Chanting explained?

[RevBlue]

Hi all!

 

Just a quick question, I just got my first Chanter character (pretty sure you know who, but will refrain from adding detals just in case)

 

Anyway, my quesiton is: I am pretty confused as to how the chanting system works, any tips/explanations you guys can give me to make good use of it?

 

Thanks!

[Mungri]

I havnt played a chanter yet, but the idea seems similar to bard songs in typical DnD games. You play a chant just as a bard would a song, and it either buffs your group or debuffs the enemies.

[Magrusaod]

I am trying one out as my main PC. I am running a combo of M: 14, C: 12, D: 12, P: 6, I: 20, R: 14. This gives me a slight boost to Health and Fort and Attack Speed and Ref, slightly better boost to Damage, Healing, Concentration, Will and Deflection. The Perception dump cancel's out the Deflection gained, and makes my Interrupts terrible, but I'm not interested in that. 

My main focus is truly extended Chants with a larger radius. Allowing my PC to sit in the middle of my party chanting and granting auras to the rest of the party. My passive Endurance restore does more, although it's scaling is terrible. My chants last for 6 seconds instead of 4, meaning when I start chanting 1, and then start the 2nd, the first chant continues up to the end of me chanting the first. This is key. It allows me to do a 1, 2 combo endlessly where once round 2 is started, I have both chant effects constantly up. 

I've no clue if this is a *good* build, I only just started playing, but lol. I ended up in a fight with a bunch of bandits earlier and my weapon ended up being ineffective. I literally killed them solely with COME, COME SOFT WINDS OF DEATH damage combined with THE THUNDER ROLLED LIKE WAVES ON BLACK SEAS for DPS. I was running Dull the Edge, Blunt the Point with Ancient Memory passive. Taking between no and 2 damage per strike, just essentially siphoning their life away slowly for 3 rounds, then shoving them backwards for a spike of damage. Slowly healing as they came at me. My weapon literally had no effect against them, at all. 

So this is a sustain build, not damage, right now. Not sure how it will turn out, but worst case scenario, I can protect my allies from axes, swords, spears, arrows and polearms while slowly healing my allies and injuring the enemy. Better chants and invocations will give me more options down the road. 

[AncientSpark]

Here's how Chanting works. Chanters have two types of abilities, Phrases and Invocations.

 

Phrases have two phases; a startup phase (the "duration") and a lingering phase. The Phrase grants its benefits during both phases, but only one Phrase can be in startup phase at a time. However, this does mean multiple Phrase can be active at once, if one of them is in startup and the others are in lingering (so Int is therefore powerful for Phrases because they affect the linger time). You can set-up Phrase sequences to auto-play in the interface and the game will automate your Phrases for you, by immediately playing Phrases when they're done with their startup, one after the other. Also note that Phrases are NOT actions; this means Dex does not affect their startup duration either, so Dex is not as important for Chanters as other characters.

 

Invocations are disabled until a Chanter sucessfully goes through three startup phases of Phrases (either the same Phrase or different ones, doesn't matter; just needs 3 of them). Once they do so, the Chanter can then activate one Invocation; this IS an action.

Edited March 27, 2015 by AncientSpark

[Skor]

I'm curious, I started with a 20 int and it shows my chants have a duration of 6 sec total, instead of 4.  I can't tell from the graphic on the music sheet if the extra duration is being split between both the active chanting and the linger or just the linger.  If its splitting it and making the active chant an extra second longer, then its actually creating a detriment because it is taking me 33% longer to build 3 counters to fire of an invocation.  Anyone esle figuring this out?