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the inability to use songs without a target leaves their cooldowns all over the place (and misaligned with buffs). if you're worried about people stacking pitch perfect pre-pull, just make it so you won't get repertoire procs out of combat
also would be nice if pitch perfect and sidewinder had aoe dmg (NOT aoe versions which share a cost/cooldown with them)
If you ask me the song rotation feels kinda clunky in any situation because of the whole cutting-songs-early for proper raid buff alignment thing, and dungeons are bad for it as you say.
As for the Pitch Perfect / Sidewinder doesn’t Bard already have extremely powerful aoe compared to other jobs? We’re not really allowed to be good at anything because Dancer or Machinist would cease to exist entirely (lol) so I feel like devs would class this as ‘OP’
Everyone has buff alignment problems in dungeons. It's the nature of dungeons. Use the best buff for the situation when you can, and don't worry about alignment. Dungeons are super easy and not worth the effort to coordinate and optimize four strangers' buff rotations. As long as everyone is doing AoE attacks on trash and using a competent rotation on the bosses things are good.
Dungeons as bard has always had a song alignment problem, and even more in EW now, but I do believe you can work around it a bit. If you're letting each song go to their full length (including ballad because it's good AoE anyway), and just cycle them like on single target so that you keep a coherent rotation for bosses, you should be able to do fine, or at least on endgame lvl90 dungeons that is. The downtime between mob packs actually also adds margins and leniency on the timer so that your CDs come back online properly more or less. Always make sure to start up Army when Ballad is close to end on a pack (even if still left with like 10s), so that it continues charging ethos until the next pack or boss. If you start a boss not on minuet, then it's fine too, it's better to just consider the whole dungeon as a single one encounter tbh. Removes a lot of headaches for a lot of jobs.
The fact that the gauge continues filling up during downtime is actually a blessing, so please no, don't remove it, as on top of it would also actually nerf bard pretty badly for actual savage encounters when downtime happens.
Could bard do better in dungeons? Sure, it's more cumbersome than DNC that is completely freestyle without any issue, just using its stuff on CD, and require some thought and more gymnastics during each song to play, but if you like that challenge, I don't think it's that bad. Like, I was like you before and tended to avoid bard in EW endgame roulettes but having gotten back into it a bit personally, I can say that yeah, you can definitely work around the restraints. Try to keep stuff aligned and you'll be fine. The only thing that I find infuriating is fishing for Shadowbite when barrage is up, because of raging strikes having a timed window, and also due to the need of keeping things... mostly aligned (so no delaying barrage too much).
Archer class needs to have two options at thirty: ranger physical dps and bard magical dps
Give the rangers the bows and a pet hawk or wolf or bear make it a quest where you get to choose which pet you end up with and tie the pet into the new gauge system they will need.
For the bed give them all the songs and the gauge system and give them harps as weaapons.
This would be amazing for 7.0!