Welcome to this week's Grab Bag!

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As always, thanks everyone for your questions, keep 'em coming! You can send in any game related questions you have for our DAoC Devs through our Grab Bag submission form. Please note this is for game questions, feedback/ideas/suggestions should be sent in through our feedback form.

Read on for glory!

Why is it that the Bard Crescendo ability is on a 2.8s interruptible cast while the Skald and Minstrel Crescendo ability is instant cast? Is there a reason the Bard Crescendo ability can't be an uninterruptible cast (not necessarily instant)?

There are usually a myriad of reasons for why one class gets an ability (or the same ability but in a different form) than other classes in other realms and this case is no different.

First, we don’t just look at Minstrels’, Skalds’, and Bards’ strengths and weaknesses and then choose their form of Crescendo, we look at the realms and their classes as a whole too. This includes analysing synergies that exist among the various classes within each realm on the small and large scales. Second, we look at the overall performance and popularity of each class across the different playstyles. And finally, we analyse what each class can bring to a fight across the different playstyles.

Bards’ combination of their casting-focused support role, popularity, synergy with the other classes in their realm across every playstyle, and overall performance mandate that their Crescendo be a normal-casted spell. In short, making the spell uninterruptible would be too near to making it an instant cast and would be too powerful for our liking.

What caused the lowering of controlled pets hit points? 10% is really significant. Help us understand why.

When pets were generally increased in effectiveness (including hit-point and other bonuses) in Patch 1.122B they were improved a bit too much. In subsequent versions pets were reduced back down to more acceptable levels. With 1.125, there were still some pets that were enjoying their 1.122B hit-point values while all other pets had been reduced already. The 1.125 reductions merely put the remaining pets in-line with the other pet reductions.

I understand that the DF bow may be the optimal weapon of choice for archers, but I'm also a fan of the astral bow which along with the DF bow both have good proc rates.  My questions is about other bows:

Gjalpinulva, Tuscars, and Nychta's Heartstring Bows.   I like the dragon bow because it has 5% spell pierce and it would be viable except that it breaks mez poison.  And the Tuscars bow has a 204 DD proc and the Nychta's Hearstring has the 20% abs proc; these hardly proc: 1:30 on the Tuscars and 1:50 on the Nychta's.  I will say that the endurance drain on the Nychta's procs more than the abs debuff, but basically these two bows do not proc at the same rate as the astral bow or df bow.  Is this because these two bows overperformed?  Could you make a few adjustments with some of the bows and procs to add a little more flavor to the archery type, so we aren't using one bow all the time?

While the Astral Bow of Dismay’s proc rate is indeed high, the Darkness Falls’ Champion Level 15 bows and the other bows listed all have extremely similar proc rates (within 1-2%). This is unlikely to be changed.

When playing my wizard, I noticed something with the loyalty cloak. When you cast to reset timer on class abilities, why doesn’t this affect class realm abilities as well since some are class specific? All of the toa abilities come back, but realm timers like decimation trap don’t reset.

The short answer is that it would be too powerful of an ability if it reset realm abilities in addition to the class abilities. There is not a way for it to only reset certain ‘class-specific’ realm abilities and not other realm abilities like Mastery of Concentration, etc.

For additional context, class-specific realm abilities are still classified as realm abilities and not “class” abilities. Class abilities are only the abilities that a class specializes for or gets as baseline as they level up.

Any update on when Name changes will be available again?

Barring any unforeseen circumstances we plan to re-enable them sometime next week.

That's it for this week! 

Don't forget to tune into my streams on our official Twitch channel on Saturday nights at 5:30PM EST / 10:30PM GMT for all the chat, action, and giveaways!

Thanks as always and enjoy the weekend :)