I noticed a lot of changes to the Bard profession in Renaissance from the T2A experience I'm used to, so I started looking things up to understand them better. I found the official publish that contains many of the changes I've seen here: http://update.uo.com/design_415.html This is when Provocation became difficulty based and when all instruments, newbie included, started to break. But the date of that publish is Jul 23 2002, which was after Third Dawn and four months into the Lord Blackthorn's Revenge expansion. I know complete 'UO:R accuracy' is not necessarily the goal of Renaissance but generally speaking what are the beginning and ending cutoff dates that are primarily used? And were these bard changes included with knowledge of these publish dates?
The changes you linked are part of publish 16 which is the one that introduced power scrolls and champ spawns. I reckon most people would count this as being a different era from UO:R as the game changed dramatically with this update.
I hope staff sees it your way because all those listed changes only served to make bards worse. Far worse.
Provo here is difficulty based and instruments do break. Nothing should be permanent in UO, it keeps the economy running. I have a 7x bard/provoker and it works great on this shard.
I know. Almost every change to bards listed in that patch is a current Renaissance feature. I wasn't talking about whether or not I could still make a bard work with that ruleset though. The questions were whether or not these rules were implemented with full knowledge of the fact that they came after UO:R and what is generally considered the starting and ending timeframe for Renaissance rules.