"New" Bard.

[HyoMinPark]

The problem is that the way brd procs work, it's still hard to balance. In Alex Ultimate it's an op abomination because of multidotting, and it's by far the highest ranged dps. How do you balance a job like this when any scenario with 2-3 targets directly results in brd doing more dps than melee jobs?

I haven’t tried out BRD in TEA, so I can’t comment on the damage it has in there. However, the last 2 weeks of E1S (the only fight in the tier with adds to really pad on) actually has BRD below both MCH and DNC despite DoTs and the ability to pad on the two adds and the meteors during second orb phase. Uploads between the three ranged DPS are very close, so there’s no skewing there.

DNC: 12,696
MCH: 12,483
BRD: 12,167

This is from the 95th percentile.

EDIT: just want to add that if BRD does significantly pull ahead in TEA compared to the other DPS, I still think it’s a bit flawed. Especially if it continues to lag behind everywhere else. Most high-end fights aren’t likely to have a solid ~2 phases where there are multiple targets up and about.

[Shurrikhan]

The problem is that the way brd procs work, it's still hard to balance. In Alex Ultimate it's an op abomination because of multidotting, and it's by far the highest ranged dps. How do you balance a job like this when any scenario with 2-3 targets directly results in brd doing more dps than melee jobs?

Create another tight dps check that's entirely single-target and keep the AoE phases from being a large portion of the overall fight. It's honestly fine for one job to greatly outdps another in a single part of a fight, so long as it doesn't make that much difference to the encounter as a whole. Will just have to see how the next Ultimate handles both that and severe mobility/uptime concerns...

That or you have to tone down multi-DoTs across Bard, SMN, and quite possibly even MNK, or SAM (in cases where the adds will last near to some multiple of full minutes), which is far less than ideal.

[Valence]

Also add fights are always a problem in raiding since they removed dots from a lot of jobs that can't just dot everything as a measure to keep up with specialized dot jobs like bard. Lead Shot for example was a decent way for MCH not to lag behind on add phases, but it concerns a lot of classes now. I find it a bit concerning tbh.

[Valence]

My opinion, if players are silent about a certain job, its balanced perfectly. In SB nobody complained about Bard being OP, nobody complained about Bard being weak either. If they are so keen on listening to their players, why they do not when its concerning initial job changes? It was a perfect job, yet they felt the need to change it for no reason and now they dont know what to do with it at all D:

Are you kidding me????

I suppose we MCHs were not the most numerous and visible but damn it we spent our time complaining about BRD balance during the whole expansion... The crit scaling and party support were completely busted.

[Akiudo]

Can we stop for once nitpicking about ridiculously low differences between ranged physical jobs and actually address what truly matters, which is ranged physical versus everyone else?

Also add fights are always a problem in raiding since they removed dots from a lot of jobs that can't just dot everything as a measure to keep up with specialized dot jobs like bard. Lead Shot for example was a decent way for MCH not to lag behind on add phases, but it concerns a lot of classes now. I find it a bit concerning tbh.

well aside from ultimate i wouldn't call a nearly 500 dps difference going from mch to bard, ridiculously low, i would call it "acceptable" if this was going from the top, the point that its not 500 from the top but from mch , which is basically king of the nerds in this scenario sadly does make it somewhat of a bigger problem than it would normally be.

on bard being strong in ultimate though i agree with you, the problem with add fights is that the chance to basically permanently multidot is not just not the norm, its so much the exception we get around 1 fight like this every 2 years or so, balancing around that would be like taking only the 100% top parse of blm on voidwalker and arguing that makes it fine, even if blackmage in every other fight of the game would be lagging behind by 1000 dps.

This however is on the devs, they either need to design fights with that in mind or normalize multidotting and aoe potential, they did this with things like aoes doing less damage on the second target onwards, make it so say bard only gets 2 chance for repertoire proccs even if there are 4 or more dots active and maybe even make it so their dots get weaker on more targets, give other classes other reasons why "fighting 2 adds is better for them" , give mch back lead shot, make it so dragoon jumps are so potent whenever they drop from the skys they send out a small shockwave hitting every mob currently active in a 30y radius, make verholy/flare aoe, (these are just mechanical examples of things that could be done, please no one reply to that with "that would be op" or whatever, it were just examples of the top of my head and number balancing is on the devs) like no don't make it so everyone is exactly the same, but if some classes get way more out of a second add than others find ways to get this difference closer together just like with single targets, but a class (like bard in this case) isn't fine just because it gets better under very specific circumstances which happens like once every 2 years.

[Mordraug]

All that talk about AoE padding DPS kinda goes down the drain when you consider that:
- Most of the fights that count for anything are single target (bosses).
- Ads having buffs that make you have to split them up.

Which brings us back to ranged DPS either needing more support abilities or a balancing up in the damage output department. In the case of Bards, give the proc-based nature, a third DoT would be nice, specially now that the two existing ones got unnecessarily nerfed.