More feedback about 6.0 BRD

Hi, long time BRD main here, you may know me from my 5.0 BRD guide (if so, thanks for reading it!)

I have a lot of feedback about 6.0 BRD, but in all, it's just not the same class I fell in love with years ago. I see Square Enix is trying to appeal to a new audience, but I hope they can understand that these changes come at the cost of alienating many longtime BRD mains. At the least, I would like to see some of these core issues resolved:

Mage's Ballad and Army's Paeon are less engaging than before. There are fewer Bloodletters generated per second during Mage's Ballad. During Army's Paeon (which was already the least engaging song), Bloodletter is not pressed anymore because it's held for the upcoming Raging Strikes window. BRD used to be one of the fastest paced jobs, but 6.0 BRD damages that identity more than ever.
* Possible solutions:
- Increase the rate of Bloodletter generation during Mage's Ballad.
- Return Raging Strikes cooldown to 60s to create a secondary burst window.
- Add new procs exclusive to Army's Paeon.

Mage's Ballad is now weaker than fully stacked Army's Paeon. This has caused the standard song rotation to resemble 43s WM -> 34s MB -> 43s AP, which is jarring to veteran BRD players.
* Possible solutions:
- Increase the rate of Bloodletter generation during Mage's Ballad.
- Increase the potency of Bloodletter.

Repertoire procs are too predictable now. Now that procs are tied to specific times after casting songs, it's possible to plan out the usage of Pitch Perfect or Bloodletter with little variation. What drew BRD mains to the job is that the ounce of randomness added freshness to each pull, making it a reactive, engaging playstyle.
* Possible solutions:
- Add a chance to receive a second Repertoire stack.
- Allow other actions besides EA to generate Repertoire.
- Randomize the time within songs where the first Repertoire proc happens.

AoE is much less engaging than before. The AoE variation was reduced threefold by the changing of Enhanced Quick Nock to a GCD proc, the removal of multi-DoT procs during Mage's Ballad, and the removal of multi-DoT Apex Arrow charging. This has taken Bard instantly from one of the most active to one of the least active AoE rotations.
* Possible solutions:
- Grant additional Soul Voice when hitting multiple targets with AoE actions.

DoTs are too weak and feel hardly worth applying. Especially in AoE situations, as few as 4 enemies can make the DoTs completely not worth applying. Even on a single target, it feels like maintaining them is just a chore. DoTs have always been the core of Bard gameplay, and it's disappointing to see them hardly pull their weight in potency.
- Restoring DoT based procs would fix this.
- Adding potency or other benefits to having DoTs would also help.

Thanks for reading, and if you have similar thoughts, please chime in!

Some additional pain points that couldn't fit in the character limit:
- Shadowbite radius is too small; it will usually miss enemies on large pulls during dungeons. This is a particular problem for BRD because Shadowbite combos off a cone-shaped skill.
- Barrage does not generate a Shadowbite proc. This can be fixed by making it share a proc with Refulgent Arrow.
- Repertoire only begins to proc 3s after using a song, so 45s songs only have 14 procs (they do not proc at the end, nor would that be valuable for either AP or WM).
- It feels bad for Radiant Finale to be especially weak during the opener.
- Nature's Minne continues to be one of the weakest defensive utility skills in the game, especially when compared against newer skills such as Curing Waltz, Everlasting Flight, or Magick Barrier.

I feel those a lot too. There's some things I like about the changes, like buffs applying to yourself, and having a DNC style huge party-wide buff. But BRD just feels so much less dynamic than it used to with the changes. I still think it's my favorite of the three physical ranged DPS, but I really hope they find a good common ground in the future.

New bard definitely moved in a good direction for me, but I agree with at least part of the sentiment behind a lot of these pain points.

My two cents on some specific issues:

I actually like that DOTs are now very clearly not worth applying in AOE situations, because that was always way too fiddly. An AOE spreader would be nice (adding this function to iron jaws for example would be a nice spot to put it), but just making the dots AOEs also would make a lot of sense. Making sure you aren't flailing about during AOE pulls applying

I definitely think the DOTs should proc SOMETHING though. DOT mantinence does feel a bit anemic. I just think there is a better reality than bringing back the weirdness of multi-procs on dots, or downtime sometimes really disrupting songs. The randomness of procs is nice but it should be a 'standardized' randomness, if that makes sense.

Increasing reactivity (and making Mages the second best song again) would definitely be nice. A chance at double procs (while leaving the base proc rate at 80 or close to it) would be a nice addition while maintaining the positive effects the 80% proc rate had on making EA actually feel like something in our kit rather than some random nonsense. There is obviously a lot of tension between us wanting EA to be something that feels like it ties into our song rotation at all, and wanting a more reactive playstyle though.

RF's interaction with the opener and how it lines up with bursts is indeed weird and feels very bad. Love the idea of the skill as our way to 'keep up' with dancer, but it definitely needs tweaking.

Minne stinks and we definitely need some attention in the non-DPS support arena #weshouldagotcombatsprint.

I will say a petty problem I have with AOE is that Ladonsbite FEELS like a downgrade, in the sense it is slower and doesn't have that satisfying "I want to hit this button as fast as I can" feel of Quick Nock. Its visuals, sound effects, and animations of our character also don't sell it enough as hitting harder than that arrow spam. Minor point I know, but visual polish is part of why XIV is such a good game.

Also a long time BRD main here.

I agree with pretty much all the points raised by the OP.

Overall, I appreciate the idea to make the job (and all jobs, really) more accessible to a larger audience. One of the key points of playing a game and having fun with it is being able to quickly grasp the basics and gradually build on top of them, and while FF14 really isn't shining bright in this department (with the leveling kit of some jobs feeling completely disjointed until you reach level cap, among other things), it's a step in the right direction in terms of lowering the skill floor.

However, I don't see how lowering the skill floor justifies dumbing down higher end play and trimming down what was largely seen as unique gameplay.
As many experienced pre-EW Bard players know, SB and ShB Bard relied heavily on risk management and reactivity to dish out damage, which was one of the most fun and unique gameplay experience of all jobs in FF14 and is basically what defined the job.

It was easy to pick up and play, and even if you weren't striving to perform optimally, you weren't punished as badly as most other jobs. Dropped your DoTs? That's fine, put them back on. Stayed in Army's longer than you should have or went songless for a bit? Yeah sure, that's bad, but you could still get back on track just fine.

Standardizing BRD's "rotation" to 120s is okay (although I'm of the mind that standardizing literally every job to 120s feels incredibly bland when the entire combat system is basically like a metronome in this game, so having different timers brought diversity), and EW brought a few nice additions to the job:

- A long overdue "upgrade" to Quick Nock (it is functionally identical, could be argued that it got downgraded since it doesn't reset Bloodletter/Rain of Death now)
- A Refulgent-like AoE proc in the form of Shadowbite (although the abysmal radius often makes it hard to use, so just give it Rain of Death's radius or the old Wide Volley radius)
- Barrage being usable in trash packs (and is still kind of a noob trap as it's only worth using at 4+ targets, which coupled with Shadowbite's small radius, means sometimes Barraging Refulgent is STILL a better option)
- A follow-up to Apex Arrow is nice on paper, less so in practice in its current implementation (still kinda nice though, at least as far as gamefeel goes, but it's so underwhelming now that AoE and gauge generation got gutted)

For every nice thing EW BRD brought, something else weights it down, and it further muddies up the job identity. And this is without taking into account the rest of the kit that got completely overhauled. Some parts of the kits feel disjointed, other changes such as BL charges when double procs don't exist anymore are just pointless and encourage unintuitive charge hoarding for the burst window (which is something I like, but that doesn't make it intuitive). Heck I'm not sure what direction the dev team wanted to take Bard this time around.

I understand making a job easier to play, and in that regard the Bard rework did work as shown by the large amount of players happy with how Bard plays now, but most of the issues old Bard suffered from that got "fixed" didn't need most of the changes that made it - to put it bluntly - boring to play for veteran players. DoTs, which were the lifeblood of the job, are just soulless damage buttons that have no noticeable impact on the way the job feels. At all. I also don't understand how people had issues with putting up DoTs in AoE when all you had to do is just put them up while the tank is running, since AoE'ing while the mobs are moving is unreliable and it gave us something productive to do between pulls, instead of simply waiting around for the tank to stop like most other jobs suffered from. Because we're unfortunately now in the same boat.

The one thing I agree had to be removed because it was a degenerate byproduct of the way DoTs tick in this game work is mental DoT tick tracking. Was it fun? Yes, very much so for me and for many other high-end players. Was it healthy? Nah, it was one of the most obscure mechanics the game had, and arguably the one thing that caused a huge gap in skill between newer and experienced Bards. While I'm on this topic, what would have been nice to have would have been a visual UI element similar to a metronome (hey it'd even fit the Bard fantasy) that would show when a tick happens. I think it would even benefit the current iteration of Bard a lot, especially since I doubt most players have figured out procs only start happening at 42s remaining and stop when the timer reaches 3s. This isn't even written anywhere in the tooltips.

Anyways, the bottom line of this post is I do not like where EW Bard is headed. Media Tour Bard was much closer to fixing the issues old Bard had while keeping the identity of the job much the same, and I was really looking forward to trying it out. What we got in the end is, quite frankly, a massive disappointment compared to what we got to see from the Media Tour. Making a job more accessible doesn't mean dumbing it down and sacrificing what made it fun. SB was a sweetspot for me, ShB already started oversimplifying kits, and EW really feels like SE wants to double down on that for some reason. For everything Square Enix is laudable for, job design that appeal to new players and veterans alike still isn't something the developers have a good grasp on.

something need to be done with the song skill, mage ballad affect bloodletter but now it does less effect than previous mage ballad, army peon effect is straight forward and efficient but the thing is when we in the mid of "down tempo" (no proc, BL is on CD, sidewinder is on CD, etc) we do nothing except burst shot and hope the refulgant proc which is very underwhelming.

fully agree on the dot, both bite is only 20 and 25 potency, that is way to low, we are doing TWO dots when other dps only does one and it has same result for our both dot and they doing it better because its part of their rotation unlike us who are "forced" to apply it.

Theres still too much bard in my Ranger. please fix it.

"Accessible" is such a buzzword now regarding class difficulty. The core of the issue is just that we need our dot procs back. Bringing mages back to its old full refresh would also be nice, but if they really don't want to do that at least we'd have double procs alleviating that pain a bit.