Quote Originally Posted by Nyarlko View Post
... You never played BRD back in the day, did you? XD We literally were "required" for EVERYTHING. Entire Sky God runs of 1-3x full alliances would be cancelled/postponed if a BRD couldn't be found. I remember being extremely proud that my presence alone resulted in a 10min reduction in our Kirin kills compared to no bard. ^^ (I was one of those crazy party hopper bards that would keep songs up on 30+ others though.)
The problem BRD had until this update was that it was solidly stuck at 75cap power levels. This update appears to have brought a lot of our stuff up to modern standards, so I'm hoping we can finally come back out of the basement. XD

GEO was not likely "broken" until they got updated for the first time. I've seen some old threads that were complaining about how WEAK GEO effects were at launch, so I'm personally convinced that the formula bug was introduced at that time.. It's going to take a bit for the playerbase to adjust to the new environment for sure, but I'm expecting to start seeing more BRD and RDM out and about pretty soon.

Any MMO that has support classes will use the basic/standard group setup: tank, healer, support, enough DDs to fill... The problem we had is that one (glitched) support was overwhelmingly better when compared to the other supports in 99% of available content. (In large part due to said glitch.)
BRD was not required for sky gods .... all they did was ballad ... and more ballad. There wasn't a single "end game" event that BRD was required for, though they were used for melee zergs but melee zergs weren't the only strategy that existed.

The only set of jobs that was "required" was BLMs but that didn't last long as we soon learned how to use melee's.

The problem is that in FFXI "difficulty" is primary determined by monster stats vs player stats. The Monsters Attack, Defense, Evasion, Magic Attack, Magic Defense and so forth compared to the players Attack, Defense, Accuracy, Evasion, Magic Accuracy, and so forth. If players stats are under the monsters then it seems really hard, once the players stats can be put above the monsters it suddenly seems easy. To do this we used a combination of buffs and debuffs, but with the release of Voidwatch SE jacked NM stats to astronomical never before seen levels. Then SoA came out and they went even higher and suddenly content was impossible without someway to lower them by huge amounts. And enter GEO, GEO allows the players to lower the enemy stats or raise their own by incredibly large amounts and unlike RDM and BRD those stat reductions aren't subject to passing a ludicrous resist check. And thus GEO became necessary for every event because it essentially lowers the enemy's level while also raising the players level.

So the first thing SE needs to do is low enemy boss stats across the board by 10~20%. Things need to be brought back into the realm of realistic difficulty instead of this OMFGWTFBBQ that we then must exploit a glitch to overcome. Now SE needs to introduce some ways for all the central support jobs to raise player / lower enemy stats by decent amounts instead of the smidgen that we've been traditionally allowed to. The recent buff to Frazzle and Distract were a decent start but it's not nearly enough to balance out content. The buffs to BRD were nice for melees but they aren't nearly enough considering how OMFGWTFBBQ powerful their offensive stats are.