Can bard become a Support?

by "support" i mean, NOT a Healer class, but something somewhere in betweene healer and dps (like red mage)
Building off of the title , i mean more in the section of helping the party stay alive, more than a small 1-3% dps increase, somthing like...

well, correct me if im wrong, but traditionally bard isnt a dps, its a support that provides a range of BUFFS for the party, and even a few debuffs for the enemy.
if nothing else i think bard needs a healing song -- at the very least a way to be an off-healer/support by giving a continus stream of health and or resources to their party or themselves.

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A way i think this could happen would looks something like this
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Option A.
Heart's Serenade : a song (spell) that can be sung on the battle field. this (channel) song can last up to 30 seconds and grants all allies within a 30 yalm range a regeneration buff that will stack on top of itself the longer its played .

(when the song begins it grants all surrounding players a regen healing +2% hp per second plus an additional 2% is added every 5 seconds the song goes uninterupted, capping out at a maximum of 14% hp regen per second at the end of the 30 second channel.)

while the bard is singing this song however they then become limited -- any movement will break the channel, and the bard will only have access to a few select attacks while this channel is happening.

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Option B.
A simple buff addtion: simply put, every song bard is able to play has the additional effect of granting a small aoe health regen effect that can stack with the regen effects of the bards other songs (not other bards).


Just some thoughts .
thanks for your ears :D....or eyes ;\

Generally it seems like they’re trying to move away from support skills, they usually fall into one of two categories.

1. So powerful the job becomes mandatory.
2. So niche they’re not worth the dps decrease that comes with them.

At the end of the day there’s no such thing as a support role in this game. BRD is a dps and as a dps it needs to bring competitive damage with other dps or it will be excluded. Adding support skills to them like healing only adds to dps indirectly if it means healers can save a GCD on a heal and use it to dps instead which is basically never the case, but having support skills does decrease the jobs damage because they need to compensate for it for balance (why bring a MCH if BRD does the same damage and brings extra healing?)

Its virtually impossible to add a new role now. Because of the 4/8 setup.

Would it be 1/1/1/1 then? This would approximately double the wait time. And if you tried 5/10 the entire game was to be reworked ... or they accept they fucked the difficulty on everything up to now.

Rdm is still not a support as much as you would like to see. The game does not require an additional heal beside the healer that is selected for the duty.

Theres already a huge "can the pld please stop healing himself cuz that my job as heal"

This comes back to not wanting to lose the additional dps of the tank ... as the healer has way better tools.

If a rdm was healing it would prolly cause a lot of parties to yeet them.

Rdm is as much a support as drg a tank.

If you want to give a class a support status you would need to ruin its private dps as well as not making its buffs stack with other supports else they get to strong.

If a support class was to emerge they would need at least 2-3 classes that were likely dps before ... the outrage would be real.

Tl;dr to late for the support class buffs would be impossible to balance and the setup 4/8 wont really work w/o a great overhaul.

Not a new conversation and I really don't see it happening.

"Support" is already a thing, actually. It's not a new role and it doesn't matter much in 4-player-content but raiders are already reserving spots to bring support like a BRD or DNC with them, sacrificing personal DPS for buffs to raise the output of the whole group. But I don't think it needs to be a special jobclass or a fixed spot which you HAVE to fill.

I’d love to see Bard return to a more support oriented DPS role, but SE has made it clear that they don’t want ‘support’ abilities in FFXIV. And when they do decide to add support abilities they’ll probably automatically go to Dancer, since the devs seem to want it to be the sole ‘support oriented DPS’ in ffxiv.

I’d be surprised if they touched ranged DPS at all for the rest of the expansion. Bard is OP in ultimate, Dancer is still popular and that other one they pretend doesn’t exist is...there (poor Machinist). So i think, from the view of the devs, they look at the ranged physical role and say ‘ok this is perfect’.

Honestly I kinda wish they’d rename Bard at this point to like Ranger or Hunter or something so it stops confusing people into thinking it’s going to have anything to do with supporting the party like it does in any other final fantasy game. I mean, they wouldn’t even have to change anything in the lore really since ‘Bard’ is just an Archer who sings anyway, not something’ separate from Archer like how a Conjurer isn’t a White Mage or a Thaumaturge and Black Mage are two separate schools of magic (though still inextricably linked). They could just keep it called ‘Archer’ and have ‘Bard’ be like a title or something rather than a ‘pseudo-profession’ of archers-who-aren’t-but-still-are-archers.

Again like I always say in these kind of threads I’d love to see Bard become more support oriented. In like my ideal world, they’d separate Bard and Archer somehow and make Bard a support oriented healer that can compete with Astrologian in terms of buffing then party, though obviously it would have to offer something different than the damage increases so it’s not a clone. Archer/Ranger would be the exact same as what we have now (mostly). Or hell, even make it a caster DPS so it can use Raise and have a healing spell like Red Mage.

Obviously though, this isn’t my ideal world, and with the developers moving away from support on all jobs (most especially on jobs that used to be considered support oriented like Bard/Astrologian/Machinist to a lesser extent) its more likely that we’ll see jobs like Bard become even more personal DPS oriented in future. And since they don’t have the time or resources to do something like split the jobs so they can both get the attention they deserve, the current iteration of Bard as a highly mobile, high aoe DPS class with some limited support abilities is likely going to remain for at least the next few expansions. I mean, the job is still so popular in its current iteration that they really don’t have any reason to change anything about it

"In-between Healer and DPS, like Red Mage"

Despite the Raise and Vercure spells, Red Mage is still pretty much a DPS that shouldn't have to heal the party under normal circumstances.

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Originally Posted by Connor

I’d be surprised if they touched ranged DPS at all for the rest of the expansion. Bard is OP in ultimate, Dancer is still popular and that other one they pretend doesn’t exist is...there (poor Machinist). So i think, from the view of the devs, they look at the ranged physical role and say ‘ok this is perfect’.

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3rd lowest dps ahead only of the other 2 physical ranged and that only because the first half of the fight literally bends over backwards to accomodate bard is hardly what i would call overpowered, especially as the reason why it is so good will most likely never translate the same way into another fight. Mind you at this point i wouldn't put it past the dev team to simply go "*shrug* someone still takes them so we did everything right" but people should really stop calling things "overpowered" just because they are not literal shit under very specific conditions.

like, im pretty sure my biggest gripe with the class would be its far too DPS oriented, and not SONG and UTILITY BASED enough....like a bard should be.

give me some class diversity instead of every job being turned into a pure dps class with some "flair"

Bard should give the group strong yet limited time buffs things you can really feel when they trigger their bardic song

Dancers should give consistent but weaker buffs to one party member and maybe have limited time where they can share their dances with the rest of the group

Machinists should be the debuffer of the group have things like protection shreds, enemy damage debuffs and reactive damage (the team does more damage while the machinist triggers flamethrower or wildfire can be built up by the entire team)

I think whilst "support" as a role would be too late to add, I definitely think there can be more in the way of supporty stuff, rather than everything feel like a variation of pure DPS. But I come from a background of playing COR in FFXI where it felt like I had a variety of buffs I could interchange based on the fight and situation and it felt more meaningful to the mechanics of the game. Whereas here, we had some level of it, which has gradually been gutted out.

But if I look at what COR could offer me in terms of support back in FFXI, there are probably some things (but not all) that can translate here, but here's a list of buffs that exists in XI that I think would work/have worked here:

Save TP*
Regain*
Haste
Snapshot
Fast Cast
Peloton
Buff Duration Boost
Conserve MP
Regen
Boost Magic Attack
Defense
Double Attack**
Crit Rate
Refresh
Store TP*
Cure Potency
Magic Defence
Attack Boost

* - If instead of removing TP they took it the other way to make TP more meaningful
** - Although the mechanic only half exists, but "next attack hits twice" would be a cool adaptation of this buff.


That's a pool we can choose from that (aside from TP) would not require changes to how the game works, but of course changes to balance. I think having a support DPS job pulling from the above could be fairly adaptable. Because ultimately the rDPS is most important when it comes to balance and if the BRD/DNC/whatever jobs get support are limited to what they can apply at a given time I think a good rDPS can be balanced whilst still having all of this other stuff to buff.

Because it's stuff like haste, crit, double attack, attack, magic attack and so on that would be an rDPS boost and if they all feel meaningful, then great. But then we end up with extra abilities that are more situational or maybe better in progression groups where they struggle more, so your regen, cure potency, defense boost, conserve MP and so on would be beneficial. Though for the latter the healing in me says "but we heal too well already, this would increase our downtime", so I think for those kind of buffs healers needed to be weaker and that's something I've already asked for on the healer forums.

But there is a drawback here. The more useful the buffs are, the more "required" a buff-centric job is needed, so that DNC or BRD may be considered a requirement in a party make up rather than say, MCH, who is the selfish DPS of the three, unless we can get MCH balanced to BLM/SAM/SMN levels of DPS make it so MCH is competing with their space instead of BRD or DNC

The second drawback is that whilst all of the above would be cool from a support job fantasy perspective, borrowing from a title that made use of the role, once the most efficient rotation has been set up, being given a choice to manage buffs could become less meaningful and more a part of a rotation, and SE has streamlined how that would work in BRD by making a "buff" rotation in the form of songs and this would lessen how supporty it feels because you've not made any meaningful choice behind the support you've given. So I'm not really sure how they could tackle this. AST had the advantage of RNG, so they make sure of what they got and had to make a choice in how they used their card.

But I expect there is a way. However, the other problem will come in the form of people who enjoy BRD as a DPS job, rather than the support side. Whilst traditionally bards are support orientated, SE also made BRD a hybrid of Ranger and Bard, so those who favour a ranger-type job are also playing BRD. So they'll have to dissatisfy them to make it work for those who want more support orientated stuff.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Connor

I’d love to see Bard return to a more support oriented DPS role, but SE has made it clear that they don’t want ‘support’ abilities in FFXIV. And when they do decide to add support abilities they’ll probably automatically go to Dancer, since the devs seem to want it to be the sole ‘support oriented DPS’ in ffxiv.

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This drives me crazy. Why the sudden change? FFXIV has operated for 6 years with syngerism and support classes. Yet, now they want to take it away? I wish they would explain their reasoning beyond the bull they've been spouting. And then, I would hope they would actually hear our side and consider the fact that we liked things as they were. If they wanted to change gears and make this a mostly-DPS-game-like-Blade & Soul, then they probably should have made a new MMO all together. The changes were just way too much, especially all of a sudden.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Connor

Honestly I kinda wish they’d rename Bard at this point to like Ranger or Hunter or something

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I think I agree with that. At this point, it really isn't "bard." Yes, it sings, but no it doesn't have the range of support it used to. I do think they would need to change the lore, though, because the lore is all about bard singing to their boosting their allies, weakening their foes, and so on.