Minstrel changes - future
by Tarrant
Hello Minstrels! I have been working with one of your fellows to acquire some feedback from your developers regarding your questions and concerns. These questions were what your Minstrel friend gathered and summarized based on your 3/3/1 thread. I am going to paraphrase the questions or comments, and provide the answers. Enjoy!
1) Will we be seeing new instruments in the future?
Yes, the team is adding in new instruments in the future. These instruments will not be significantly more powerful however.
2) Healing feels limited to Bolster Courage, and with harder hitting mobs in Moria, Minstrels do not really have time to use other skills. Can we have a variety of healing skills?
Minstrels are the best in the game at healing. Everyone knows that. If we were to provide more healing skills, and thus variety, we'd probably have to nerf healing skills across the board. In the future though, there should be some changes to Ballads that will enable Minstrels to interweave them better with healing. Also, there is far more to healing as a Minstrel than simply spamming Bolster Courage. Don't forget to utilize a combination of anthems to manage in-combat regen and threat generation.
3) Soliloqy of Spirit is considered inadequate for a level 50-something skill by many Minstrels. Minstrels are hoping to see a serious buff to this skill.
SoS is a maintenance heal, and as such is deliberately weaker than your standard heals. Captains and Rune-keepers have access to a wider and stronger variety of heal-over-time skills, as that is their specialty. With regards to Rune-keepers specifically, we need to be careful to not bleed the class roles together. Making SoS low-powered was done intentionally, but it does have its use. Using SoS you can provide some maintenance for your group while generating minimal threat, and use your main heals on the Tank, as SoS costs little time or power. Essentially, SoS is what it is, and it will never be as good as the HoTs belonging to the other classes.
4) We need a higher tactical critical raiting for healing, as according to some Minstrels, healing has not tiered with damage intake.
Your tactical critical rating can be raised through your gear and your Legendary items. Change it up!
5) Tactical resists on mobs are rediculous.
We have provided resist defeating Legendary gear for exactly this reason. Use the Legendaries. Love the Legendaries!
6) There is no medium armor set for Minstrels.
This is something the development team would love to do in the future.
7) The cost of re-traiting class traits is very high, and makes switching between different trait sets a money sink.
This is not a Minstrel-specific issue, as all classes pay the same amount to re-trait. Of course, we will always keep an eye on this, but at the moment we feel the costs are acceptable.
So ends the Q&A session, and I hope this was helpful to you all.
P.S. The future does not mean Book 7. It means the future, as in some time after this second. That's about as concrete a time as you are going to get until we say otherwise.
