The Unbroken Song
A deep dive into Shroud of the Avatar's Bard school, what twenty-five years of virtual performers taught the genre, and twenty-seven concrete proposals.
This August the Bard school was rebuilt from the ground up, and the rebuild began by deleting half of what players actually used. The old school was a self-buffing combat tree that leaked into every build in the game: one player in eleven cast a bard skill last month on the live servers, and the skills now retired carried nearly half the school's volume. The new school is the game's first pure support class, and it runs on one strict covenant: the songs help everyone but the singer, and the moment the singer draws blood, every song falls silent for sixty seconds. Around that covenant the rework built a second life, the town performer, with an audience, a tip, and an Inspiration economy that turns watching a good set into a better evening of adventure. The machine is built and playable on the test shard. What it is still owed is its glass, its words, and its depth: the covenant has no timer on screen, the tooltips describe a school that no longer exists, and the room a bard works has no arc, no receipts, and no memory. This page measures the school against the genre that invented virtual bards and proposes twenty-seven changes built on one idea: the song is the instrument of the party, and the bard's mastery is keeping it unbroken.
Every game that ever shipped a bard has run the same experiment: give one player the power to make everyone else stronger, and see what the world does with it. The results are unusually consistent. Ultima Online shipped three barding verbs in 1997 and spent five years watching provoke farm its gods before the great 2002 retrofit scaled the verbs against each creature. EverQuest priced bard power in keystrokes and produced the genre's most famous repetitive-strain injury. Star Wars Galaxies built the finest social loop the genre has seen, the cantina, and let unattended macros rot it culturally before the developers deleted the demand instead of the bots. Lord of the Rings Online made the support trade legible with one visible mode switch and was loved for it. Final Fantasy XIV rooted its bard to a cast bar for one expansion, reverted under protest, and proved the musician must never stop moving. The verdict across all of them: a support class lives or dies on legibility, mobility, and the integrity of its social loop, and every shortcut through those three gets paid for within two years.
Measured against that bar, the August rework made the structurally correct choices. It is mobile. It is interaction-gated. Its power flows through a covenant instead of an APM wall. Thirty days of live-server casting data explain why the surgery was radical: the old school logged 185,601 casts, 2.09 percent of the 8.88 million casts recorded across every school, from at least 113 distinct players, and the skills the rework retired carried 48.6 percent of that volume. The school was popular the wrong way, a splash of self-buffing power in every build, exactly what the design brief set out to end. What shipped is the right machine with three kinds of debt still on it:
The deal that runs through all twenty-seven proposals: Tier 1 fixes what is wrong or dishonest, in the open, with the defects filed as tracker bugs the day this page went up. Tier 2 rules on the eleven unbuilt skills in public, then makes the loop legible and deeper: the covenant gets a face, the meter gets a screen, the room gets receipts, an encore, and an audience with agency, and the school's second most played skill gets the successor its retirement never named. Tier 3 widens the stage: restraint becomes spendable, the debuffs meet a per-creature difficulty, the peace verb returns on honest machinery, the counter to a bard becomes another bard, and the town gains a memory. The song is the instrument of the party; the bard's mastery is keeping it unbroken.
One population fact shapes several cards and deserves the honest statement up front: Bard and Taming is the most common specialization pairing in the game, 271 players all-time, 112 of them active, the bard-buffed tamer as the flagship archetype. The rework's songs deliberately no longer reach pets at all. The compensation is real but indirect: the two new debuff songs weaken the pet's target instead of strengthening the pet. This page keeps the doctrine, states the trade plainly wherever it matters, and gives the pairing what it can: charm where numbers are forbidden.
| # | Proposal | Tier | Size | Server | One-line pitch |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S1 | The words catch up | 1 | M | none | seven live tooltips and eight retired ones describe a school that no longer exists |
| S2 | A song no longer ends its own show | 1 | S | none | three songs flag their own singer for combat, and combat now closes the show |
| S3 | The lockout gets a face | 1 | M | none | the school's defining minute becomes a named timer instead of a hidden rule |
| S4 | One number per fact | 1 | S | none | target caps, stack counts, and dead fields disagree inside the same songs |
| S5 | The songs get their own voice | 1 | M | none | the new songs wear retired skills' effects, and the stance glows like heavy armor |
| S6 | The guards guard | 1 | S | none | a completeness test excuses the one rune it was written to catch |
| S7 | The room count tells the truth | 1 | S | small | a vanished watcher can haunt the audience count for minutes |
| S8 | Grandmaster or two hundred | 1 | S | none | every specialization number needs one anchor, and one crit rider is on for everyone |
| S9 | Verdicts on the unbuilt eleven | 2 | S | none | eight retired and three never-built skills get their answers in the open |
| S10 | The quickstep | 2 | M–L | none | the school's second most played skill retired with no successor; the role returns the support way |
| S11 | The meter on your screen | 2 | M | none | bank, charge, and both fortify ramps become readable at a glance |
| S12 | Receipts | 2 | S–M | none | tips get a ledger a performer can read back |
| S13 | The encore | 2 | L | tunables | applause and worked minutes build toward a finale the whole room feels |
| S14 | Hold your inspiration | 2 | M | one op | the patron chooses when their Inspired hour begins |
| S15 | The traveler's chorus | 2 | M–L | none | the genre's cheapest goodwill, a road song for the whole party |
| S16 | Voice Training's honest bargain | 2 | S | none | the school's priciest innate finally says what both of its jobs are |
| S17 | The room catches its breath | 2 | M | small | watching a set becomes the best rest in town, and never worth farming |
| S18 | What bards owe their pets | 2 | S–M | none | the game's most common pairing gets charm where numbers are forbidden |
| S19 | The troupe | 2 | M | yes | one tip pays the whole band |
| S20 | The crescendo | 3 | L | none | a clean minute can be spent, once, on one swelling pulse |
| S21 | Barding difficulty | 3 | L | none | the debuff songs meet a per-creature difficulty, the fix UO took five years to find |
| S22 | The peace verb | 3 | L | none | a pacifying song, difficulty-gated, pure crowd control |
| S23 | The song contest | 3 | L | one op | the counter to a bard is another bard |
| S24 | Dirge and troubadour | 3 | L | none | specialization forks the same songs toward melee or caster support |
| S25 | The chronicler | 3 | M | wire key | performances carry a dedication, names with no numbers attached |
| S26 | The healer's accompanist | 3 | S–M | none | the strongest cross-school pairing in the support game is shipped and invisible |
| S27 | Performer renown | 3 | L | records | a career track for the town half, cosmetic by construction |
Fourteen implemented skills. Five songs: a healing aura, a focus-restoring aura, a strength-and-precision aura, and two resistance-shredding dirges aimed at your enemies. One stance that only works in towns and exists to run a show. Three entertainer moves that work an audience on two axes, strength and length. Five innates, from the instrument mastery that speeds every ramp to the specialization that deepens every duration. Every castable requires an instrument in your hands. The songs share a two-song limit, so a bard chooses a set, not a stack. Nothing the bard sings ever touches the bard, or anybody's pet. And underneath all of it runs the covenant: deal any damage and every party-facing number in the school is zero for the next sixty seconds. The rework is playable on the chaos test shard today; the live servers still run the school this page's telemetry measured.
[Flourish] [Dance] [Group Dance] [Perf. Stance] [♬]
Inspiration 31.4M banked
The whole economy's face: one caption under a slot strip. It hides at zero, fades when idle, turns gold while an Inspired charge is live, and appends one word while a fortification holds. Cards S11, S14.
You take up the Performance Stance. Your instrument readies itself. Your performance is open. Tomas begins watching you. You flourish. The crowd stirs. Tomas tips you 500 gold. You play Savage Sonata for the square. Your performance has ended.
The setlist closed the show. Casting the school's own party song flags the bard for combat, and since August combat drops the stance. Card S2.
The school's second life runs on an economy with one direction: everything in it climbs, and nothing in it ever takes. Adventure banks Inspiration; watching a working performer converts the bank into an Inspired charge that pays experience out richer; and the same watching fortifies the buffs a patron already carries, on two independent ramps. The pipeline, as built:
flowchart TB
A["Adventuring: combat experience awarded"] --> B["The same figure banks as Inspiration\ncapped at 50 million"]
A2["Melody of Mending up in the party:\nbanking runs a quarter faster"] -.-> B
subgraph TOWN["The performance, in a town"]
P["Performance Stance readies the instrument\nand opens the show"]
M["Flourish, Dance, Group Dance:\nworking the room on two axes,\nstrength and length"]
V["A placed Performance Stage:\nthe venue bonus"]
end
B --> W
P --> W["/watch: distance, facing, and sight\nchecked on the patron's own machine;\nthe server bounds what the claim is worth"]
M --> W
V --> W
W --> X["Conversion: bank becomes an Inspired charge.\nFaster with a working performer, a band,\na venue. Per-second ceiling; one session\nper performer each half hour"]
W --> F["Fortification: two ramps climb while\nyou watch, duration and strength, toward\neach buff family's ceiling"]
X --> S["Inspired: the next experience arrives\n15 percent richer until the charge is spent"]
F --> G["Carried blessings, food, potions, and\nsongs last longer and work harder"]
style W stroke:#8a6d33,stroke-width:2.5px
style S stroke:#a3771c,stroke-width:2px
The fortification ramps are the patron's slow reward for staying: each buff family climbs toward its own ceiling, and the performer's training sets the pace. Three honest paces:
The live servers still run the pre-rework school, which makes the last thirty days a clean portrait of what the rework chose to end:
| Skill | Casts, 30 days | Share of school | Fate in the rework |
|---|---|---|---|
| Melody of Mending | 53,986 | 29.1% | kept, rebuilt as the party heal aura |
| Anthem of Alacrity | 41,315 | 22.3% | retired, no successor — S10 |
| Rhapsody of Recovery | 21,841 | 11.8% | kept, the focus aura |
| Atonal Aria | 21,685 | 11.7% | retired, named by the community in both major balance threads |
| Psalm of Stagnation | 20,204 | 10.9% | retired |
| Savage Sonata | 19,577 | 10.5% | kept, the party's edge, no longer for pets or self |
| Refrain of Resistance | 5,569 | 3.0% | retired, its role absorbed by fortification |
| Mesmerizing Melody | 716 | 0.4% | retired, functionally dead already |
| Concussive Canticle | 708 | 0.4% | retired, functionally dead already |
Live server, 30 days ending 2026-08-14. School total 185,601 casts, 2.09 percent of 8.88 million across all schools; at least 113 distinct bard casters, lower bound from a random 4,000-cast sample. The retired rows carried 90,197 casts, 48.6 percent of the school. On the chaos test shard, every skill of the new roster has been seen firing, Group Dance least, because it takes a band; magnitudes are withheld since testers are the only population there.
The August rework is the foundation this page builds on, and it was large: the two-role redesign itself; eight skills retired with every point refunded; seven new skills live; real focus costs and a two-song limit where the school once sang for free and stacked; the equipped-instrument requirement, with instrument quality, masterwork, and enchantment feeding song strength; Voice Training brought to life so a trained voice can stand in for strings; the Inspiration economy end to end, bank, watch, tip, convert, with its +15 percent Inspired bonus and no matching cut anywhere; fortification on two independent axes read from the performer's own training; two brand-new debuff songs on a channel that fortification can never stretch, so an enemy bard's patron cannot lengthen their curse on you; the craftable Performance Stage and its venue bonus; Performance Stance rebuilt as the show's switch, readying the instrument and opening the performance; the bard bar with its note keyboard; every move playing through the instrument with its own emote and colored aura; the watch gate's line of sight fixed twice over; fortification reaching the buffs a patron walked in carrying; and the watch verb on the right-click menu. Two of its choices answered the community by name: the instrument requirement was asked for by ConjurerDragon and Krovakin and pre-announced by Violet Ronso, and the call for an active answer to monster magic resistance came from Akandriel, answered by Requiem of Ruin.
MMO barding was born with an instrument requirement. Ultima Online shipped three verbs in 1997, provocation, peacemaking, and discordance, all rolled off an instrument in the pack, and then spent twenty-five years paying down the launch math. Provocation turned enemy power into free player damage and became the dominant degenerate farming loop of the game's first era; the great retrofit of Publish 16 in 2002 gave every creature a barding difficulty the verbs had to roll against, Publish 28 capped the skill's reach in 2005, and Publish 66 in 2010 finally rebuilt the three solo verbs into a party spellbook through quest-gated masteries. The rest of the genre ran every other experiment. EverQuest priced bard power in keystrokes, and song twisting became both the deepest skill ceiling of its day and a wall of wrist pain the game later conceded with an automation command. Star Wars Galaxies built the cantina, the finest social loop the genre has produced, an entertainer economy of buffs, tips, and audiences, and let unattended macro rows rot its culture before the New Game Enhancements deleted the demand instead of policing the supply. Lord of the Rings Online gave its minstrel a single legible mode switch, War-speech, and proved a support trade reads as identity when the player can see it. Final Fantasy XIV bolted cast bars onto its bard in Heavensward, reverted them one expansion later in Stormblood, and taught the genre's simplest lesson at scale: the musician must never stop moving. Its zero-power Perform system then bred a real concert culture, tolerable to automate precisely because no power rides it. The August rework already sides with the survivors on every count: mobile songs, a gain-framed cantina loop, identity carried by a covenant instead of an APM wall. The twenty-seven cards below spend the rest of the genre's tuition.
Ultima Online: the retrofit template. Instrument-as-identity from day one; target-side difficulty instead of skill deletion; masteries as the mid-life re-founding. Its three verbs are answered one by one in this page's hand-off block. EverQuest: the ceiling-versus-wall distinction, and Selo's Accelerando, the travel song every group physically felt, ancestor of S15. EverQuest II: the dirge and troubadour split, comp variety without a second class, ancestor of S24; and the buffbot trap its raids normalized, which the covenant and the moves already preclude here. Dark Age of Camelot: speed as the beloved product, and the charm sinkhole its minstrel spent years in, the strongest argument in the rejected list. Star Wars Galaxies: the whole town half of the rework is the cantina's kinder inversion, an economy that only climbs, watched instead of taxed; its death teaches that the audience's interaction is the loop's armor, which is S13's design. LotRO: legibility as identity, ancestor of S3; and the Captain, support without performance, proof the instrument is the differentiator worth protecting. FFXIV: never root the musician, and keep the expressive layer power-free, both already shipped here. Rift: the coda, the spender that gives a support rotation its exclamation point. ArcheAge: the song that grows the longer it plays, kept for the town where standing and playing is the point. Black Desert's Shai: the honest no-damage support class dies without a scoreboard, the case for S11 and S12. Guild Wars' Paragon: audience-scaled power and the mandatory-support warning. Pantheon: the unresolved twisting argument, the reason this page writes its answer down. Dungeons & Dragons: the school's namesake. Bardic Inspiration is a banked die the recipient chooses when to spend, which is S14 exactly; Song of Rest is performance as downtime value, which is S17. And the fiction the class walked out of: Orpheus, whose music moved stones under one strict condition and failed the moment he broke it, is the covenant's own myth; Finrod's duel of songs is S23; the skalds' praise and satire are the buff and debuff songs' oldest names; Dandelion writing Geralt's legend is S25.
| Capability | UO | EQ | SWG | LotRO | FFXIV | D&D 5e | SotA today | SotA proposed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Support mode legible on screen | ○ | ○ | ◔ | ● stances | ● gauges | ● the die | ◔ hidden lockout | ● S3, S11 |
| Musician keeps moving | ◔ | ● | ○ rooted | ● | ● post-revert | ● | ● mobile songs | ● held |
| Audience has agency in the loop | ○ | ○ | ◔ watch | ○ | ○ | ● recipient spends | ◔ watch only | ● S13, S14 |
| Tips and a performance economy | ○ | ○ | ● cantina | ○ | ◔ culture only | ○ | ● shipped 2026 | ● + S12, S19 |
| Buff fortification by watching | ○ | ○ | ● the buff queue | ○ | ○ | ◔ Song of Rest | ● two-axis ramp | ● held |
| Debuff songs | ● Discordance | ◔ | ○ | ◔ | ◔ | ◔ | ● two, shipped | ● + S21 scaling |
| Pacify or redirect verbs | ● two verbs | ◔ | ○ | ○ | ○ | ● Fascinate | ○ | ◔ S22; provoke rejected |
| Band play | ○ | ○ | ● group flourish | ○ | ◔ | ○ | ● band gates shipped | ● + S19 |
| Skill expression without an APM wall | ○ | ○ twisting | ◔ | ◔ | ● | ● | ● the move cadence | ● + S13 |
| Anti-AFK integrity in the social loop | ◔ | ○ | ○ the failure | ○ | ● zero-power | ○ | ● interaction-gated | ● held, by rule |
| Travel or movement gift | ○ | ● Selo's | ○ | ○ | ◔ | ○ | ○ | ● S15 |
| Combat verbs on instruments | ● | ● | ○ | ◔ | ◔ | ◔ | ● instrument-gated kit | ● held |
| Support has a hero moment | ○ | ◔ | ○ | ◔ | ◔ | ◔ | ○ | ● S13, S20 |
| The counter to a bard is a bard | ◔ | ○ | ○ | ○ | ○ | ● Countersong | ○ | ● S23 |
| The town remembers the set | ○ | ○ | ◔ server fame | ○ | ◔ concerts | ○ | ○ | ● S25, S27 |
● native · ◔ partial or conditional · ○ absent. "SotA today" includes the August 2026 bard rework, playable on the chaos test shard; live servers still run the pre-rework school. Venue and event discovery is deliberately not a row here: it belongs to the Music & Sound page's gig board.
Tier 1 fixes what is wrong or dishonest, mostly small, with the defects filed as tracker bugs the day this page went up. Tier 2 opens by ruling on all eleven unbuilt skills in public, then makes the loop legible and deeper: the meter, the receipts, the encore, the patron's choice, the road song, the rest, the band. Tier 3 widens the stage: the crescendo, the difficulty stat and the peace verb it gates, the song contest, the specialization fork, and the town's memory. Every tuning number is an illustrative starting point: final values ship through the combat balance program's changesets and measurement windows.
The Music & Sound page deferred two items to this page by name, and both get their verdicts now.
The scored rhythm layer: adapted, and the scored half rejected. The deferral read "a scored rhythm layer tied to buffs," to be revisited once the rework reached the test shard. It has, and the revisit finds the rework already shipped the right rhythm layer: the entertainer moves are one. Flourish, Dance, and Group Dance are timed, alternated, committed to on two axes, and worth more played attentively than idly, which is rhythm as commitment rather than rhythm as note-matching. What this page rejects, permanently, is wiring buff power to a scored accuracy input: it attaches power to a claim the server cannot verify, it is an automation magnet the moment the score pays, and it rebuilds EverQuest's APM wall as an entry fee. The expressive free-play layer stays powerless on purpose, which is exactly why it stays free. S13, the encore, is the adopted half: depth added to the commitment layer the moves already are.
The barding verbs: one adopted and shipped, one adapted, one rejected. The deferral read "UO-style combat barding verbs," with the music page's own warning attached, that mandatory utility kills the flavor. Verb by verb: discordance is adopted and already live, because Dirge of Dissonance and Requiem of Ruin are discordance rebuilt under the covenant, shipped this August. Peacemaking is adapted as S22, pure crowd control gated behind the same per-creature difficulty as everything else, and it arrives only after S21 builds that gate. Provocation is rejected permanently: turning enemy power into free player damage was the genre's longest-running balance sore, and in a client-authoritative combat model it would be the least policeable mechanic in the game. Nothing here is tuned to be required; that warning rides every card in this catalog.
Every player-facing description in the school is at least two development rounds behind the machine it describes. The strongest song still promises the tamed creatures it deliberately no longer touches. Dance says your song stops while you dance, when the entire point of the August fixes is that it does not. Performance Stance's tooltip does not mention towns, the instrument it readies, the show it opens, or the combat that now ends it. Eight retired skills still carry live, working-sounding promises. Only the two newest songs mention the instrument in your hands or the sixty seconds of silence that follow a blow. One localization pass brings every string up to what actually ships, and the debuff songs' covenant line, which is good copy, gets inherited by the other three songs.
Seen in: the truth pass every page in this series ships first; tooltips are contracts, and this school rewrote its terms twice in one week.
While in this stance your songs reach further.
Play for the room. Works only in a town or a player town. Taking the stance readies your instrument and opens your performance. Entering combat ends it. Your songs reach a little further while you hold it. Requires an instrument.
Text only, in the game's one localization file family, shipped through the standard localization export check. Retired rows gain a leading line: "Retired. Points spent here were refunded in full." The final strings for the specialization surfaces wait on S8's anchor ruling so the numbers written are the ruled ones; everything else can ship immediately. The companion document carries the full old-versus-new table.
Cast Savage Sonata, Dirge of Dissonance, or Requiem of Ruin while performing, and your own show closes a beat later. Those three songs flag the bard as entering combat, and since the August rounds the stance drops on combat entry, which stows the instrument and ends the performance. A bard's own setlist is the one thing that should never close the show. The fix teaches the stance's combat rule the difference between a fight and a song that merely draws attention: combat entered by the bard's own bloodless song no longer drops the stance, while taking or dealing damage still does, and the sixty-second covenant is untouched.
Seen in: this page's own audit, and the same shape as the two rounds of self-silencing bugs the August work already fixed, one layer further out.
A truth-table refinement in the stance's combat gate, which is a small, fully test-pinned rule table today. The finding is confirmed at the code level but was never executed in play, so runtime confirmation on the test shard is part of the card, and the new singing-versus-fighting rows join the existing gate tests. The attention the songs draw from enemies stays exactly as it is.
The sixty-second silence is the school's defining rule, and it is invisible. This card gives it a name, an icon, and a countdown. Deal damage with a bard kit equipped and a named effect appears on your buff bar, counting down the silence; your song auras stay present but visibly dimmed; on the minute, the name lifts and a line says so. The rule does not change by one second. It stops being something a bard suspects and becomes something a bard wears. The school's oldest story rides along: the music only works while you keep faith with it, and one in-game book gets to say so properly.
Seen in: Lord of the Rings Online's War-speech, the genre's proof that a legible mode trade reads as identity while a hidden one reads as punishment; and Orpheus, the covenant's own myth.
[Melody of Mending 0:24] [Song Silenced 0:47] You drew blood. Your support songs return in 47 seconds. Your songs regain their strength.
Client presentation over the gate the combat engine already evaluates at every pulse; no numbers move and no server work exists. The stale internal note that still describes the rule's old stance condition is corrected in the same change. Ships before S20, which spends what this card makes visible. The lore book and the shared tooltip line ride S1's strings pass.
Inside the same songs, the data disagrees with itself. The heal song's area says five targets while its delivered effect says eight; the three newest songs' areas say one while their payloads say eight; one aura stacks twice where its sibling stacks once; the heal song still carries display strings from the fire-school template it was copied from years ago; and one dead per-rune field is set three different ways across the nine runes. A runtime check first establishes which layer the area machinery actually honors, because today either the reference doc or the assets are wrong and nobody has run the experiment, and then one changeset settles every fact to one number, everywhere it is written.
Seen in: the wrong-template paste class every formula-driven game accumulates; the audits that opened every sibling page in this series.
Data edits plus a new area-authority test pin so the two layers can never disagree again. The dead-field cleanup carries a cross-page coordination flag: the music page proposes to start reading that field for instrument playback, and two of the three entertainer moves currently hold the value that would silence them again, so either the values are fixed here first or that page's card keeps the current hard-coded list as the authority. Stated on both pages so neither lands the regression. If the runtime check finds the smaller caps govern, three live songs currently reach one ally, and this card upgrades itself to urgent tuning.
The two new debuff songs wear retired skills' visual effects. The strongest buff song borrowed a retired song's flash. The stance's lasting glow is, literally, the heavy-armor buff graphic. And the heal song still fires a leftover aimed-arrow travel effect from the template it was built on. The three entertainer moves got their own looping emotes and colored note auras in August; this card finishes the job for the songs and the stance, with sound. The skaldic flavor comes free: the party anthem as praise poem, the two debuffs as satire.
Seen in: requested by Akandriel, the longest-standing open ask about Savage Sonata's missing payoff. The icon half of the same complaint belongs to the music page's filed art task, which this page's audit strengthened: two live abilities on the same bar currently share one icon.
Art and audio only; no formulas move. Each of the five songs and the stance gets effects wired that belong to it. Icon art stays with the music page's card and its filed task; this card is the effects-and-audio sibling, and the two land best together.
Internal honesty, cheap to restore. The bar's completeness test promises that every bard rune on disk is on the bar, and quietly excuses the one retired rune that is on disk with a comment claiming it is not. A few documentation comments in the bard files begin with a stray slash where doc markers belong, the sign of a scripted edit worth sweeping for. The school's reference contradicts itself on whether the bar carries eighteen or nineteen runes. And one hand-written allowlist naming "the whole bard tree" predates the two newest songs and needs one read to confirm they are in it. None of it is player-visible; all of it is the difference between guards that guard and guards that appear to.
Seen in: the moon page's small-truths card, this school's edition.
Test and comment fixes plus two one-read audits; zero player-facing behavior except wherever the allowlist audit finds a new song missing from something real, which would upgrade the finding.
The audience list is pruned lazily: a watcher who disconnects in a quiet room can haunt a performer's audience count for up to two minutes, because the cleanup only runs when somebody starts performing or watching. And on the watching side, the client re-finds the performer by name every single frame for the whole watch, a cost that grows with the size of the scene. The count becomes current within seconds, and the lookup happens once.
Seen in: Star Wars Galaxies' cantina lesson that the room's numbers are the performer's scoreboard, and a scoreboard must be honest.
Server side, the prune joins the heartbeat path the loop already trusts, kept idempotent; client side, the per-frame lookup becomes a cached reference invalidated on the scene events the client already receives. No protocol change, no stored state.
Three specialization questions, one ruling. First, the anchor: every bard duration reads "up to 25 percent more from specialization," which is the grandmaster figure, but the stat keeps growing to level two hundred, where the same term is half again and casts run twice as fast. Grandmaster or the cap: one of them is the tuning anchor, and every tooltip and future changeset should use it. Second, the rider that slipped its gate: the strongest song's crit-damage bonus is on for everyone, while its tooltip and the school's own reference call crit the specialization's reward; only the smaller crit-chance rider is actually gated. Third, the riders that skip the instrument: the specialization bonuses on the heal and the anthem ignore the instrument-quality multiplier every other number in the school carries. Each is either intended and undocumented or a copy error; the card is the audit, the ruling, and one changeset either way, with the words updated to match.
Seen in: the balance program's rule that a number is either designed or a defect, never merely unexplained.
The ruling is one owner decision; the changeset is small either way and lands on the school's existing formula pins. S1 writes the final specialization strings after this ruling, and S24's fork consumes the same anchor. Deferring costs nothing except that the tooltips stay ambiguous.
Eleven of the tree's twenty-five skills are not implemented: eight retired this August with every point refunded, three never built at all. This card rules on each in the open, so the tree stops advertising futures it does not intend. The verdicts: the six retired combat skills stay retired. Atonal Aria, Psalm of Stagnation, and Refrain of Resistance were the every-build splash the rework exists to end; the community named the Aria as the problem in both of its major balance threads, and the answer was structural, not numerical. Mesmerizing Melody and Concussive Canticle were functionally dead, seven hundred casts and six players each in a month, and their retirement cost nothing. The solo stance suspended rules the design allows no exception to. The retired innate's job moved into the specialization. One retired role gets a real successor, attack speed, and that is S10's card, minted as a new skill rather than a revived row. The three never-built rows, a detection ditty, a conservation chorus, and a charm chant, are retired outright: two are names without designs chained behind prerequisites that are themselves retired, and the charm verb is the genre's longest-running balance sore, unpoliceable in a client-authoritative engine. If a detection or conservation idea ever earns a slot, it arrives as a new design with a new identity.
Seen in: the community's own case, made by Adam Crow, that_shawn_guy, and necronut in the balance threads; and the scaling reports from Loaffer and AoiBlue, answered honestly here, the skill they reported is gone and the points came back.
Publishing the verdicts costs a skill-sheet edit for the three never-built rows and the S1 strings for the retired ones. Retiring rows the bar and its tests deliberately enumerate means the test contracts update in the same change. Reviving a retired row, for the record, would mean flipping the sheet back and unwinding an idempotent refund, which is why every returning role on this page arrives under a new identity instead.
Anthem of Alacrity was the school's second most played skill, forty-one thousand casts a month, and the rework retired it with no successor: nothing in the new kit touches speed of attack. The quickstep brings the role back the support way. It quickens your party's hands and never your own, it costs focus, it needs the instrument, it shares the two-song limit, and like every support song it falls silent for a minute the moment you draw blood. The bards who fought in every group get their signature back, and the structure keeps what the retirement bought: a build that deals its own damage gets nothing from carrying it.
Seen in: EverQuest's pulsing group songs; the shipped Savage Sonata pattern, applied to the school's biggest unfilled seat.
A new song on the existing song contracts: the instrument requirement, the covenant multiplier, the song channel, the bar, and the data test suite that enforces all of it together. Attack speed is the most potent group stat in the game's damage math, so the card commits to the published band: one bard's total party uplift, this song and the anthem-of-war stacked together, measures inside 15 percent or the song does not ship. How much of that band to spend on speed is the owner's call the card is named for. New icon, no collision with the filed art task.
One shy caption carries the whole economy. This card gives the meter real surfaces without making it loud. The caption's tooltip explains bank, charge, and rate in plain words. The character sheet gains a small Inspiration block: the bank, the live Inspired charge, and both fortification ramps drawn as bars with time-to-full while you watch. A patron watching a performer sees their ramps climb in real time. The quiet default stays: hidden at zero, faded when idle. The school's interface voice is a whisper, and a whisper you can read is the goal.
Seen in: Black Desert's Shai, the honest no-damage class that dies without a scoreboard; World of Warcraft's Eclipse, whose visible pendulum was the identity.
Banked ####################---- 31.4M Inspired ##########---- +15% for 6.2M more Fortify Duration ##### full · Strength ##--- 2:05 Watch a performer in town to convert your bank into an Inspired charge.
Client only. Ships before S13 and S14, which both assume the player can see what they are spending. The readout math is pinned against the same shared formulas the server runs, so the sheet can never flatter.
Tips arrive as a toast and vanish. A performer deserves a set ledger: who tipped what, when, and the set's running total, session-scoped, gone when the show closes. The patron's side shows what they gave. Nothing is stored and nothing is ranked; the point is the social contract, and the social contract is per show. Nine years ago the community ran a hire-a-bard thread and a player took the gig; the shipped tip flow finally pays that job, and this card gives the worker the receipt.
Seen in: Star Wars Galaxies' tipping norms, the strongest economy a non-combat role has had; the 2017 hiring thread, Lily Byrd paying for an hour's set and scroda taking the stage.
22 minutes · audience 6
Tomas 500g
Ariel 1,000g
A stranger 250g
----------------------
Set total 1,750g
Client aggregation of tip events the client already receives; nothing stored server-side, no history op, no new economy surface. The gig board stays the music page's card; this is the ledger under any stage, board or not.
Today the tenth minute of a set pays exactly like the first, and the room feels no arc. The encore gives the set a shape. Working the room fills an encore meter the whole audience can see: moves landed, band play, and, for the first time, the audience's own answer, applause during the set counts toward the call. When the meter fills, the crowd calls for more, and the performer may play the encore: a short finale during which the room's conversion runs at its ceiling and the performer's moves chain freely. Then the meter rests. The arc is earned by activity on both sides of the stage and never by parking: an idle bard's meter does not move, and a silent room fills it slowly. Applause is a bump above an unchanged baseline, so a patron who only stands and watches loses nothing; a room that answers gets its finale sooner.
Seen in: Rift's builder-and-coda support rotation; ArcheAge's song that grows the longer it plays, kept for the town where standing and playing is the point; Star Wars Galaxies' band flourishes, and the cantina's tombstone lesson that the audience's interaction is the loop's armor.
Encore ##############------ audience 6 Ariel applauds. The crowd calls for more. You play your encore. The whole square feels it.
The meter derives server-side from the activity shares and heartbeats the loop already reports, so no new client claim is trusted; applause rides the existing heartbeat as one more bounded fact, at most one bump per window, session-scoped, nothing stored. The encore's conversion boost compounds against the same per-second ceiling that already bounds the best honest stack, so the ceiling is the encore's hard bound by construction; a scripted room gains at most what an attentive one gains. Tunables join the shared inspiration math on both code trees under the mirror discipline. Fires one room event the clients render.
An Inspired charge spends itself on whatever experience arrives next, junk included. The patron who watched a fine set at noon burns their bonus on an afternoon of gathering instead of the evening boss run they saved it for. One toggle fixes it: hold my inspiration. Held, the charge waits, whole, until released; released, it spends exactly as today. Nothing drains while held, nothing expires, nothing is lost in either position of the switch. The choice of when the bonus begins finally belongs to the person it belongs to.
Seen in: Bardic Inspiration itself, the meter's tabletop namesake, where the recipient holds the die and chooses the moment to spend it.
One flag beside the charge in the character's inspiration record and one small op in the existing bard request group; the experience-award path checks the flag where it reads the charge today. The stored-shape change carries its data-migration ledger entry in the same commit. The gain-only contract is pinned in both switch positions: holding never reduces, never expires, never penalizes.
The genre's cheapest goodwill purchase, still unclaimed here: the road song. A marching chorus that quickens the whole party's step on roads and open country, ends the instant anything fights, and grants nothing once swords are out. Twenty-five years of evidence say the speed song is the one support product every group physically feels, and the reason parties formed around two different games' bards. The bard becomes the person every party is glad to have on the walk, without touching a single combat number.
Seen in: EverQuest's Selo's Accelerando, faster than a horse with a drum; Dark Age of Camelot's Skald, the class groups formed around.
A new song on the existing contracts: instrument, focus, channel, bar, the data test suite. One fork stated honestly: the school's shipped rule is that no party song touches the caster, which on a travel song strands the singer jogging behind their own sprinting party. The default here follows the rule and accepts the comedy; the alternative, a mobility-only exception because zero combat power rides it, is the owner call flagged on the card.
The school's priciest innate costs four times the experience of its siblings, and its tooltip sells the smaller half of what it does. It lets a trained voice stand in for an instrument, up to parity and never past. It also, silently, sets the pace at which an audience's strength ramp climbs while they watch you, the entire second axis of fortification. A player paying specialization-tier experience for a stat that caps at parity deserves to be told about the second job. The words state both jobs; the price stays an owner question, asked here with the arithmetic attached: the strength axis levels four times slower per point of experience than the duration axis, and that asymmetry is either a deliberate rarity or a price tag nobody re-read.
Seen in: this page's own audit of the fortification arithmetic.
Strings ride S1; the price question is one owner ruling; the ramp constants stay drift-pinned either way, since the shared math reads them on both code trees.
Patrons watching a performance gain a small comfort while they watch: a touch of health and focus regeneration that lingers a few minutes after they leave, so a tavern with a working bard in it is the best place in town to catch your breath. It is tuned to be worth feeling and never worth farming: town-only, too small to out-value an inn bed, and it can never stack with itself.
Seen in: Song of Rest, the tabletop's performance-as-downtime; Star Wars Galaxies' cantina, the reason a whole server knew where the music was.
Granted on the credited watch ticks the server already counts, so every fact involved is server-owned: a live performance, a verified heartbeat, credited seconds. The buff rides the game's existing music effect channel, a two-slot channel with replace-oldest rules that no bard song currently occupies, which makes self-stacking structurally impossible and its contention with instrument-item effects predictable. No stored state, no new op.
Bard and Taming is the most common specialization pairing in the game, and the rework's songs deliberately no longer reach pets at all. Power for pets belongs to the taming program, and this page does not move one number of it. What the bard can still give a pet is charm: companions react to a performance the way the room does. A wolf settles by the stage. A bear sways off the beat. A spider does whatever spiders do. Zero numbers, all character, for the two hundred seventy-one players whose whole build is the bard and the beast.
Seen in: Star Wars Galaxies' cantinas, where the room reacting was the product; every game whose pets ignore the world and feel worse for it.
Client-side reaction behaviors for owned pets in venue scenes, triggered from the performance events the client already receives; emote layer only, no stats, no effects, no server. Animation coverage varies by creature rig and the card ships with whatever the menagerie can act.
When a party of performers works a room together, one tip should be able to pay the band. A tip to any partied co-performer offers an even split across the troupe, with each cut on the ledger. Playing together already converts faster for the audience; now it pays together too. On the test shard the band move has barely been touched, because band play needs more reasons to exist, and getting paid together is the oldest one there is.
Seen in: Star Wars Galaxies' cantina bands; the game's own 2017 hire-a-bard thread, where the performer brought an apprentice to the gig.
The tip flow's debit-then-credit gold movement gains a split across live co-performing party members in the same room, using the same band definition the conversion math already trusts, with each recipient's cut in the item log. Transactional logic only, no stored shape, bounded by the existing tip throttle and the rule that the live performance session is the authorization.
Keeping the covenant is the school's skill, and today it pays nothing visible. The crescendo makes restraint spendable. While the bard stays clean of damage, a charge builds along the same sixty-second clock the lockout already runs; at full, the bard may spend it on one swelling pulse: the current song's next pulse lands half again as strong, once, and the charge empties. Draw blood and the charge is simply gone until the silence lifts. A hero moment measured in the school's own currency, the minute you kept.
Seen in: Rift's coda, the spender that makes support a rotation; Orpheus, keeping faith finally rewarded; Black Desert's lesson that the no-damage class needs its moment.
Client formula work on the same gate the lockout evaluates, one new term in the songs' amounts behind a spend flag; no server. The half-again figure is illustrative and the card states its band arithmetic plainly: a single-pulse spike prices well inside the published 15 percent party-uplift band, and the changeset publishes the measured uplift beside it. Ships after S3, so the thing being spent has been visible for a wave.
The two debuff songs shave the same thirty-five points off a starving wolf and an ancient dragon. Ultima Online shipped exactly that math in 1997, watched bards farm gods for five years, and fixed it in 2002 with the great retrofit: a per-creature barding difficulty the verbs roll against, capped, with reduced effect at the top. This card imports the fix before the problem matures. Each creature family carries a difficulty tier that scales the debuff magnitude down toward bosses and up toward trash, with a floor so the songs always matter and never trivialize. The school keeps meaning something as content scales, and never becomes the mandatory key to the top of the game.
Seen in: Ultima Online, Publish 16 and Publish 28, cited by name; and the community's own 2021 nerf history, the lesson that target-blind bard power gets chased by nerfs forever.
A difficulty term joins the two debuff amount expressions, read from creature archetype data the formula machinery already reaches; tier values ship through the balance program with a published table. This card is the gate S22 waits behind, and the scaling floor the party-uplift band is measured against for debuff-driven groups. The curve and the floor are the owner call.
The adapted half of the barding-verbs hand-off. A pacifying song: non-damaging crowd control that settles a creature out of the fight until it is struck, sung under the same covenant as everything else the bard plays, and rolled against the barding difficulty so it can never lock down content above its weight. Pure control, nothing more: it never redirects a creature, never makes one fight for you, never converts an enemy's power into yours. The school retired its old mesmerize as dead weight; this is the verb rebuilt on the machinery that makes it honest.
Seen in: Ultima Online's Peacemaking; the tabletop's Fascinate; and Lúthien singing the fortress to sleep, the biggest song in the school's own mythology.
Rides the standard crowd-control resistance and diminishing-returns machinery every hard control already pays, so chain-pacify governs itself; sequenced strictly after S21, whose difficulty stat is the gate. Provocation stays rejected; the fences hold.
The oldest complaint from the school's loud era was that bard power had no counter. The rework shipped the quiet half of the answer already: an enemy bard's debuff songs ride a channel your side's fortification can never stretch, and songs contend for the same slots on every target. This card finishes the thought with the genre's oldest duel. A bard may contest an enemy bard's running song: an opposed check of the two performers' skill, resolved by the server from facts it owns, no positions needed. Win, and the target song falls silent for a spell; lose, and your own next song opens flat. Contests touch combat songs only. The Inspiration economy, flattened in player-versus-player play by design, stays untouchable.
Seen in: Finrod against Sauron, the duel of songs; the tabletop's Countersong; asked for in spirit by Adam Crow and that_shawn_guy, whose threads named the missing counter.
Marek contests your song. Your song holds. Marek's dirge falters.
One op beside the existing bard request group; a skill-versus-skill roll with cooldowns and a per-pair limit so contests are punctuation, never a lockout loop. Before any of it, a verification pass on the test shard confirms the shipped per-target song contention already behaves as counterplay, and displacement gets visible feedback either way; the contest op is the escalation the owner can decline while keeping the feedback. Tests pin the contest math and the untouched meter.
The oldest comp answer in the genre, delivered as a specialization choice instead of a second class. At high mastery a bard leans one of two ways: the same songs, with the war anthem favoring strength and weapon crit down one road, intelligence and spell crit down the other, and the two debuffs leaning physical or magical to match. Two bards at the top of the school stop being interchangeable, the old complaint that only one build was worth trying gets its structural answer, and no new tree is built. Uplift stays inside the published band down both roads, measured in the changeset.
Seen in: EverQuest II's dirge and troubadour, minus the buffbot trap, because the moves and the covenant already demand a played bard; asked for structurally by that_shawn_guy.
Data-shaped: spec-gated rider effects on the existing pattern, selected by a stored preference, with the data test suite pinning both roads. Consumes S8's anchor ruling, and shares the band budget with S10's quickstep, which is why both carry the owner-call chip. If the preference persists server-side it is one character field with its migration ledger entry.
Bards are the record. A performer may dedicate a set, to a party, a guild, an occasion, assembled from a fixed book of phrases, and every buff their performance fortifies carries the dedication in its tooltip: the performer's name, the venue, the line they chose. No numbers attach, ever. Months later a buff bar still occasionally reads like a town's memory, which is a thing only a small world can have.
Seen in: Dandelion writing Geralt's legend; the skalds' praise poems; the concert culture that outlived every set it was built on.
Fortified: lasts longer and works
harder for a while.
Played at the Crooked Anchor, for
the Company of the Red Branch.
The dedication rides the fortification wire as one more key; phrase parts come from a fixed book, so there is no free text and no moderation surface. Territory honored: titles stay with the achievements page, the crier with towns.
A specialized bard's heal song quietly grants every ally a large bonus to the healing they give others, and the life school's signature heal consumes exactly that stat. A bard and a healer standing together are already markedly stronger than either of them knows: at deep specialization the bonus approaches half again on the healer's mending of others. This card changes no number. It puts the pairing on the character sheet, in both schools' tooltips, and in the strategy references, so the strongest cross-school partnership in the support game becomes a plan instead of an accident.
Seen in: EverQuest II's dirge and troubadour, whose value was legible enough to build a group around; ours is already shipped and invisible.
Strings ride S1; the character sheet shows the granted stat while the buff holds; a paragraph lands in both schools' strategy references. Whether the rider's magnitude is right belongs to S8's ruling, not here.
A performance career leaves a record. Credited watch time and tips received accrue into a renown track with named ranks, street busker up through names a town says with weight, and rank unlocks are cosmetic and social only: stage presence, a flourish only the highest rank can take, the rank shown to the room when a show opens. No power anywhere in it. Reputation is the pay a performer actually plays for, and the town half of the school deserves a career arc, not just a session loop.
Seen in: the Eolian's talent pipes in The Name of the Wind, performance as credentialed reputation; the master entertainers whose names their servers still remember.
Server-side aggregation of two facts the server already counts, credited watch seconds and tips received, into stored rank thresholds pinned in the shared math. Persistent per-character records carry a data-migration ledger entry. Collusive-watching yield is bounded by the same throttles that bound conversion, and cosmetic-only stakes keep the abuse worth near zero. A new progression track is a program decision, hence the owner chip.
What Tier 1 plus Tier 2 feel like, on surfaces the game already draws. The left pane is a town set; the right is a fight on the road; every tagged moment is a card on this page, and the two panes share one economy: the bard on the left is why the party on the right walks in fortified and Inspired.
[Flourish][Dance][Grp Dance][Stance] [Melody][Savage][Rhapsody][Dirge][Requiem] Encore ##############------ S13 Audience: 6 watching S7 Tomas tips you 500 gold. Set: 22m Tips: 1,750g S12 The crowd calls for more. S13 You play Savage Sonata for the square. Your performance continues. S2
Buffs: [Melody 0:24] [Savage 0:04]
[Inspired +15%, held] S14
The chorus carries you down
the road. S15
You strike the wolf.
[Song Silenced 0:58] S3
Your songs regain their strength.
Your crescendo is ready. S20
The melody swells. The party
is mended.
Legibility before depth, depth before new verbs. Nothing spends what cannot be seen, every changeset lands on the school's existing test pins, and the owner calls are marked so nothing waits on one that does not need it.
| Wave | Ships | Rule |
|---|---|---|
| W0 · Truth | S1's strings, S6's guards, S8's audit half, S9's published verdicts; the defect bugs behind S2, S4, S5, S7 filed the day this page goes up. | The words and the guards first; every fix published with what was broken. |
| W1 · The mend | S2, S4, S5, S7; S8's changeset once ruled. | Fix-first before any new surface; the show-ending bug confirmed and fixed on the test shard. |
| W2 · The glass | S3, then S11, S12. | The covenant and the meter become visible before anything reads them harder. |
| W3 · The room | S13, S14, S16, S17, S18, S19. | The loop deepens only after it is legible; agency and the encore ride the visible meter. |
| W4 · The wider stage | S10 and S15 as the two new songs; S20 after S3; S21, then S22; S23; S24; S25; S26; S27 last. | New verbs after the fixed base; the difficulty stat gates the peace verb; every band-brushing card publishes its measurement. |
flowchart LR W0["W0 truth: words, guards, verdicts"] --> W1["W1 the mend"] W1 --> S3["S3 the lockout's face"] S3 --> S11["S11 the meter on screen"] S11 --> S13["S13 the encore"] S11 --> S14["S14 hold your inspiration"] S12["S12 receipts"] --> S13 S3 --> S20["S20 the crescendo"] W1 --> S21["S21 barding difficulty"] S21 --> S22["S22 the peace verb"] S3 --> S23["S23 the song contest"] S8["S8 the anchor ruling"] --> S24["S24 dirge and troubadour"] S8 --> S10["S10 the quickstep"] S13 --> S27["S27 renown"] S19["S19 the troupe"] --> S27 S4["S4 one number per fact"] -.->|coordination| MS3["music page: instrument-field read"] style S3 stroke:#8a6d33,stroke-width:2.5px style S11 stroke:#8a6d33,stroke-width:2.5px style MS3 stroke-dasharray:4
Combat in this game is a deterministic simulation run on the players' machines, and a school is therefore mostly authored data: formulas, effect entries, skill-sheet cells, strings. The town economy is the exception that proves the rule, a server-owned loop built on counters, sessions, and ceilings rather than positions. This page is shaped accordingly:
| Change class | Cards | What it touches |
|---|---|---|
| Strings and documentation | S1, S9's publication, S16, S26 | The localization pass, the published verdicts, the sheet display |
| Client fixes and presentation | S2, S3, S4, S6, S7's client half, S11, S12, S18 | The stance gate, the named lockout, the meter, the ledger, the pet reactions |
| Formula and tuning changesets | S8, S20, S21, S24 | Spell expressions regenerated through the real tokenizer, on pins |
| New songs on existing machinery | S10, S15, S22 | Skill rows, rune assets, icons, localization, the song-contract tests |
| Server work on existing facts | S7's prune, S13, S17, S19, S23, S25 | Heartbeats, credited ticks, tips, one op, one wire key; no positions anywhere |
| Stored state, with ledger entries | S14, S27, S24's preference if persisted | One flag, one record family, one field |
The school shipped better covered than any before it: fourteen editor-mode suites spanning the watch gates, the stance truth table, the song data contracts, the entertainer rules, the inspiration math, the buff families, the fortify ramp and its retroactive grant, the instrument bonus, effect plausibility, venue certification, tree integrity, and the bar's contents. The new obligations, card by card: S2's singing-versus-fighting rows, S4's area-authority pin, S8's rider pins at the ruled values, S11's readout parity, S13's meter and ceiling pins, S14's hold state machine with the gain-only invariant pinned in both positions, S10 and S15 and S22 riding the song-contract suite automatically, S20's charge clock and spend-once, S21's difficulty tiers, S23's contest math and meter isolation, S25's wire round trip, S27's thresholds.
| Ask | Asked by | Answered |
|---|---|---|
| Require an equipped instrument | ConjurerDragon, Krovakin; weapon-gating from maldoke; pre-announced by Violet Ronso | Shipped in the rework, credited |
| An active counter to monster magic resistance | Akandriel | Shipped: Requiem of Ruin |
| Savage Sonata's sound and animation payoff | Akandriel | S5 |
| Stacking limits, one song at a time | that_shawn_guy, Adam Crow | Shipped: the two-song limit and family contention |
| A counter to bard power | Adam Crow, necronut, that_shawn_guy | The covenant and the debuff channel, shipped; S23 |
| More than one build worth trying | that_shawn_guy | S24 |
| Skills that scale with investment | Loaffer, AoiBlue | The reported skill is retired and refunded; S21 carries the scaling lesson forward |
| A retired song's duration | (unnamed wishlist entry) | Retired and refunded; S9 |
| Performance should not break on mundane actions | Mingo | The August rounds fixed the class of bug; S2 closes the last case |
| Protect the bard's ownership of music's value | Mingo | The power layer is interaction-gated by design |
| Distinct bard skill icons | community thread; "possible" on record from the team | The music page's card and its filed art task, strengthened by this page's finding |
| Hire a bard, pay a bard | Lily Byrd, scroda, Xee, Roycestein Kaelstrom, Jezebel Caerndow, Obsidian Tempest | The shipped town loop; S12, S13, S27 |
Shipping game data: the school's twenty-five skill-sheet rows, the nine live rune assets and their delivered effects, the five innate packages, and the shared inspiration and buff-family math. The client performance, watch, and bar systems, and the server's bard authority. Thirty days of live-server skill-use telemetry ending 2026-08-14: 8.88 million cast events across all schools, 185,601 of them bard, with distinct-caster counts as lower bounds from a random 4,000-cast sample; plus confirmation on the chaos test shard that every skill of the new roster fires, with magnitudes withheld because testers are the only population there. The balance program's targets, change log, and the school's four August changesets. Fourteen editor-mode test suites. The community record: seven forum threads from 2017 through 2024, the wishlist ledger, and two developer replies on record. And the genre: twelve games from Ultima Online 1997 through Pantheon, tabletop from first edition through the 2024 revision, and the myths the class walked out of.
Prepared 2026-08-14 against the unity-6.5 migration branch. Companion markdown: docs/plans/2026-08-14-bard-improvements-proposal.md. Twenty-seven proposals: eight fix-first, eleven core, eight wider stage. Fourteenth skill-school page in the series; with it the Strategy ring stands at four of five written.
No account needed. Every proposal above also has its own Discussion box for talking about that one alone; this thread is for the plan as a whole. Comments are plain text, held to basic decency, and may be trimmed.