Anyone have bard as main?

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On top of that, it's extremely forgiving. Nothing you do can screw up your dps. You didn't refresh your dots quick enough, just reapply them. You forgot to apply your buff, apply it.

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Obviously nothing is as unforgiving as BLM, it's not really fair to compare to it. Dropping your DoTs is still pretty brutal though. You lose 160p on the re-apply, 135p from the DoTs themselves, and about 80-90p worth of River proc odds, so something like 375p total - before the 30% WM multiplier. I'd hardly call -500 potency unforgiving. And if SS is on its last few seconds when you drop DoTs, you're even more cooked.

But more than that, what makes Bard tough right now is all the little things you can mess up that add together pretty quickly. If you don't double-weave you're losing damage, if you double-weave too much you're losing damage, using Feint too much costs damage, not using Feint enough costs damage, you need to plan your buffs but then an Optical Sight gets skipped and you get dumped on, etc. etc.

To say that playing Bard optimally will get harder in SB strikes me as insane, because River of Blood + cast times is a broken mess that demands constant pick-the-least-terrible-move decisions on a half-second reaction time basis. Playing Bard functionally will almost certainly be harder though, which is amusing in a cynical way against the backdrop of SE purportedly trying to make floor dps better / easier.

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However, if your skills are all isntant, you can always dps, dancing around the boss is basically NOT an excuse for lower dps. No matter what happens, you should be able to pull the same dps as if you were not moving. So every time you'll fail to use a skill while dancing around the boss, avoiding aoe and doing mechanic, you're basically not doing it right.

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This is super real though, I remember making a similar case in 2.x as this was the main thing that really separated the good bards from the poor ones. Although we won't need to face target to maintain autos now, it was very much a gap - there was the kind of Bard that could keep its DPS going while doing Earthshaker, Shiva circles etc., and then the ones that dropped their focus from damage in order to do mechanics.

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Originally Posted by Cetonis

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I agree I did pick the worst job for comparaison XD

What I mean is, other job can very easily screw up.
A mudra can easily be messed up by accident
Loosing blood of the dragon can hurt if your cooldown isn't about to come back.
Casting too many Mega Ruin can run you oom and unable to dps.
Basic mistake, as basic as dropping your dot, but mistakes many average player do.

I didn't say it doesn't have consequence, as you very well explained, it will hurt. But the fact that you can reapply the dot right off dimishes the dps loss compared to what other job might suffer from failing something. You won't be denied your proc for 1min if your DoT wears off for 1sec.

I agree that dps is more than just keeping your dots and stuff, what you pointed basically makes the difference between a good bard and a great bard. But being myself a casual bard, I answered what I thought would be relevent to the poster.

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Originally Posted by Sylvain

Bard currently has one of the easiest rotation

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i dont disagree but i'm sure a lot of people would as many bards i've played with have put up abysmally awful numbers. at ilv 240 i outdamaged a bard with a 275 relic by 30k with my kinna longbow. and i always see bards doing dps in the 1k-1.2k range. i was actually in baelsar's wall this morning and a bard was doing 800 dps (practically stationary fight) with a crafted bow lol. i'm never really excited to have a bard in group.

but with bard it is all about consistency. without it, your dps will be trash. you need to hit bloodletter off every ability use whether it's available or not. why in god's name there is no visual or audio cue for a river of blood proc is beyond me, but this is how you have to do it because of that. people drop dots a lot too because they are not focused. sometimes they do not even drop fire arrow.

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Originally Posted by Sylvain

Concerning Foe and Paean, they seem to be gone. (Foe at least)
But again, SE has reworked A LOT of skill and merged many together.
With the removal of Esuna as "basic skill" from healers, maybe Paean will also be reworked or removed.

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Nooooooooooo..... don't say that. I love Paean ;_;

We seem to have an abundance of bards on the aether server. Its not uncommon to see 3 per raid section.
That includes myself, since bard is the only job i have with all 270 gear.

i think it's still too early to make any assumptions about how bards will play until the new bard goes up on the beta. Everything is still up in the air and no one really has any clue how the class will play. (people making assumptions on the video is pointless since all the video serves is to show the new song bar and weapon animations. they give zero context for the song duration / cooldown / abilities.

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Originally Posted by Shunye

i think it's still too early to make any assumptions about how bards will play until the new bard goes up on the beta. Everything is still up in the air and no one really has any clue how the class will play. (people making assumptions on the video is pointless since all the video serves is to show the new song bar and weapon animations. they give zero context for the song duration / cooldown / abilities.

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Oh I totally agree!
My claim was just an educated guess according to what we know and saw.


The poster hoped for a more simple rotation and I made 3 claims

1- Bard being one of the easiest, the odds it get simpler with the addition of new skills are slim.
Usually new skills makes everything more complicated. (Of course, "more" has a wide range, Bard got "slightly" more complicated, BLM got "annoyingly" too complicated)
Sometime it's the opposite, like the addition of the ninja Futon refresher which made mudra management much more simple.

2- Song being reworked, we know that 2 of them will have a ressource management and require a target which, in itself, means that it will require more than simply pressing the skill.
How complicated this new ressource will be to manage remain to be seen. (I'm not expecting too much deepness as it would go against their design of reducing DPS disparsity)

3- The removal of the casting time on most of the Bard skill can, technically, only result in a higher difficulty gap as explained above. If 100% of your skills are instant, there's virutally no reason for you to not dps as long as the boss is in range. Taking A12 for example, having no cast time definitely change the way you apprehend the fight.

And regarding the question about paeon and foe, I simply suggested that with the rework and fusion of many skill and the absence of foe in the video, it could mean the skill is gone. Regarding Paeon, healer loosing their ability to remove debuff, perhaps Bard would receive the same treatement.
I can obviously be wrong on both, these are just suggestion according to the meager info we have.

I didn't make any claim regarding
- How the dps will be
- How the new song mechanic will be
- The new position of Bard in the meta, especially compared to MCH.

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Originally Posted by Shunye

i think it's still too early to make any assumptions about how bards will play until the new bard goes up on the beta.

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As far as I know, there was no beta, at least no open beta, last expansion. It is unlikely there will be one this expansion as it releases in less than a month. But yes, nobody will know until we start playing! :) I'm excited to see how it turns out.

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Originally Posted by Sylvain

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Okay so I'm going to be straight, don't listen to this gut he has no idea what he's talking about. Bard will be getting much easier most likely, cast times and the proper use of feint dramatically change bards priority system, anyone who says otherwise is probably bad at the job. They will also be removing at least 2 of our current dps cooldowns, and the other big part of the job is getting the maximum number of dot ticks under our buffs. Thirdly, bard has the widest delta between top and mid percentile of any job at the moment and is incredibly reliant on syncing your rotation to the buffs, missing a barraged Emp under trick hypercharge for example is massive. With the removal of cast times we are also free to double weave every OGCD where before we had to sacrifice DPS by either clipping, feinting, or having minuet off in order to do so, and since our OGCDs are semi random that involves a lot of on the fly decision making and judgment. Not to mention in movement heavy fights we will now be sacrificing 0 DPS in order to move where before it required mastery of slide casting in order to execute properly to minimize the number of out of minuet casts, or the number of feints you used on the way to your destination.

TL;DR bard will be objectively easier, anyone who says otherwise doesn't know how to play bard.

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Originally Posted by Sylvain

3- The removal of the casting time on most of the Bard skill can, technically, only result in a higher difficulty gap as explained above. If 100% of your skills are instant, there's virutally no reason for you to not dps as long as the boss is in range. Taking A12 for example, having no cast time definitely change the way you apprehend the fight.

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There is no reason to EVER stop dealing damage as is, if you look up good bards, or hell even me, we have basically no downtime even in fights like A12S. The rule of ranged DPS is ALWAYS BE CASTING. Even under Extreme Caution in A10S if you align your casts up right you never need to stop making inputs.

I should also add ATM Bard is a top DPS so its DPS contribution getting higher is unlikely.