People hating on visibility problems due to mist/lightning are wrong.

(Why are there two threads about this at the same time? I posted this in the wrong one initially, though it's relevant to both.)

A lot of people in this thread have mentioned problems with night-time visibility limits, but no-one has mentioned what is by far the largest one: They have a major effect on game balance, and hit some classes much harder than others:

As a Bard, if I see you coming from 20 seconds away, I start the fight buffed and we have a fair fight when you attack me. If I see you from 5 seconds away, I just die.

Bards are balanced around having their buffs active. If I have time to see an attacker coming and buff myself, I am significantly stronger (i.e. actually equal to that attacker). If I don't, I have to fight without the significant buffs my class is balanced around having.

I'm all for a real, good cosmetic day/night cycle with lighting effects, but I need night to not nerf my class specifically. Sure it'll hurt everyone a bit, but Bard by nature has to spend time buffing in advance in order to match the other classes power. Stopping me from doing that is a major nerf.

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I admit that if a Bard can buff to full instantly, it's not really an issue, but that honestly feels like a relatively odd design choice. If they can't, we're back to the same problem, unless you allow the buffs to be strong enough to make up for that time where they're just getting hit (or worse yet, stunned out of the cast), but if you allow that, they become OP in normal fights where they do have the chance to prepare, which unbalances things in a different direction.

Alternately, you could allow Bards buffs to last on the order of 5-10 minutes, but that doesn't help either. The songs you need to face a Fighter/Mage will be different than the ones you need to face a Cleric/Rogue. If there's one universal set of songs that's always correct, there's not really a game to play.

I haven't found a solution to this that doesn't either make Bard's design super weird, or in some way break the game. What alternative Bard class design choices did you have in mind?