When I read 'LARGE, AoE low-level buffs and debuffs' in the chanter's description, I thought "great, I can help and hinder across the entire battlefield with my chants!'
Not quite. The chant circles are really small, even with max INT, so if I stay at maximum range with a ranged weapon (playing an elf here), my chants do not even come close to reaching the melee camp (or enemies, for that matter).
So the way it is now, I have to decide if I want to be a melee chanter and buff the melee camp (and choose some debuff auras for enemies too) or be a ranged chanter and buff the ranged camp (and forget about debuffing enemies because the point of being a ranged fighter is staying the hell away from them, and the aura never reaches them).
So this greatly diminishes the effectiveness of any chants in my opinion. Is it really supposed to be this way?
Because 'forget chants, invocations is where the meat is' is really not that great if you have to wait three ore more turns before being able to cast anything useful and otherwise giving only slight buffs to half of your party at best, essentialy making you a mediocre fighter most of the time. The way I see it right now, Priests and Paladins have all the real buffs, and their limited spells per day don't matter much if you can rest anywhere anytime anyway.