How prevalent is the “musical” aesthetic in the bard job?

I’m having a hard time fitting a ranged DPS job on to my largely physical “martial arts” themed character. He’s not really a magic guy, not really a tech guy… and he’s not a singing or dancing kinda guy.

A bow would be the default choice here, but it’s of course apparent that the evolution of archery in FFXIV leads to… music, somehow.

All due respect to everyone who went bard to be a frickin *bard,* I’m just wondering (since I generally play with party spell effects turned off) just how prevalent the “bravely bold Sir Robin” vibe plays into the bard job. I’ve seen the UI, I’ve read the action names, but are we talking music notes swirling around and xylophone trills in the air here?

I just want an option for my serious samurai guy to play ranged now and then!

If you ignore the whole performance-feature that bard has (aka playing music instruments - which is not a battle feature and has nothing to do with the battle gameplay), there is pretty little music in the job.

Its way more ranged than musical - most animations are a variation of "shooting arrows", the only expection being the three songs that you want to rotate about every 30 seconds (your character will pull out a harp real quick, a couple notes will float around), the role-skill for faster movement (your character pulls out a flute and plays a quick tune) and the two healing/support skills (Paean - harp again - and Nature's Minne - flute again). Since bard has a really fast gameplay I usually dont really notice the whole harp-note-thing when using ballad/hymn/menuett, because I'm already hitting the net arrow before that animation has even finished playing (infact I had to go to a striking dummy just now to confirm that yes, harp and notes are infact there).

All in all I'd say the musical elements are very mild and most of the time you'll see arrows flowing around, not notes. (Then again I'm also not bothered by the musical elements, yo my view might be slightly tainted - and what I percive as "no big deal, there isnt all that much" might bother someone who doesnt really want to see those things... rule of thumb: your character should probably pull out a harp about every 20 seconds for a quick animation, the rest is all bow).

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Originally Posted by Vidu

If you ignore the whole performance-feature that bard has (aka playing music instruments - which is not a battle feature and has nothing to do with the battle gameplay), there is pretty little music in the job.

Its way more ranged than musical - most animations are a variation of "shooting arrows", the only expection being the three songs that you want to rotate about every 30 seconds (your character will pull out a harp real quick, a couple notes will float around), the role-skill for faster movement (your character pulls out a flute and plays a quick tune) and the two healing/support skills (Paean - harp again - and Nature's Minne - flute again). Since bard has a really fast gameplay I usually dont really notice the whole harp-note-thing when using ballad/hymn/menuett, because I'm already hitting the net arrow before that animation has even finished playing (infact I had to go to a striking dummy just now to confirm that yes, harp and notes are infact there).

All in all I'd say the musical elements are very mild and most of the time you'll see arrows flowing around, not notes. (Then again I'm also not bothered by the musical elements, yo my view might be slightly tainted - and what I percive as "no big deal, there isnt all that much" might bother someone who doesnt really want to see those things... rule of thumb: your character should probably pull out a harp about every 20 seconds for a quick animation, the rest is all bow).

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Thanks for this! Upon further consideration it doesn't seem too far out of reach for this largely samurai-concept character to play the koto! ;)