If Bard right now still brought the same amount of buffs it did in Stormblood then no one would bring Machinist or Dancer to raids ever.
They wouldn't give MCH at all anyway, you guys literally put anti-utility meta on the game. Dumb as hell instead of making DNC have more buffs and utility and leave bard alone. So all JP bard players are mad Yoshi even respond that they will fix it. Those shallow mindedness of MCH players. You ask for it.
Because Dancer mostly just buffs 1 other person in the raid. Unlike Stormblood bard which brought buffs for the entire raid.
The 3 physical DPS are rather well balanced at the moment. If you gave Bard all their buffs back then they would be miles ahead of the other 2.
If they fix summoner or ninja then all the physical ranged will be locked out of raids. I want bard to be more supportive, yes. Because it was the main support job for years and one good utility does not make it a support job. Dragoon is a better support job this point. The 3 physical ranged are all so close in dps that if they tweak one, they will need to tweak them all.
The "balancing" has only made all the jobs fight with each other. We are all passionate about our main. And I'm tired of people telling me to pick another main because I am unhappy. I played bard main before ShB and red mage, mach and astro for fun. So you can imagine how this expansion hit me hard.
Let's all try to get along until SE fixes this hot mess. If it's possible to fix.
As a Bard main, I stopped raiding period except some Eden runs each week. I spend time on A and S rank hunts/train and gather/craft only now. I quit Wow way back because they kept messing with classes and never got mine right.
I get the frustration, and I think it’s most apparent if you were playing one of the ‘utility jobs’ that got the shaft this expansion (Bard, Red Mage, Astrologian, Ninja, even Dancer arguably). As a Bard main every since 1.0 until now, I know just as much as anyone how disappointing it feels to play now, to the point that I’ve dropped it completely as my main job, which I honestly never thought I could do.
Why does only one job get to be the ‘support oriented job’? I mean, imagine if it was like this for any other role. If they deleted Battle Litany and Dragon Sight from Dragoon, Mantra and Brotherhood for Monk. Then give all four to Ninja. It would kinda suck, wouldn’t it? Having Ninja be the ‘sutility’ melee is totally fine, but the other jobs shouldn’t have to suffer in what they can have because of that. It’s the exact same with Bard and Dancer. Why should one have to suffer for the other to benefit? There are plenty of ways they could have kept Bard the way it was without making Dancer redundant. Removing synergy stuff like Refresh I get, but it would’ve been nice if they at least added something else to use instead. If it was in role skills then they don’t have to worry about one job cancelling out the other.
Jobs can have overlap between their capabilities and still provide something unique. I mean, I always found it weird that nobody is dubious about the Machinist having almost no utility. I mean, the play guide describes the ranged DPS role as one that ‘inflicts sustained damage (isn’t the ranged DPS a burst oriented role functionally?) and supports companions’. That might be true for Dancer, and partially true for Bard (barely), but how come Machinist just gets left out lol? Surely they deserve some kind of utility, if ‘supporting companions’ really is supposed to the point of the role. I mean, Tactician is essentially just a role skill
Healers also have been suffering from gradually losing all their interesting abilities. Astrologian’s cards of course are the most extreme example. They’ve kinda went the opposite direction to ranged though. Instead of concentrating the majority of the role’s utility on one class, they just keep gutting utility abilities and not even giving us more DPS abilities or something to use instead.
I feel like Bard is the job that’s often referred to in regard to this because the thing that suffered (it’s identity) was such a core part of why people played the job.
Not saying it’s any better, but at least Astrologian still has its cards (even if they’re superficial at this point). To compare to Bard, it’s like if they removed all the card effects like now, then left us with what we have now for a bit (the damage only cards), then next expansion they rework every card to be a single target heal. On a 90 second cooldown. With no more buffs. Then, to add insult to injury, a new healer is added the same type of abilities that Astrologian used to have, on a shorter cooldown in most cases, with a decent variety of unique support options. Meanwhile, Astrologian gets nothing unique of its own, and is left with a card system that’s nowhere near what it started as.
It’s funny that, as the amount of jobs in FFXIV has increased, the amount of variety has decreased (outside of superficial differences)
It feels like this thread is just another iteration of "bard is ruined forever because crit buff and battle voice are gone", mixed in with a wish for the game to be redesigned to play like Ragnarok Online. Missing a few generic and passive buffs has very little to do with "homogenisation", given that Dancer, Machinist and Bard all have fairly distinct gameplay. DPS classes in this game are way more distinct between each other than Healer and Tank classes are, and this has been the case for a while.