My original thread from 2010: https://forums.warpp...derer/?p=169925 -- note that most of the skills are still busted! 6 years later!! 
Synopsis:
Performer has lost its place. In 2003-2005, dancer/gypsy was not a fully focused on "party support" type of class.
- Dancer had double strafe and slinging arrow, and they could both do decent damage!
- Arrow Vulcan was also pretty great in PVM for 1 shot killing some of the highest level monsters in the game (like Kathryne Keyron, Kasa, and Gold Acidus!), when combined with lex aeterna.
- The support aspects of dancer were more "weaken enemy" and the bard was the one that had "improve ally" abilities. The dancer did offensive status like stun, lowering enemy speed, that sort of thing.
This was the way of things -- minor amount of support for the party in PVM (leave the heavy lifting to a priest), offensive debuffs for the woe role, and in pvm, DPS to help pick off enemies threatening the party!
What do we have now? A mess! The class cannot support very well at all, and the debuffs are all busted/non-functioning, and the PVM DPS is horrendously under-scaled and cost prohibitive.
Skills
Death Valley - This is a priest's resurrect but with 2 drawbacks. Can you developers please make up your mind? Is Performer a hybrid offense/support class (which would make the drawbacks make sense) or a support class (in which case why is this clearly inferior to resurrect? If the job class is inferior to priest in every way, why would you play this?). The only interesting thing about this skill is that it can resurrect a player wearing Undead property armor. This is a trade-off with losing the ability to damage undead monsters, though.
Deep Sleep Lullaby - Orginally, this skill was quite powerful in WoE. Maybe too powerful. But it was weakened by kRO-- TOO MUCH! It's not useful in WoE at all anymore. Very unreliable. Even a Sorcerer can put people to sleep better. Also it is STILL BUGGED! You turned it off in all player-vs-enemy (PVE) maps because it was making players fall asleep. FIX IT and TURN IT BACK ON! We want to be able to use it when leveling! It has a combination with [Metallic Sound that] outright cannot be used in PVE as a result.
Despair Song - This is OK nowdays! One of the useful skills for performer, which is similar to an ankle snare from a ranger, but can be placed from some distance. We come from the same archer as Ranger so it makes sense we have a tool like this in PVE areas, but you frequently treat us like we're not supposed to be able to fight enemies! Make up your mind!
Reverberation - This skill needs a MASSIVE overhaul!! Its WEAK!! The damage is very low! Its WAY TOO HARD to get someone to walk over it because for some reason you have it with no activation range! All traps, geneticist plant, etc, have a 3x3 activation area, why doesn't this have it? Please fix that! Also the damage distributes/splits like Blitz Beat when it damages enemies. Why? Severe Rainstorm does like 10x the damage this does, why does it need to be completely ineffective when there are many enemies? Even if I wanted to kill 1 enemy at a time, if a second wanders over, I am now dealing half damage and can't kill one let alone both enemies in a reasonable amount of time! Remove this drawback, its super-mega-duper unnecessary! There are already reasons why Severe Rainstorm would be more powerful (such as element change, larger area of effect, etc) so you don't need these hurtful drawbacks!
Dominion Impulse - This is not useful! It has a long delay and so does the Reverberations! In the time it takes to set down Reverberations and then cast dominion, you could have done 10x as much damage with Severe Rainstorm! Make it do something more, like remove a random enemy buff or when it does explode a Reverberation, it should increase the damage by 200% or something!
Lover Symphony - Not that useful, (but they can't all be winners). It should reduce the enemy's MATK or something instead!
Circling Nature - My goodness!!!! Useless! Bad! Why do you hate us? This skill is very very very weak! And has a drawback for no reason! And is currently disabeld in all maps except war of emperium/PVP because it was affecting players unintentionally in non-PVP zones and you were too lazy to bug fix it! Why do you hate performers so much? Drastically increase the amount of healing! Get rid of the SP drain! And turn it back on for PVE parties!!!
Gloomy Shyness - This is actually useful in WoE... perhaps make it have a better success rate though for removing mounts! Rune Knights are too strong and need a counter like this!
Improvised Song - This is quite useless and there is no real way to make it useful! Its unreliable, slow, and weak! But you can at least make it FUN in in PVE! Have it cast 5 random spells in succession on the chosen tile instead of giving you a target cursor for 1 random spell.
Frigg's Song - This is one of the best songs you have given us. Which is actually very sad. This one is good as it is.
Metallic Sound - This skill depresses me so much. It looks like it could be great. It looks like the 3rd job version of Arrow Vulcan. It looks like something that has a fun combo (sleep+kill) for solo PVE or PVP. It looks like it can be used in WoE to siphon SP as a offensive-supportive role. It is none of those things because it does as much damage as a first job skill (fire bolt/cold bolt/etc) !!!!!!! With the "Sound Amplifier" item it does the damage it SHOULD HAVE DONE FROM THE START but with a EXTREMELY PROHIBITIVE SP cost. Also Deep Sleep Lullaby is disabled in PVE!!! Fix Deep Sleep Lullaby! Turn it back on in PVE after! Also the delay on the skill is way too long! It has a longer delay than skills with a 11x11 Area of Effect and it only targets one enemy! You already made a hat at my&iRO's request (wing headphone) which fixed this specific cooldown problem. Thank you! Please up the base damage of this skill to 2,500% instead of 1,000% -- and significantly reduce the SP penalty of Sound Amplifiers-- this will make it effective in PVE when used with sound amplifiers and in WoE it can be used to knock out the majority if not all of someone's SP.
Severe Rainstorm - This skill is too good! I mean, its not too strong, its actually a lot weaker than other classes' skills, but its way better than all of the other performer damage abilities by kilometers and lightyears. Why is a bow skill the only centerpiece of a class that has its own unique weapons (whips, guitars)? Please make the other skills more effective rather than focusing all of your new equipment on improving Severe Rainstorm...
Moonlight Serenade - The benefit is too low, nobody ever uses it when they could instead be using swing dance/rush to windmill. I hardly notice any damage chance with this when used with metallic sound. Perhaps it should have a more visible effect? Like a static MATK in the status window.
Great Echo - Do they use this in your country? Here on iRO I've never seen anyone seriously use this. It does very low damage and requires a lot of performers to be used with any effiacy. The delay is too long for it to be used when leveling up your character, and the damage is too low for PVP/WoE. What is this for? Can you make this do something more interesting? Such as also afflicting whoever you damage with multiple negative status effects? Or dealing additional damage on boss monsters, so that performers who are participating in a MVP fight can pitch this in on occasion?
Dances with Wargs - The benefit on rangers is too great... it makes us a slave to rangers and makes the ranger a one man/woman hero in PVP. This is not the way to encourage people to play as this job class. Improve the other skills I mentioned above and you can lower the effectiveness of this on the Ranger ally.
Song of Mana - Far too weak! This is a joke! You've made headgears that are 4x better than this! Drastically increase the recovery amount and frequency!
Lerad's Dew - You obsoleted your own skill with Frigg's Song! What the heck! This needs to be re-worked. Give it a new effect. Maybe it can remove 1 negative status effects from all allies every 10 seconds.
Warcry from Beyond - Get rid of the max HP drawback. It is not needed.
Infinite Humming - This is not very useful. Have it increase MATK and reduce fixed cast time maybe?
If I didn't mention the other skills it is because they are decent. (There aren't many).
Elephant in Room
Magic Strings. It is a horrible skill. It makes other skills which would be fair... become unfair. And I suspect it is the main reason every other aspect of the performer job is restrained so much.
BOLD SUGGESTION: WEAKEN MAGIC STRINGS and improve the heck out of this game! Be brave and brace for the players to riot!
Edited by Kadelia, 30 August 2016 - 08:29 PM.
