The Disappointing State of Bard Going Into 7.0

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Originally Posted by Valence

I don't like babysitting buffs and timers on my end. Keeping an eye on a timer for 40s and being distracted within the last 5s and missing the refresh just feels awful as a system to me and I never liked it. While I liked the dot correlation with repertoire before EW, now that it's been removed, only the part that I actually dislike is left on the job. I can understand the engagement snapshotting for specific situations can generate for people, so if that's what bard mains like, then so be it.

I just hate timers.

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In my opinion as a fellow Savage/Ultimate raider, learning when you need to refresh your DoTs on the boss is just part of learning the fight. I admit that while progging a fight I would frequently let my DoTs fall off until I had a mechanic mastered. But afterwards I would be able to associate needing to refresh with a specific mechanic or movement within the fight and it became something to almost not even think about. It's just part of the rotation at that point. Not to mention that with the current iteration of Bard and non burst window party buffs, you have almost zero variance in when you should be refreshing. Also, as a side effect of getting buffs that encourage refreshing DoTs earlier than the end of their duration, the amount of times someone runs into the risk of forgetting to refresh the DoTs before they fall off should drastically decrease assuming they take advantage of the buff.

Having said all of this, I'm not completely opposed to them removing DoTs and giving Bard something else to focus on further down the line. But at the present moment, they're one of the few bits of "complexity" that Bard still has in its rotation and removing them without a replacement would reduce our already bare-bones GCD rotation down to 3 buttons (4 in burst) and a couple oGCDs that we spam.

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Originally Posted by Embed

If you don't mind elaborating, how do you feel DoTs could be made better in XIV? I can see how DoTs and Iron Jaws don't really fit the Bard aesthetic and are more of an Archer thing, but if we're being honest, that's kinda what Bard is in XIV. The only parts related to music at the moment are their buffs. Songs, Radiant Finale, and I suppose Battle Voice could be considered "musical." I wouldn't mind leaning more into the musical side, removing DoTs and providing something else to upkeep. But that's getting beyond the scope of what I intended with this post and far beyond something they could provide to us in the time span of 7.0-ish. My hopes were to bring these core issues to attention so that they could hopefully be addressed without a rework and before 8.0 or later.

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Mostly that they are needlessly cryptic. Nowhere in the game does it say that they deal damage every 3 seconds on the server tick, we have to find that out from other players -- frankly, they would feel better if they dealt damage every second. The amount of damage that the actual dot debuff deals does not show up in the combat log. And when you do take the time to figure out how much damage they can deal, it turns out to be less than auto attacks per tick of damage -- unless they have snapshotted buffs -- which again, the game does not say anything about snapshotting. So what we have are buttons that slaps a little icons on an enemy, and we just have to sit back and trust that it's doing its thing -- a bit too passive for my taste. And this is BRD specific, but the DOTs really do just feel like clutter at this point. They are 2 different actions that apply 2 different debuffs, and are refreshed by a third button that treats them like a single debuff -- 3 different actions for effectively one DOT. It may as well just be just be one DOT at this point. Also the game keeps kicking Stormbite off bosses in large scale fights so there's debuff limit shenanigans as well. Iron Jaws isn't even a good archer skill - - your character just kind of wiggles their finger for the "attack." Layers upon layers of jank.

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Originally Posted by Embed

In my opinion as a fellow Savage/Ultimate raider, learning when you need to refresh your DoTs on the boss is just part of learning the fight. I admit that while progging a fight I would frequently let my DoTs fall off until I had a mechanic mastered. But afterwards I would be able to associate needing to refresh with a specific mechanic or movement within the fight and it became something to almost not even think about. It's just part of the rotation at that point. Not to mention that with the current iteration of Bard and non burst window party buffs, you have almost zero variance in when you should be refreshing. Also, as a side effect of getting buffs that encourage refreshing DoTs earlier than the end of their duration, the amount of times someone runs into the risk of forgetting to refresh the DoTs before they fall off should drastically decrease assuming they take advantage of the buff.

Having said all of this, I'm not completely opposed to them removing DoTs and giving Bard something else to focus on further down the line. But at the present moment, they're one of the few bits of "complexity" that Bard still has in its rotation and removing them without a replacement would reduce our already bare-bones GCD rotation down to 3 buttons (4 in burst) and a couple oGCDs that we spam.

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I tend to have landmarks in the rotation that make me automatically check and refresh dots, notably the empyreal arrow around 25ish seconds of Mage Ballad (which is also where the odd minute Apex Arrow is often used). In Army's it's a little more tricky to find true landmarks because it's in the middle of nowhere but well, it's also always at the same time after all since the dot duration is fixed. As for the burst it's a no brainer since it's usually snapshot at the end.

So as long as the rotation stays like on a dummy, it's an afterthought, but if there is downtime, or unexpected shenanigans, it becomes a real annoyance to me. I do like that it's about learning the fight, but it doesn't remove the fact that I find is utterly annoying to babysit. It adds to the complexity of executing the job for sure, especially with non standard encounter layouts, but I find it utterly uninteresting and tedious/distracting.

Not just a bard problem though, every job with a manageable dot (not a long recast dot like tanks) faces this issue, however bard is the most egregious since it has the most amount of those manageable dots and the very existence of IJs makes it even more punishing/annoying when you drop them.

You know, that's a really good point, I remember being really confused reading "60 potency for 18 seconds" or whatever and then noticing the ticks clearly aren't every second.

And it still would be way less annoying eyeballing the arithmetic if it just said "deals total of 360 potency over 18 seconds".

Playing a bit of devils advocate for just a moment. Last time they really tried some major innovation with Bard was HW's infamous Bow Mage and well it no longer being a thing speaks for how much it was disliked. After that they went to the iteration of the songs we know today which at the time was maybe not praised but generally welcomed warmly. I'm wondering if they're too afraid to try anything drastic or even something that would change the general flow again.

And with that out of the way;

I've always played BRD, Main at first sight 1.0 and beyond. Now what could they do? A thought I had after 4.0 was to do something like Dancer before Dancer, Actually play the songs in a similar method that DNC Dances a simple quick button game and bam song played, though that wouldn't solve the issue of what it is the songs do just more of a thematic change.

In terms of openers and death recovery. I know they're on a more button bad kick but just two more or maybe even make it one that changes. Pre pull on a nice big timer (4min+) and only available outside of combat something like "Opening act" Gives you full coda effect minus the new big hit we're getting. Turning that into "Encore" a massive recovery button only available if no song is active but all are on cooldown that refreshes the songs (though if in my dream world if this does actually happen it would probably just refresh wanderers or in a nightmare world Paeon)

DOTS! Honestly they could be easily removed at this point for potency buffs elsewhere since nothing really relies on them being applied anymore, Sidewinder no longer gets it potency buff if they're applied and them not effecting procs anymore. Bring back my procs on crits then we can start talking about what to do with them.

The Songs, Wanderers and Mages are.... Ok. One more clearly aimed towards single target and one more to AOE. Honestly how bad would it be to increase the duration of those two and just lose Paeon entirely? That just seems like a lazy fix. The clear thing for Paeon would be to make the reducing effect...effect EVERYTHING. and/or Dive into the music aspect Paeon decreases the cooldown aka upping the pace in the rush to get back to wanderers Build off that and the support aspect of the job and have Army's Muse effect the whole party as you enter wanderers for the two minute buff window giving everyone a little haste in that burst window. Make it act like a crescendo into a finale There is so much more they could do with the music theme of BRD that they just blatantly ignore at this point. Crescendos, Accelerando,...etc there are so many terms you can use to just make it feel more thematic than an archer that can pluck a string once in a while.

Low key I always felt like Dancer is what Bard Could have been. Dance partner? Called Harmonize/Duet if it was on BRD. I went into the whole actually playing songs like Dancer dances above. The feathers? Improv notes, to use in the same way dancer uses them.

What they could is turn Stormbite low level Resonant Arrow. It could look like this.

Windbite, and Stormbite now deal flat damage with AOE falloff.

Level 30 unlock Barrage -- it now has a shorter cool down

Level 38 Enhanced Barrage - Barrage now grants Storm of Arrows allowing for the execution of Windbite

Level 64 Bite mastery - upgrades Windbite to Stormbite, and Venomous Bite to Caustic Bite

Level 96 Stormbite mastery - upgrades Stormbite to Resonant Arrow

This leaves Caustic Bite as the only dot, and Iron Jaws could either be scrapped or replaced with a new AOE GCD that applies the Caustic Bite dot -- call it Grogon Bite to keep with the light snake theming.

I think the songs are unique and creative enough and that they keep it is a good thing for the job's identity. If we want to see more around songs, they could definitely add some flourishes/procs to an extended repertoire adding variety to each. BRD could be a job that plays music that dynamically reacts to what happens in the fight, like if the party takes damage, perhaps some flourish suddenly proc up and provide benefits, for example. Could think of a lot of different context dependent little things like that.