Please never change Bard (feedback)

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Originally Posted by Vidu

While I'm very happy with the changes they've made to bard gameplay wise I was pretty shocked how bad, and even awefully written the quest was - at least in german it was a pain to go through it. Just finished it today and... please... stick to the gameplay but never ever give me the option to say "Yes, thats shit." (literal translation of the german version) again. It felt horribly out of placed, uncalled for and just... shitty.

(Can anyone tell me if its the same in english? I get that Guydelot is supposed to be that asshole, but the german version took it a bit to far with the stuff he said - it just seemed tasteless and very badly done)

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If I remember correctly, Guydelot says "Bullshite" in English. Althought I didn't find it revolting or anything, it was fine with me ^^'

Maybe they will change Mages Ballad to Blood Ballad given what it does? :D
I absolutely agree! I'm loving the SB bard so much. I stubbornly refused to give up on the job, despite the gross casting bars, I mastered the bow mage but now I'm so happy with it, I don't want to go back to HW Bard ever again.

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Originally Posted by WiseWolfHolo

Stopped playing HW because of the bard change along with real life but I like the change, however, I do feel some things could be better. I do throw out the extra healing buff or the 10% reduction but I get so busy they fall by the wayside often and the tp regen is pretty pointless with invigorate. They should rework some of the cross skills because what we have is pretty pathetic.

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To keep up with AoE DPSing, you'll need both Tactician and Invigorate. Our cross class skills are actually pretty decent. 3 of them are so good they're pretty much mandatory and the other two are down to personal choice or down to the fight.

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Originally Posted by Luciel-Nyx

If I remember correctly, Guydelot says "Bullshite" in English. Althought I didn't find it revolting or anything, it was fine with me ^^'

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It's also not particularly uncommon, especially for Sea Wolves, who tend to be pretty vulgar in general. I still remember a sidequest where one referred to the ocean as "colder than a dead whore's crotch."

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Originally Posted by Luciel-Nyx

If I remember correctly, Guydelot says "Bullshite" in English. Althought I didn't find it revolting or anything, it was fine with me ^^'

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Originally Posted by Daralii

It's also not particularly uncommon, especially for Sea Wolves, who tend to be pretty vulgar in general. I still remember a sidequest where one referred to the ocean as "colder than a dead whore's crotch."

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Indeed. The game isn't afraid to swear where appropriate. I mean heck, one of the FATEs in South Shroud, the mobs will often say "Sod off ye sack o' squirrel shite" (and thus how my Provoke macro came to be what it is)

THe new MCH is great, fun, takes a lot of skill to master and sadly has the lowest DPS of the bunch :/, even considering utility.

First off, I like this iteration of Bard. I liked 3.0 as well, and 2.0 too.

The mainstay problem with Bard in 4.0 is its inconsistency. Having their two best moves behind RNG, and having their toolkit revolve around pure chance makes it so your damage output (especially in burst) becomes sporadic. I've spent hours and hours, probably 20+ at this point, testing openers, individual fights, ex trials, and the median of my numbers is way too large.

If there's anything Square can do to make Bard feel more solid, it's to make our damage more consistent. Either give us more ways to guarantee Refulgent Arrow, increase our crit chance, or rework Raging strikes to work more in line with our kit (giving us a crit increase instead of attack). Otherwise, the job itself is solid.

I like where we currently are, but I feel we need just a little something extra to make us perfect. I cant say what that is per se, I just know we need something. The biggest thing is that we are a Proc based DPS, and two of our skills, Pitch Perfect and Reflungant Arrow require procs to execute. We just need a way to get these to proc more often. I can tell you how many times I've played Wanderers Minuet and nothing, but that might change with the 68 trait. Can anyone confirm?

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Originally Posted by AkashiXI

The mainstay problem with Bard in 4.0 is its inconsistency. Having their two best moves behind RNG, and having their toolkit revolve around pure chance ...

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The songs do provide one major advantage to a party -- a 2% crit increase for the entire party while you're singing them ... any additional damage the party does because of those is cause for celebration. RNG procs occur for lots of jobs (see, for example, Red Mage). As bards, we guarantee some crit and can spin off some other damage-increasing tactics that mean our own DPS doesn't have to exceed that of Samurai and Black Mage.

If you're looking for higher DPS, you might want to try out one of those. If you're looking for reliable DPS with a good chance of burst damage (depending on how you gear/meld), Bard is it.

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Originally Posted by Eloah

We just need a way to get these to proc more often.

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I assume that if you push Crit as a secondary stat, you'll get more procs. Meld and/or gear to that, perhaps.

Agreed!!!! BRD was my main job in ARR. HW crushed the life out of it and drove me away from the one job I truly liked. Now with SB I picked up BRD again and could not be any happier. THIS is what BRD was always meant to be. Not the horrible idiocy of the HW design.

I kinda want bow mage to come back as its own job with elementally/spiritually infused arrows. Bard though? Its design never screamed stationary. More... prancing about while filling your enemies with arrows and pilfering their loot like its a Robin Hood musical.

I guess I'm in the minority here, but while I do enjoy Stormblood Bard (as I had ARR's and HW's before it, each for very different reasons, despite actually being very picky about my jobs), I feel like it's taken as many steps in some other arbitrary direction for each step forward.

"Active" use of songs is no longer a matter of support whatsoever. We are simply Selene with permanent uptime and crit in place of attack speed. We also come with her double-cleanse, and her partner's healing received boost, but limited to a single target. We can also Non-Synergetic Battle Litany. None of these things shout "Bard" to me.

The song system now feels more like a macrorotational variant of Monk's forms. Start in Coeurl/WM, and cycle from there. Make sure you blow your final proc before fade and start the next asap. Trim Paean because it's currently badly inferior. None of this feels like nuance (though it does have—preset—strategy), and overall it feels less fluid than bow mage to me.

Mobility felt sufficient in HW. I'm glad to have more of it, but it's only impact has been in kiting boss FATEs to death. In raids, I was already capable of taxi'ing my BLM's Aetherial Manipulation casts as a fellow "mage".

oGCDs now feel less impactful by virtue of not needing to pray for or make my own opportunities to fit them in tightly into my windows, but I got over that somewhere around level 56 just by virtue of having everything "Bard" about the job now being oGCDs and better filling up that time with healing boosts, MP restoration, Palisade, and so forth. But the songs? They still feel just as clunky as when I started into Stormblood. It's honestly the clunkiest that Bard has ever felt for me (at least, since WM was a 3-second cast and toggled off immediately after opening with EA, give-or-take DoTs and Sidewinder, back at HW launch).

If there were just actual control over our songs, rather than merely their order, differentiation in their supportive effects, and a bit more point-support over them, I'd be incredibly happy with SB Bard, but the songs timers and same-ness of their effects feel, while more subtle, as much some strange flaw in design logic as WM did in its first iteration.

Bard is in a fantastic spot atm, please don't change it. It is hands down one of the best ranged classes I've played out of all the MMO's I've played, from Aion to L2, FFXI etc... ^^

Reminds me of pre-pandaria shadow priest... which was the only class I ever enjoyed playing in that crap of a game, the little I did for my friends. I loved it because it forced me to manage a buttload of resources, check for procs and above all constantly check priorities instead of following some braindead rotation. It forced me to constantly think about what I was doing.

I guess there's not so much "managing all the stuffs" with Bard, but at least it's a dot and proc style. And I actually enjoy the fact that I feel like I'm supporting, even if it's in a passive way mostly. On top of it, in an archer which is a theme I always loved. Glad I picked this to start in this game. I probably would have hated it pre-SB.

P.S.: Pitch Perfect = :D

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Originally Posted by DPZ2

I assume that if you push Crit as a secondary stat, you'll get more procs. Meld and/or gear to that, perhaps.

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That's good in theory, but sadly might not be the case. Crit was always important for us because of straight shot. But the issue with the prics now is the window, only 30secs doesnt allow for much error, not to mention youd need Pitch Perfect to reach 3 before its damage is anything significant. Otherwise other skilks offer similar returns. One nice chsnge would be to hsve it available only under WM, with a base potency, then it potecy increases when the prics occur, a less potent increase but it would make the skill more accessible in my opinion.

Thank you tiny keyboard for making every proc a pric

Additionally, I sorta wish Battle Voice extended the song duration, over its current use.

I seriously hate SB bard... it's back to ARR without having to really care about our abilities so long as our DoTs are up. So painful...

I just wish they would remove quick nock and give back Wide Volley .. :(

Edit: but i'm very happy we no longer got those damn cast times.

ARR = i loved playing bard

HW = I hated it, cause of cast times.

SB = Loving it again.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

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I actually agree with much of this, being someone that started playing Bard in HW so I never got to experience ARR Bard.

To me, as someone that raided and cleared A12S as a Bard main, I find that SB Bard also has its own set of flaws compared to HW Bard, although I am of the opinion that SB Bard is better designed overall. The thing about this expansion was that the devs were supposed to lower the skill ceiling and raise the skill floor to tighten the gap between the least skilled and the most skilled players. But what happened to Bard was that while the floor was raised, the optimization ceiling was raised a lot higher - I can already dish out damage comparable or even higher than most Samurai I meet, juggling all of my support on top of that, and I'm supposed to be at my weakest now early into the expansion, when my crit rate is at its lowest. Bard has always been a super RNG-heavy class with damage that increases exponentially as our critical hit rate increases due to how our procs are tied to our crits, and I predict that if Bard were to stay the same as it is, we have a high chance of overtaking almost every other DPS class towards the end of the expansion - something the top Bards saw at the end of HW.

The current Bard design emphasizes planning a whole minute ahead into a fight, if not even longer, knowing a fight top to bottom to get the most use out of all of the absurd utility we have. And it's not just because of our utility, it's also because of our three song rotation and the off-GCD procs we get to spam. Bard is now by far the hardest class to optimize for that reason - an optimized Bard now pretty much plays like a ranged monk, spamming everything they can as soon as something procs, but simultaneously keeping an eye on the rest of the party as well. HW Bard did have a certain flow to it, SB Bard is a lot more chaotic in nature. Not to say it's a bad thing, but many players just won't have the reaction speed to play the class to its fullest potential. I would still keep SB Bard over HW Bard, if only for the simple fact that HW Bard doesn't have any merits that can excuse the fact that massive Bloodletter clipping and double-resetting while casting was a thing.

That said, I've been dabbling a bit into Red Mage myself recently, and now I understand the other, less obvious reason why the devs got rid of bowmage/gunmage - because Red Mage plays almost exactly like HW Bard/Machinist did, due to their dualcast nature. The only real difference is that their cast times are doubled, but their mobility is also doubled.

Does anyone know our materia priority yet? at the moment I'm stacking Crit/Det not sure if this is right.

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Originally Posted by Rekujin

Does anyone know our materia priority yet? at the moment I'm stacking Crit/Det not sure if this is right.

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General consensus is Crit/Direct Hit.

Coming from a player that has been through the thick and thin on ARR and HW, I very much enjoy the current iteration of Bard. I was also keen of the Bowmage playstyle in Heavensward and had some very top-end parses during Creator. However, for all the fun it is playing the class right now, it is not without problems that need addressing.

Any changes suggested below are just general thoughts in the vacuum, further adjustments may be necessary for them to be actually balanced.


First and foremost, as mentioned earlier by another poster, the class is somewhat inconsistent due to the nature of it being extremely heavy on the RNG procs. Especially the very nature of Refulgent Arrow is problematic, due to it being the best thing to pair Barrage with. While it does add a modicum of desirable decision-making in terms of spending either spending GCDs to fish for it or saving your earlier proc to pair with Barrage, it is still very inconsistent to get the combo off. There are several things we could do to make the interaction more consistent, and here's a few suggestions:

1.) Make Empyreal Arrow also give you a Heavier Shot proc, making your next Heavy Shot cast also proc Straighter Shot and thus also Refulgent Arrow. This change would fit very well with both the current iterations of the currently recognized Bard openers while making the interaction feel somewhat fluid altogether.
2.) Make Heavy Shot proc progressive, giving an additional 10% chance to proc a Straighter Shot upon consecutive casts. Base chance could be reduced to 10% to compensate for the additional effect of it.

These are just quickly thought suggestions of mine to fix something I see as a very annoying interaction atm. I'm sure someone might have thought of more exciting interactions between Refulgent Arrow procs. However, as is, I think the current interaction needs changes. It feels more relieving than rewarding to land a RA+Barrage combo atm, and having to pair it with Empyreal Arrow due to a quirk of RNG feels just bad.

As for being inconsistent in general, I have some dummy parses up to around 4k over 3minutes as a i315 Bard with a very nice streak of proc-luck, with the lowest being around 3,5k with some absolutely horrible RNG. We're not talking about some minor fluctuation here. However, I wouldn't really like to touch the gameplay outside of RA interactions too much. One suggestion in this thread I liked, however, was changing Raging Strikes into additional Crit Rate instead of additional Damage. This would interact much better with the way Bard procs work, as well as make double dot clipping worth it again even without additional buffs. It would definitely add a nice flavor to the gameplay I think, while also making the procs more consistent.


Second major problem I have with the class is the lack of meaningful sources of Piercing Debuff. With Dragoon in the gutters so to speak, getting a Dragoon for serious statics is a no-no unless 4.05 is going to swing the pendulum yet again. However, I don't see this dependence of Dragoons as a healthy design in the long run and would appreciate some changes to make our DPS less reliant on having them in the parties. Here are some suggestions I have been thinking of:

1.) Give the BRDs and MCHs a way to apply the buff themselves. This goes in line with all other DPS classes applying their own flavor debuffs and makes us less reliant in someone else enabling our full potential as DPS classes.
2.) Give the Piercing debuff to some other classes to make more meaningful synergy options. Pigeonholing us to pair with only Dragoons is not the way.
3.) Remove the Piercing synergy from Ranged completely and make our damage categorized as merely Unaspected Physical Damage. If this suggestion is seen as a problem, some kind of small potency increase could be done to our base damage to compensate. Piercing as it is right now is just a pretty problematic debuff to have from a competitive aspect. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And this is not even counting the fact that Dragoons offer the very best party buff for us, the Battle Litany, which is super good with the way our procs work. Although that is fine by me, and the actual problem I have is with Piercing Debuff. In a meta with no Dragoons, everyone else in the party can play (nearly) up to their maximum capability. Compositions without Dragoons atm severely gimp ranged players and make them somewhat sad to play from a competitive viewpoint.


On the core of things, the class is very fun to play and I very much like the current iteration of Bard. I would no like to see major changes happen to the class that seems to be loved by many people now. I think it should get some minor tweaks, however.

Holy crap, agreed with the above. Probably THE biggest problem with Bard right now is how a 20% Straighter Shot proc is just way too low for any kind of consistency. With no way to force trigger that, it's just brutal to work into an opener. The difference between having to Barrage EA and being able to Barrage Refulgent during an opener is massive. 210 potency massive.

Army's Paeon is also really, really bad too. I think a good buff to make it in line with other songs is to let it boost the bard's own critical hit rate while in Paeon mode too. That way, Army's Paeon gets used as a means to get a boosted Iron Jaws right before swapping into another song to take advantage of the higher critical chance. Army's Paeon could also boost Straighter Shot proc rate by 5% per repertoire stack, going up to 40% while in Paeon mode (assuming nothing is done to the base proc rate), or extend Straight Shot's buff duration by 2.5 seconds per stack, up to a new maximum of 30 seconds.

I would also ask for Barrage cooldown to be reduced to 80 seconds rather than remaining at 90 so that it fits in better with song rotations and Raging Strikes, but that's probably asking for too much considering Bard is probably in the best shape out of all of the old DPS classes as is.

I hate the new bard, sorry! It became one of my favorite classes in HW but now in the trash bin it goooeeees :D

I have mained bard since 2.0. I was really looking forward to the changes but I am a little disappointed. I don't understand the obsession with "mobility". There is no reason to be constantly jumping around...

Few things: I don't like how bards have "selective hearing" as in we can finally enjoy our Foes buff (for a laughable 12s) but put ear plugs in and not get the crit buff from other songs. Also, why must songs be targetable? It's weird.

Straighter Shot button should turn into Refulgent Arrow, I can't tell you how many times from muscle memory I miss RA proc and us SS. Plus saves an extra button.

At the conclusion of Army's Paeon, the buff we have worked up should remain with us on a timer or something, say 30s after Army's falls off.

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Originally Posted by Chevronone

I have mained bard since 2.0. I was really looking forward to the changes but I am a little disappointed. I don't understand the obsession with "mobility". There is no reason to be constantly jumping around...

Few things: I don't like how bards have "selective hearing" as in we can finally enjoy our Foes buff (for a laughable 12s) but put ear plugs in and not get the crit buff from other songs. Also, why must songs be targetable? It's weird.

Straighter Shot button should turn into Refulgent Arrow, I can't tell you how many times from muscle memory I miss RA proc and us SS. Plus saves an extra button.

At the conclusion of Army's Paeon, the buff we have worked up should remain with us on a timer or something, say 30s after Army's falls off.

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Archers in every MMORPG should always be mobile, if people want to play a stationary class they should play casters. Bard in HW felt like a tedious version of BLM/SMN to be honest. If they want some form of "casting" maybe only one or two strong abilities (like a power shot or something? cast for 3s, do 400 potency, 30s cooldown)

100% agree with the bolded statement, muscle memory screws me big time with straighter shot procs lol