Will bards always have to carry Emp+2 gear?

[VoiceMemo]

With the addition of all the new gear from adoulin there are many nice stats, but the song specific stats that Emp+2 gear seem to be lacking. So until those kinds of stats appear on other pieces of gear bards will always have to carry around 5/5 Emp+2 to put on before their songs end to get the boost from each respective piece.

I don't suspect this was from design, as the song+1 stats only occurred on Gjallarhorn until EMP+2 was released.

Back then SE didn't forsee Adoulin and beyond so they may have wrote themselves into a corner when bard is considered.

Our stats/job is very specialized in FFXI, since the strength of our songs are only affected by 3 stats(for buffs) and 6 stats(this is debatable) for offensive songs.

Buffs seem to only need singing, then wind or string skill(when using the respective instrument) and any gear that has song+ stat for that specific song.

At present the only armor that has the song+ stats are the EMP+2 gear. All of which affect buffing songs only. So until other gear has those song+ stats, I believe we'll be stuck using those as our equipment before we finish those 5 songs that are listed
on the set.(precast gear first then these gears before song finishes activation for their respective boosts)

[Reain]

I suspect so, yes. The empyrean armor is really good. I think most jobs would be happy to have an empyrean set as useful as ours. New armor would need to have incredible stats to even replace 1 piece of the empyrean entirely.

Once the artifact equipment revamp comes I would expect some good bard specific stats on that. What would you put on AF1+2?

[detlef]

I like that the entire set is still useful. I like that we have 3 pieces of relic +2 which will always be useful. I like that the Marduk +1/Nabu sets still have some best-in-slot pieces.

For AF1 I'd hope for some useful pieces for precast, idle, and magic accuracy. Maybe something that enhances our JAs.