#NerfBRD

[Connor]

Wouldn’t most of the Bard vs Machinist debate be quelled if they just focused on giving Bard more utility next expansion instead of even better better?
Then Machinist gets more DPS oriented skills which makes deciding between the two more interesting?

Just a suggestion. As for crit scaling, I don’t know much about how that would be balanced properly but maybe they put a cap of some sort on it so that Bards can’t past a certain crit rate that would make their damage too high?

I don’t believe (from what I understand) that Bard DPS itself is too strong. I think it still technically does the lowest damage of all DPS jobs in a vacuum (I may be wrong). But, I do think Bard itself does a little too much, too easily. It’s the entirety of its toolkit relative to competitor jobs (Machinist in particular) that makes it seem ‘too strong’

Also i know I’ll be flayed alive for saying it but I really liked the original idea for Bards having to spend gcd / cast times on support songs instead of it all being off-cd instant cast. I don’t mean the damage reduction from songs, just the DPS loss itself of having to do something that isn’t Heavy Shot. Wouldn’t something like this balance Bard without them having to bother with crit scaling? That way our abilities don’t technically have to change and it’s easier to balance against Machinist with them having instant-cast stuff but on cooldowns.

It’s also worth considering that there will be more ranged physical DPS in future (probably lol). How strong would they need to be to fully compete with Bard?

[Grimoire-M]

-snip-

Bard's DPS scales immensely off of critical hit rate, which SCH, AST and DRG can all provide to it. Combined they could provide up to 35-45% (if AST caters to BRD specifically) crit rate at the moments BRD wants it the most. To put it in perspective, you'd need the relic weapon to get more than that amount of crit rate on top of running for BRD's Best in Slot gear everywhere else. Just having a SCH and DRG in your party was enough to more than double your crit rate at the beginning of the expansion too.

Like MCH they also benefit from DRG's near 100% uptime piercing debuff, but boosting their spike window is far more important to pushing their overall DPS higher. Removing piercing wouldn't undo the requirement to have a DRG to maximize the potential of a BRD.

A better way to balance it would be to shift the procs to either flat rates, or direct hit, provided the latter was never given another raid buff on another class. Given SE would likely break that rule via an oversight in the future I'd prefer the flat proc system, and add a buff to proc rate in Raging Strikes, and maybe a trait that boosts every other Raging Strikes a bit further. Basically, give them more personal DPS to make up for the nerfs.

I don't think it's unreasonable to nerf some of BRD's raid dps either. Foes could easily be reworked into another song for their rotation and give them a different option. They kinda need an AoE song other than Ballad, and they could use a buff to Paeon too. I wouldn't mind a song that boosted their GCD damage too. Battle Voice could survive a 5% Direct Hit rate nerf while still being good.

I think nerfing the bardsong buff itself is probably what needs to happen though. 2% crit rate with 100% uptime has a weaker but similar effect as Piercing, but for your whole party, making it immensely, if deceptively good. Moving that to Direct Hit would help bring it down, limiting its overall power. You have to keep in mind that while the crit raid buffs only affect rate, their power still scales with item level far better than Direct Hit or % increases that aren't as high as TA, since boosting the Crit stat with gear boosts your rate AND the damage that your critical strikes do. Direct Hit rate buffs always give the same DPS boost, regardless of what your stats are.

I don't feel BRD needs GCD songs at all either. I'd rather remove them than buff them. It would be healthier for the game overall to not push BRD's utility further too (They're running out of nifty things to add that don't explicitly beat MCH further into the ground). Instead give it personal cooldown boosts that buff its spike DPS to match what it was capable of with 2 crit rate buffs while retuning its core kit to not function on crit at all anymore, undoing what makes it broken. MCH should get all of the love it frankly needs and deserves on top of pushing ahead of what BRD is currently capable of.

[Valence]

BRD is so strong because the developers continue to balance it (and MCH) without a DRG in mind (for piercing), in addition to Crit scaling being far higher than any other substat this tier - just as its been the last two expansions. From what I understand, no job is balanced with any sort of party or buff synergy in mind, which just adds to the problem.

To be honest, ranged physical without a dragoon are utter trash though. Even bard's rDPS right now isn't that high considering how much they lose due to piercing. It's good though, very good, no denying that.

[Connor]

I don't feel BRD needs GCD songs at all either. I'd rather remove them than buff them. It would be healthier for the game overall to not push BRD's utility further too (They're running out of nifty things to add that don't explicitly beat MCH further into the ground). Instead give it personal cooldown boosts that buff its spike DPS to match what it was capable of with 2 crit rate buffs while retuning its core kit to not function on crit at all anymore, undoing what makes it broken. MCH should get all of the love it frankly needs and deserves on top of pushing ahead of what BRD is currently capable of.

Wouldn’t everything stay the exact same as it is now with these changes? Unless Machinist got some ridiculous buff to compensate for Bard getting even more DPS boosts. Or some amazing raid DPS buffs?

Idk personally I feel like pushing Bard’s utility is exactly what it needs, but only under the condition that personal damage naturally suffers as a result.

It’s also worth considering that a job can have utility without it necessarily affecting raid DPS (like Red Mage with Cure/Raise). I’m assuming that in future they’ll continue to develop Machinist’s DPS mechanics (eventually lol) and continue to have it lower on the utility side. But if it balances that with better personal DPS, or maybe even better raid DPS, surely that’s enough?

I think anything that changes Bards DPS isn’t really going to address the problem. Especially if the changes just make it equivalent to what it was now but with different mechanics. I mean, the whole point of a Bard is to support the party, so I can’t see much good coming from them gutting its utility and turning it into an even more generic Archer job that has a harp out of sheer coincidence (I know this is what everyone wants but plz no lol).

Personally I think the developers imagine Bard as this support class that people take for their utility and not their DPS. Hence why it keeps being considered such a mess at each expansion release. Then, to address feedback, they make its DPS stronger and easier. And then we end up in this situation where Machinist is left crying in the corner because the developers don’t see it as the same kind of ‘support class’.

I understand that piercing buff and crit scaling are super important for balancing the jobs but I believe that doing so only addresses the symptoms of the main problem. Two jobs in the same slot can’t have two different roles when you have a trinity role system. They’re either both DPS or they don’t exist. But SE keeps trying (and not doing very well) to squish Bard into the traditional support role it had in every previous Final Fantasy, while keeping it a fast paced high APM Archer DPS. And as you can imagine, a high APM Archer with very high crit rate squished together with a song-based support class (*cough* which is a caster in literally every other FF except in this one, probably for a reason *cough*), it makes sense there’d be balancing issues

These two competing roles, a DPS and a support, are being fused to create a completely different concept of a Bard’s role than Machinist. Part of the different concepts comes from the fact that only one of the two jobs is a fusion of two pre-existing jobs. If you ask me, they can never balance a job that’s already a fusion of two previously existing FF jobs. If they make it just DPS, it’s not a Bard and they’ve failed at the job concept. If it just focuses on support, why is it a DPS in the first place? If it fuses the two, well, look where we are now.

Last but not least I’d honestly support them renaming Bard to ‘Archer’, change songs to be Forest Friends like FFV or something. Then Archers can be Archers and they can release Bard as a real job . I also imagine it’s significantly easier to balance an Archer vs Machinist than Archer + Bard vs Machinist. I mean, Machinist loses on numbers alone, because it doesn’t have a ‘second job’ to pull interesting abilities from conceptually. And of course there’s the expectation of what a job should do/be. I don’t think anyone would expect an Archer to output heavy utility whilst dealing damage, because it’s an Archer. They deal ranged damage, there’s only so many things an arrow can do lol. Easy to balance to against a job that also deals ranged damage.

Now imagine that Archer mysteriously upgrades into a singer with a bow but no restrictions on their songs. Balance is entirely the same, except now the Archer can buff the party with no mechanic hoops to jump through, no mp costs, no cast times, no gcd usage, and generally short cooldowns. Suddenly it starts to seem a little much in comparison to its competitors, right? Especially for a role that’s supposed to be dedicated to dealing damage.

[Grimoire-M]

-snip-

There's nothing wrong with BRD's identity being tied to Archer. Hell there have been plenty of MMOs that specifically tie Bard to Archer as part of their job promotion line. It's a pointless argument anyways as it's purely aesthetics. Work with what we've got.


BRD does not need more utility either. They have plenty. And the majority of it is focused on buffing everyone else's DPS. So much so that they can actually match a SMN's DPS when combining raid and personal contributions, before you factor in the crit/piercing synergies boosting their personal dps spikes to match what a selfish DPS could do in the right circumstances. Just because Troubadour is on a long cooldown doesn't mean it's bad either. It can line up to meet multiple mechanic checks (All of forsaken, for example) thanks to its 30s duration while also not hurting your LB generation (which Dismantle does, because the LB generation that I'm referring to specifically factors in mitigating otherwise lethal damage, and that doesn't take debuffs on the source into account in the check). And I have used Warden's and Minne to great effect before in progression when able to. Minne's main value is in busters, but it can and has saved people from oneshots in conjunction with good healers. All of those are things Dismantle simply cannot directly compete with. The only way I'd accept another utility cooldown is if the role actions MCH and BRD have were nerfed. Other than Refresh, because that one needs to happen anyways for reasons I'll explain later.

I'm imagining these personal dps changes would be implemented as part of the 5.0 changes. The nerfs I implied would be applied to the current kit, while traits and abilities added in the next expansion would push them back up to similar levels next expansion, effectively making it a neutral change. BRD's DPS isn't a problem in of itself. The real problem is how it scales off of raid buffs. If their procs are nerfed to no longer interact with raid buffs, then you make them no longer reliant on specific synergies to shine, then you don't have to balance them around those specific interactions, and thus you open up room for them to grow back to where they were next expansion. Basically, it would ultimately wind up being a neutral exchange for BRD's personal dps at 80, accomplished through a massive nerf to their current dps at 70. But it would fix a lot of the balance issues everywhere else that BRD specifically benefits from on top of it.

MCH on the other hand would get new skills that push their personal and raid DPS even further in order to match BRD's overall contributions, which would close the wide gap between them both currently, meaning it really would be a choice between the utilities both classes provide. Dismantle has it advantages too, which I have understated, but BRD has so many more that both the raid dps and personal DPS gap needs to be breached before that can happen.

This of course assumes some other balance changes were applied, like balancing Refresh/Mana Shift against one another (ideally by just reworking both into Mana Goard and giving them to all casters and both ranged DPS, so you just want any 2 of those 5 in your comp and don't care who it is) and either giving BRD/MCH piercing or removing it entirely. The reason MCH can't be too good at the moment is because Refresh trivializes healer MP management and piercing is a major buff to ranged DPS, so what happens when MCH is buffed is the caster DPS get pushed out by it if it's equal to BRD. BRD remains the go-to pick because their crit rate procs synergize immensely with all of the crit-rate buffs, their raid DPS utility is strong enough to let them compete with BLM, and they have enough non-DPS utility that giving them even more just pushes MCH further into the gutter. All of those things have to be changed, and while I recognize this would almost kill BRD in the process (Not really, Bardsong is -that- good), that's what the next expansion's new skills could fix.

[HyoMinPark]

To be honest, ranged physical without a dragoon are utter trash though. Even bard's rDPS right now isn't that high considering how much they lose due to piercing. It's good though, very good, no denying that.

I never said that they weren’t awful without a DRG—there’s a reason why most BRDs and MCHs who care about their damage won’t run in groups without a DRG. I ran the entirety of Deltascape without one, and most of Sigmascape without one. You don’t need to tell me how awful it feels to be without a DRG. I only said that they are not balanced with piercing in mind, which, in addition to the power creep of critical hit scaling as an expansion progresses, is why they have ended up stronger than they were probably intended. Yoshida has gone on record saying that both BRD and MCH are balanced as just BRD and just MCH, not BRD+DRG or MCH+DRG. We can’t have our own way to apply Piercing because, according to him, it would make us “too OP”.


Speaking in terms of their rDPS, though, BRD does have extremely high rDPS contributions with its entire kit. Proper BV usage and 100% uptime for the critical up buff individually are almost equivalent to what piercing gives a single physical ranged. The top speedkill for the Final Omega has a comp of PLD/WAR/SCH/AST/DRG/BRD/SMN/BLM. BRD contributed 280.7 rDPS from Foe’s, 264.0 rDPS from BV, and 364.5 rDPS from Critical Up. That’s a total of 909.2 rDPS contribution.

Not a small number.

For comparison:
—DRG brought 85.9 (Dragon Sight) + 482.5 (Litany) + 310.6 (Piercing) = 879.0 rDPS
—SCH brought 536.5 (Chain) + 336.8 (Fey Wind) = 873.3 rDPS
—AST brought 553.6 (Balance) + 104.8 (Spear) + 52.0 (Arrow) = 710.4 rDPS
—SMN brought 29.4 + 116.6 (Devotion) + 475.0 (Contagion) = 621 rDPS

So BRD had the highest rDPS contribution in that speed kill.

For the second highest speed kill (Final Omega again), with a comp of PLD/WAR/SCH/AST/NIN/DRG/BRD/SMN:

—BRD: 359.6 (Foe’s) + 372.1 (Critical Up) + 263.7 (BV) = 995.4 rDPS
—DRG: 104.4 (Dragon Sight) + 475.3 (Litany) + 354.7 (Piercing) = 934.4 rDPS
—NIN: 63.2 (Slashing) + 837.3 (TA) = 900.5 rDPS
—AST: 666.1 (Balance) + 100.4 (Spear) = 766.5 rDPS
—SCH: 667.8 rDPS (Chain)
—SMN: 49.1 (Contagion) + 171.3 (Devotion) + 114.7 = 335.1 rDPS


So you’re correct in saying BRD (and MCH) feel like trash to play without a DRG. But you’re wrong to say that BRD’s rDPS contribution “isn’t that great” compared to what they lose with piercing. Piercing is a godsend—that’s coming from a BRD main—but, executed properly, a BRD’s rDPS contribution is almost 3 times the amount of piercing. These calculations do not reflect any benefit that BRD receives (which their benefit from Foe’s is minuscule, and they do not benefit from any other buff in their kit), and would be unchanged if piercing was taken from the equation.

[Neela]

Why buff 1 job, then 10 other jobs, when you can just nerf 1 to bring it back in line?

because thats just flat theory and not possible in the current core of ff14s cls-syngery-structure?

[Lastelli]

because thats just flat theory and not possible in the current core of ff14s cls-syngery-structure?

Oh please, of course it's possible.

Nerf heavy shot to 130-140 potency. There, you just made MCH competitive again.

[Kabooa]

Nerfing BRD’s potencies on the two skills that Hyperius (incorrectly) listed won’t suddenly make MCH desireable. It’s not the answer to fixing the job, no matter how much people want it to be. The only thing that will fix MCH will be the developers seriously considering its gameplay and design, and taking steps to actually rectify them when 5.0 comes along. Along with actually balancing jobs with party buffs in mind, something I doubt they do now.

I also think substat scaling should be looked at when each raid tier is released, so that the issue with critical hit always scaling to be the best can be addressed.

Sure, which is something they can do next expansion.

If we want to wring our hands and say "But the poor Machinists" then you solve this quickly, efficiently, and -without disrupting everything else- by just nerfing the Bard.

[Neela]

Oh please, of course it's possible.

Nerf heavy shot to 130-140 potency. There, you just made MCH competitive again.

Do u really believe that? It wouldn’t change ANYTHING for Mch, lol.