Resists... Hmm.

[Shin Noir]

Well, I'm not too sure personally. Shin's resists unbuffed are 380-420. Add in bard song, they all cap to 525. Lol.
Looking at alternate abilities, I see nothing that raises your cap of resists.

Essentially, here's my issue. I think gear is giving too much resists. When you factor in bard resists + spell resist buffs along with gear your characters gain you get maxxed out without even trying.

What can be done about it? I'm not sure.
Option 1: Raise resist cap so bard song affects it, and have nasty -## adjustments to AoE's you want to hurt? Downside is you'd have to go through each spell and figure out which ones you want to be tough without high resists.
Option 2: Lower gear's general resist, so you don't cap so easily. Downside: Obviously going through all gear is going to be annoying.

It kind of trivializes the bard AoE resist songs as is, at least I am pretty sure I can max out even the worser geared people with a good percussion mod.

Not to mention my AE mana/healing song is kind of botched out with the insane regeneration casters gain from cannibalize, full mana clickies, and a hand full of flowing thought items + tons of crack clickies.

Anyways, I wanted to point this out and hear if there was any planning about this, if it's fine as is, or whatever..

[Jeido]

Actually on emu there is no resist cap, it is merely graphical. If you were to do #showstats on yourself with a bard resist song, you'd have much higher resists than your client says you have. The same goes for normal stats too as far as I know.

[drawnir]

Regardless of how high your resists are stuff will still get through. With high resists, group encounters should yield many resisted spells, but if you are resisting a whole ton of stuff on raid level encounters, something's wrong. On most encounters I almost felt like getting up and doing a victory dance if I resisted a nasty AE...it happened rarely unless it was meant to be resisted.

The two AA lines that increase saves caps are Planar Power (in Pop Adv.) and Discordant Defiance(in Omens).

Raid gear has almost always come super close to maxing resists since PoP+ when you add in the saves aa's. Guk gear is on par with elemental gear so essentially everyone begins with raid level gear...just really old raid level gear.

AE resists are more circumstantial than useful anymore with elemental gear and better. That's a good thing in my opinion, since there is plenty of stuff that can fill that slot on the weave. Also, I think it was kind of known, since the psalm line stopped and there were no improved versions in higher levels...well there was that aviak's warble group song...but everyone wanted that for the ac and absorb effect.

When ae checks are chromatic and prismatic (I think that is what they were called where they check the highest/lowest resist), or really really high resist checks then bard AE resists become useful again. It was on those we actually got to dust off those spells and use them again. Psalm of Veeshan still rocks for the AC&DS in a tank group or to protect newer raiders with low resists into your group. Though if there is no cap, the AE's & veeshan would be super useful again...though that might be overkill, haha.

I know what you mean on the regen songs...I usually avoided singing it if at all possible. There's better stuff to weave and the aggro can be a pain at times. If nobody cares with all the orbs/ft going around, I would consider that a bonus, though I don't think there's such thing as too much mana for most nukers and healers.

[Jeido]

I definitely think that when the new spell file is out, then there should be custom dropped spells introduced into raid zones. This would include buffs/nukes for casters, new songs (hastes, DS's, resists, etc) for bards, and of course better heals for healers. Seeing something like this implimented would be amazing, and it could be scaled with gear levels.

I know in tier 1 ssra an AHL would nearly cheal me, or heal atleast 70%. Crits would be an overheal by far. Nowadays the mobs are much harder, but heals are the same. AHL only heals 33% of my health now, and a crit does double that. It's getting more and more intense for healers as mobs become increasingly difficult, and having custom heals that drop in ToV, for example, to help compensate for the huge HP jump on gear would be really great.

Getting back on track to the bard songs. It's not only true that mana is easy to come by with 50 FT caps and orbs. It's also true that with the amount of mana casters have now (it's easy to break 15k once you get ToV geared), the bard/enc mana regen line is getting extremely belittled. The spells that are being used now were used when gear had 300HP/mana on it at most.

[Shin Noir]

Actually on emu there is no resist cap, it is merely graphical. If you were to do #showstats on yourself with a bard resist song, you'd have much higher resists than your client says you have. The same goes for normal stats too as far as I know.

I just tested this with Striat, and it seems that 525 is true cap without the AA's. With AA's it is 575 apparantly, due to a server side minor issue of it calculating the "25 bonus (which means it should be 550) twice".

My song Psalm of Veeshan gives +207 to all resists, and with stats such as 380-420, I technically would be at 587-627 resists, anyways. Elemental Chorus (AE instead of group only) gives +185 resists.

Considering there's another resist buff druids get that does
Protection of Seasons
DRU/64 1: Increase Fire Resist by 72
2: Increase Cold Resist by 72
I think enchanters get the best MR buffs, or CLR/etc..

With The resist of gear and overall cap limit we're hitting a point where the usefulness of bard resist song + resist buffs is almost nill point to a geared player. This makes an opportunity to perhaps boost the resist cap even higher, to help support these alternative buffs, and then create larger resist adjustments on the mobs to tear through your higher resists. (I noted [url]here[/url] that dragons are too easy to resist in a lot cases, and only landing due to pure chance and their lvl diff). With that system, bard/dru/resist buffs can actually make a difference and will be wanted to help the team successfully survive the area of effects induced because withut them you will get torn up from not being able to resist the AoE's.

As is, the effectiveness of given buffs is pretty minor... And you will constantly find that spells will just use the hit/miss system or will constant land if you keep it as is.

Since we are doing content with less people, the overall nastiness of AE spells is already being lowered. (If you have a 40-50 person raid in ToV that is a LOT of healing needed when an AE hits them all), but it's now at the point it seems it's just an afterthought, considering most are still using resist adjustments of what they had back when Velious was released and 353 resists was doing good!