Revert BRD RoD debuff

I don't see the reason that the 10% damage reduction was completely removed from BRD and in place something just so amazingly useless. In the current 2.1 state of Rain of Death, it just might not even worth using when it is a free cast for anything other then trash or random :blank:ing around.

I completely understand the debuff being added to another class like a WAR , I understand having like buffs/debuffs being available to different jobs.
BRD is still good, don't get me wrong here, I'm not making a case that we should be all powerful for every situation. The songs are fantastic, but lets try to be honest here, they are highly situational that has more dependency on group composition then anything else.

Can't we come up with at least a compromise here? Shorter duration? 15 seconds? even 10 seconds? Slightly higher TP cost? Lower damage? (though the damage on it is laughable as it is) or even add a single target shot that provides that debuff?

If the ability is going to keep giving this same accuracy debuff, how about at least having it give a... lets say 100% chance to give a free quick knock? Yes 100%, that seems about right. That's 2 GCDs costing 180 TP for a total of 240 potency (also have to get in range for quick knock)? I still doubt it is worth using in any other scenario other then just fluffing around or the 2 minutes of trash mobs, but what's really the difference? For me at least, the ability is doing the same thing on or off my hotbars aside from the occasional misclick.

They wont revert it, they should just make it a ogcd skill since there is zero reason to ever use it now.

I don't think they should revert it back to DMG debuff. Now war has that. I don't think evasion debuff was the right thing to do either. ROD should have been totally replaced by a song to buff Melee DPS like we have for Magic DPS. I would have like to see a slight TP redeuction on wide volley from 160 to 145 due to not getting a free ROD if the song was replaced.

What I'm getting out of the accuracy changes to our abilities is that we can now comfortably fit into all the allagan gear that has no accuracy and not worry about the accuracy 'cap' for things. Hawk's eye for your cd burn spike, and RoD to bump you back into the cap for any other important short burn spots where you need the accuracy. :O Makes elfin bow more viable! Until you get allagan pants at least, then these acc buffs become pointless again. ;o

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Originally Posted by Id_Slayer

What I'm getting out of the accuracy changes to our abilities is that we can now comfortably fit into all the allagan gear that has no accuracy and not worry about the accuracy 'cap' for things. Hawk's eye for your cd burn spike, and RoD to bump you back into the cap for any other important short burn spots where you need the accuracy. :O Makes elfin bow more viable! Until you get allagan pants at least, then these acc buffs become pointless again. ;o

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RoD destroys your TP. What are you going to do if you miss RoD and have to recast it immediately? There goes 1/3 of your TP, or almost an entire Invigorate. It's seriously not worth it.

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Originally Posted by Venom

I don't think they should revert it back to DMG debuff. Now war has that.

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The biggest problem with the reasoning that it has been replaced by the warrior damage debuff is that the opportunity cost of the warrior ability is way more restricted than it was for the bard. Even if you don't factor in that it was an AOE the fact that they could use it out of sequence, whenever it was necessary made it way more reliable than the Warrior version, but factor in the AOE as well and there is just no comparison.

Whether they thought they were doing it or not, moving this debuff to warriors, putting it at the end of a chain of abilities and making it single target actually nerfed it by quite a bit.

Though that could have been their intention as well... but I have to say, I do miss the old RoD sometimes.

Rain of death is not worth the cost anymore. While its nice when its a free-cast during aoe, the upkeep for an evasion down status cost too much.

I personally think they need to revert RoD to how it was back in 1.20 along with Quick Knock which includes the old combo they two had. RoD should return to a AOE skill that has a potency upgrade when used in a combo that starts off with a chance proc from our Heavy shot. The combo could be a 15% proc chance that Quick Knock will go from AOE to single target 4 strike attack at 75 potency. This would then trigger a potency upgrade to RoD from 100 to 150 and give an add effect (old one was an AOE stun effect). Would even be nice if it had a potency upgrade or chance to proc when damage reducing songs are up also.

Why SE had to totally destroy all of brds combos that resulted in all of our AOE just having a 15% proc on free tp use is beyond me, but with current changes they aren't really leaving much reason to used them aside for speed-run or basic trash adds with low hp to begin with.

and get constant 30% damage reduction ? 10% warrior + 10% str reduce + 10% rod? not going to happen

They should at least change the 10% evasion drop to something else more useful...like a 10% damage taken increase. Or if they think that's still OP, 5% less damage output AND 5% less evasion. I just want something more useful than a simple evasion drop, previously it seriously was the only group support we could use regardless of circumstances to help the party. Now we have nothing that we can use no matter the party setup to help everybody without wasting it. Requiem only really helps spellcasters, and the Ballad only really helps WHM, while the new RoD isn't that helpful when evasion only comes into play when fighting something you're not geared for.

People who's saying that RoD -10% evasion is good for adjusting the accuracy build of other partymates are pretty naive.

There is in no way you can keep up RoD debuff for the whole duration of the fight (i.e Twintania fight).

As for the PvP purpose, seriously? This shouldn't happen in the first place, incorporating a PvE skill mechnics into PvP? That's just genius, another reason why I'm not fond of the PvP system in this game.

There should be a separate skill adjustment when it comes to PvP and PvE, that way people who don't care about PvP won't get affected by the skill changes especially if it's for the sake of PvP.

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Originally Posted by nostrade

and get constant 30% damage reduction ? 10% warrior + 10% str reduce + 10% rod? not going to happen

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Not sure if this was directed at what I said when I talked about reverting, but to clarify - not what I meant by reverting to 1.20 version. In 1.20 the strongest combo we had was Heavy Shot>Quick Knock>Rain of Death and the only tp used was on initiating attack where the others triggered as free-cast and either gained and add effect or had behavior changes (I don't want the free-cost trigger activation as that would create inbalance, but having the combo back would be nice). However, this combo couldn't be spammed as Quick Knock had a very long cool down (3 minutes), which is why I stated it should only have a 15% activation rate (we all know how often this is, and it isn't very often at all). The potency of Rain of Death was also much stronger than it is now and only had an add effect when used in a combo, but for this change I wouldn't want RoD to always have a stronger potency, but instead keep its 100 potency, but when combo procs gain an increase. That and when the combo did activate the 4-5 fold attack of Quick Knock would actually have a decrease in potency, but would go from conal attack to single target multi fold.

This wouldn't make brd especially stronger than it is now, but it would give us a more beneficial use of our AOE skills that currently serve an otherwise lowered priority and highly situational use. I would also die to have the old Rain of Death animation back too =/ it was much cooler than what it is now (Multi-directional multiple light arrow projectiles).

Change the name to rain of wet noodles. I don't see any deaths happening with it anytime soon

They obviously changed it for pvp because having an aoe dmg debuff was too powerful completely gutting in pve to the point of not even keeping it on the skill bar.

Free proc... that would mean you would use wide volley which you don't do atm because of its mana inefficiency to dps compared to quick nock nullifying the whole proc chain. Which imo they got all backwards in the first place since you get nock as your first aoe it should proc wide volley and it proc rain and rain have an added effect while making the added affect of say 10% more dmg taken. But, to make this not OP in pvp make it only work when completing the chain similar to the monk silence.

If Bards had to choose what the debuff on RoD was, and you can't choose the damage reduction debuff, what would you choose? The only thing I can see it being useful for is a big accuracy debuff (20-25%, maybe) or a low defense debuff like 10%. Accuracy debuff might make tanking even easier again (in which case you might as well give the damage reduction debuff back), so I'd pick low defense debuff.

I'd like to see it be a 5% damage taken debuff (mob takes 5% more damage from all sources). Good for burn phases, but too much TP to keep up all the time.
Otherwise, I'd just like it to have increased Potency to justify the huge TP cost. Something like 150 Potency.
Either of these would make the name of the ability actually make sense, lol.

If they refuse to give us back our -damage debuff, then + damage taken would be a useful replacement. But if they did this change for PVP purposes then + damage taken probably won;t be given to us as that would probably be even more OP in a PVP setting.

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Originally Posted by WhaleBiologist

If they refuse to give us back our -damage debuff, then + damage taken would be a useful replacement. But if they did this change for PVP purposes then + damage taken probably won;t be given to us as that would probably be even more OP in a PVP setting.

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Except everything already dies fast if the healer goes down, which most players aim for from the getgo. Won't be much of a change IMO as of PvP right now.

Basically they wanted people to go pld+war instead of double paladin.

First off, in a PvP setting, BRD has already has it's nuts cut off by the broken ranged penalty. Might as well play a melee since a BRD has to be in that range to not take a near 50% damage penalty. (btw, WAR toss hits for well harder at max range then anything a BRD will do in melee range) If this change was really a PvP issue, then they should look into lowering the debuff time on Player targets to something like 6 seconds just like they need to look into the sleep timer on player targets. Also, in PvP , TTK is so quick, there isn't that much point to have a BRD in your group over someone who can do more damage or bring actual utility to a group, if the opposing team is close enough to get an AoE debuff, then I can assure you that the choice of sleep is far preferred over 10% less damage for 20 seconds. MNK or DRG for damage has as much mobility as needed right now and does far more burst damage then BRD.



As far as WAR+PLD vs PLD+PLD or even WAR+WAR.. that shouldn't matter. There are 6 group buffs available, as long as you have them covered, you should be able to have access to just about every debuff/buff in the game be it very slightly different duration or versions via the cross class abilities with main job being slightly stronger then cross class. Another Job should have access to this ability and I believe it should be BRD with the current state of the game.

I honestly think RoD should have lower TP cost- maybe around the 90-130 range... with the abysmal and un-needed effects of "Lowers Enemy Evasion" changed to "Lowers Enemy Accuracy". I mean, a rain of arrows to the face would surely blind you , right?

This effect does not need to be super OP, the amount of accuracy lost doesn't have to be huge, but at least a noticeable difference would help in large raids where AoE can be an issue. The tanks would hold hate easier, the healers wouldn't need to heal quite as much (again easier hate mitigation), and any pulled aggro might be survivable from one of those DPS hungry melee.

And hey I would be able to put the ability back on my skill bar!

I used to open with RoD.
Now I only use it if I get the free cast from Wide Volley. It is a pretty useless skill now, though I can understand it may of been a bit OP, but now it is just a waste of TP.

If they ever add a mechanic that makes something have high evasion rate or something...

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But it makes way more sense for the -10% dmg to come from the Tank and not costing an obscene amount of TP.