried out the Improved Bard Song. Like in vanilla, the range is infinite, reaching across the map.
I'm looking at the spell files (FJBARDB, FJBLADEB, SPCL541A, and SPCL751A), and they all use the same projectiles. The Jester song uses the same projectile as the Slow spell; the other songs use the same projectile as the Haste spell. The Improved Bard Song has no projectile.
Also, in vanilla, the Blade and unkitted Bard songs had an infinite area of effect, affecting allies everywhere on the map. It was pre-2.0 EE that had the shorter range, not vanilla.
As for the songs winking in and out, that may be a factor of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It triggers once every 6 seconds, and if you're not within range at that instant, you won't get the effect back for another 6 seconds, which could well explain the "blinking." Also, the bard song doesn't reach around corners.
There is no "around corners" or "being in the wrong place" going on. The buff gets lost on several party members even *when I'm walking right behind them*, if we are moving.
The being in motion with the party is an important factor here.
This was fixed in 1.3 and IWD:EE. It is *not* fixed in 2.1, nor was it ever in vanilla. The song is *not* behaving the same as in IWD:EE and in 1.3. Everybody who plays bards regularly should find this new fact of life quite obvious, I would say.
Nevertheless, I am learning to live with it. It just takes more micromanagement than before of the commands and controls.
@semiticgod , Also, I can't help but notice that your "test" involves a solo bard with no party. Huh? Get back to me when you have "tested" a bard with a six member party, and walked around in the game trying to keep that bard's buffing on six characters.
I know it can be very difficult to keep a bard song on multiple party members, but my tests suggest the game isn't behaving differently. The spells have not been changed, the projectiles don't appear to have been edited, and when a party member in motion doesn't get hit by the bard song, they are always just barely out of reach of the radius I saw before.
The bard song's range is very unforgiving for chaotic situations, but on conducting those tests (which actually surprised me) and reviewing the game's files, 2.1 bard songs have the same range as a Haste spell, which uses the same projectile.
I did notice the bard sometimes canceling the song. I'm not sure what that's about, but it only happened twice out of many rounds.
The extra range is probably because the IWD:EE bard songs use a separate projectile: "ohvrpo" instead of "INAREAPA." IWD:EE uses a lot of different projectiles.
I'm doing my best to find the problem, but I'm just not seeing it happen in my game. I have no mods on IWD:EE and only SCS on BG2:EE; my IWD:EE game is 1.4 and my BG2:EE game is 2.1.
Could you put your bard song files in a zip file and post them here? Just to see if there's any difference at all. For IWD:EE, that would be SPCL115-SPCL120; FJBARDA, FJBARDB; FJBLADEB; SPCL751A; and SPCL542A. For BG2:EE, that would be FJBARDA, FJBARDB; FJBLADEB; SPCL751A; and SPCL542A.
Were you doing your BG test on 1.3?
Any way, I think we may just have to agree to disagree on this one. I've spent a *lot* of time on all versions of the game since 1998 doing complete bard runs, as it's one of my favorite classes, so I may just be more sensitive to the two versions of the song mechanics: the older one that's hard to keep active on the party, and the newer one that fixed it, as seen in IWD:EE.
Also, "The song reaches a little bit farther; is less likely to vanish while one or more party members are moving;..." *That's* the problem. The fact that BG 2.1 is not using that same bard song.
Thank you for spending some of your time trying to get to the bottom of it. At least @elminster has done us the kindness of creating a ticket for it, so the devs might eventually check it out.
BG 2.1's bard songs don't have the same projectile as IWD 1.4 because the projectile doesn't exist in BG to begin with (like before, they don't even show up in Near Infinity). I'm afraid I don't know how to move a projectile from one game to the other; IWD has always had unique projectiles like Lance of Disruption that don't port to other games. Unless Beamdog adds them in at some point.
Anyway, projectiles only matter if the target for the spell is set to "Preset Target" and the like. If you switch it to "Caster group" or "Party," it should apply to the entire party no matter where they are on the map. That's how the HLA bard song does it.
Attached are edited files for the Blade, Bard, and Skald songs. They won't give you the original range, but they will give you infinite range on those songs, which should ensure that your party doesn't lose the song bonuses due to range issues.
What I'm complaining about is the song winking out on individual party members when they move, seemingly at random, not about the whole song suddenly disappearing, so I'm still not 100% sure you understand why I've got my knickers in a bunch about it. It doesn't happen in IWD:EE, and I don't think it should be happening in BG:EE 2.1 either.
But again, thanks for the file. I don't really want to mod my game, though. Like I said before, I've just learned to live with the shorter range song for now. It's not *that* hard to keep the party covered, but it's very inconvenient, and does occasionally leave front line fighters uncovered even when I'm standing right behind them.
If so, then the reason is simple: area-effect projectiles don't strike all targets at the exact same time; it can be a few frames apart. The song activates every round without variation, but if the projectile strikes a fraction of a second too early one round, and then a fraction of a second too late on the next round, the icon will disappear and reappear because the song isn't hitting the target exactly one round after it last triggered.
In other words, the song hits certain targets a few frames out of sync whenever characters are in motion, due to the variation in projectile strike time.
And I just saw this "winking" happen in IWD:EE 1.4, while the party was moving. The icon vanished and reappeared after a frame or two. In fact, I've always seen this happen in all my games, from vanilla BG2 to IWD to BG2:EE to IWD:EE. I don't know about vanilla BG1, since I've never played the original game, but in all the other games, the winking has always been there.
If the RR songs have the same limited range, would your modded files work ok? I just don't want to drop them in my override folder and break the songs totally =/
thanks,
I'm totally open to modding the game, just really hoping for this to be fixed cause I was going to buy bg2 for a jester bg1 - tob playthrough