Bard Rework

Hello,
Wanted to address the following after a talk i had with a friend about bard.
Initially from the fluff point of view it doesn't really seem valid to mid combat change a whole longbow for a flute, in the contrary a spell-like job with a lute or any music instrument as a spell focus/weapon would be far more valid. Cause the way as it is right now, its more like expecting even a DK to bring out a buckler mid-combat, which wouldn't satisfy anyone. So i don't see any reason for a bow addict to like this change as also i wouldn't like it if i wanted to play a musician mage-like bard to get a bow. So i wanted to suggest the separation of the bow from bard to a ranger/bowman type of a job as also the possibility to have and actual musician-like caster.

I have a love and hate relationship with BRD. Currently it's my less favorite phys ranged.

The gameplay is too disjointed for me. The dots feel like they're just there to fuel the songs and like two abilities. It's just so set and forget.

I'd like to see them remove dots from jobs that don't need them and properly make dot jobs that have the dots interact with their kit. Granted yes BRD's dots do interact with their kit but Idk, it just messes with the job fantasy of a musical buffer that uses a bow/harp.

I'd like to see them lean into using songs to fuel their procs kind of like how it fuels Radiant Finale.

They aren't going to change the mainhand weapons of Jobs at this point. While we could get a new musician Job in the future (unlikely, but possible - we did get DNC), we aren't going to see BRD suddenly stop using a bow, be its own Job, have Archer become something else, etc.

Me personally, I like the idea of BRD since it's how a lot of people see the Bard class fantasy or play it in games like D&D - a ranged, stand off character who buffs his allies, debuffs their enemies, and does some token damage from the safety of range with a little magic on the side - but FFXIV's BRD is just too...chaotic. Leveling one and doing it in some roulettes, I find that a lot of the random procs and stuff are annoying to keep up with, I kinda wish Iron Jaws didn't exist and it was just optimal to refresh your DoTs manually, and I wish things procing was much more visible without having to glue your eyes to your hotbars.

Don't get me wrong, I like the "simple" rotation and priority system, and how you can roll through songs, but there are a LOT of changes I'd make if I was going to design/redesign the Job myself.

...but some people love the randomness and stuff, and for those, I wouldn't want to take it away from them. I'd say we have to see what actual BRD players want with the Job and go from there, honestly.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

I'd say we have to see what actual BRD players want with the Job and go from there, honestly.

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This is sadly more complicated than it may seem. Biggest problems that I've seen over the years are A) SE has no idea WHO exactly to listen to and B) It doesn't seem like they have anyone on their team that plays the job at any kind of high level to make sense of the asks. The changes that came about with Endwalker were kind of just what people (Influencers, not people who play the job) said they wanted for the job mashed together into a mush without any semblance of thought for how they would work together.

-Three stacks of BL? Who cares! We have half procs now. Procs that come at like what, less than half the rate they used to? What's the point. Would have been amazing when we had the full dot procs rate but why now? Now take those uber slow BL procs and make them 100 potency. Maximizing their usage/buff alignment just doesn't feel good anymore.

-Make EA's CD not scale with SkS? Nice! Now the speed bard that was popular in SB and ShB is dead. (That was my playstyle.)

-And don't even get my started on the limp dot potencies. What was the point of that? Bard used to be the ruler of multi target fights and now you're griefing if you bring it into TEA when it used to be dominant for the first two phases. Was it incredibly difficult to play properly on multi-target? Yup. But the rewards made the effort worth it and that's just gone now.

-Not having your songs proc with dot ticks was the single biggest mistake they ever made with this job. Nobody who plays the job asked for this. Less than nobody asked for this. Leagues bigger mistake than bow mage.

-Minor personal gripe of mine was them getting rid of Flaming Arrow and Misery's End. Were they a little bloaty? Flaming Arrow: Yes. Misery's End: Debatable (but I think not). But the biggest thing they provided was variety and that's something I feel bard, and most other jobs, sorely lack.

-Make blast arrow last 30s. For the love of God.

But what do I know? I've just been playing bard at a high level for almost a decade ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

ETA: I know I'm salty, but I love this job deeply and the direction they're taking it is worrying to me.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

They aren't going to change the mainhand weapons of Jobs at this point. While we could get a new musician Job in the future (unlikely, but possible - we did get DNC), we aren't going to see BRD suddenly stop using a bow, be its own Job, have Archer become something else, etc.

Me personally, I like the idea of BRD since it's how a lot of people see the Bard class fantasy or play it in games like D&D - a ranged, stand off character who buffs his allies, debuffs their enemies, and does some token damage from the safety of range with a little magic on the side - but FFXIV's BRD is just too...chaotic. Leveling one and doing it in some roulettes, I find that a lot of the random procs and stuff are annoying to keep up with, I kinda wish Iron Jaws didn't exist and it was just optimal to refresh your DoTs manually, and I wish things procing was much more visible without having to glue your eyes to your hotbars.

Don't get me wrong, I like the "simple" rotation and priority system, and how you can roll through songs, but there are a LOT of changes I'd make if I was going to design/redesign the Job myself.

...but some people love the randomness and stuff, and for those, I wouldn't want to take it away from them. I'd say we have to see what actual BRD players want with the Job and go from there, honestly..

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That wouldn't be the furthest from the truth, even when you mention pen and paper type of games, like DnD or other MMO's, as a bow addict i can verify that bow has its own little niche type of killer on every type of game apart from FFXIV for some reason, with the permanent debuff of supporting. It even got idolizing several types of blockbuster fantasy film characters like Legolas or Hawkeye. Yet here one could never be a proud Marksman. Hell, historically even Ninjas favored bow over others. While Bard in such games stick with the magic usage, cause simply music is mind affecting.
Avoiding any misconceptions, marksmanship as a term, should be counted in power of fire arms like Machinist's? Cause in my eyes that doesn't make much sense.
Also, im sorry, i dont want to comment in anyway about the game/skill mechanics, I'm not a game designer nor a math person, i only address the class fantasy and role that i see as an issue.

Honestly if 7.0's iteration of bard is a literal copy/paste of stormblood bard I'd be happy as a clam.

In my opinion, the heyday of bard was in Stormblood when your DoT-tick-crits turned into repertoire - which meant more Rain of Death / Bloodletter and more pitch perfect. If I recall, we also had foe requiem back then and a few other tools that had some value. When they changed bard to just get repertoire at a steady rate... it became too vanilla.

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Originally Posted by dspguy

In my opinion, the heyday of bard was in Stormblood when your DoT-tick-crits turned into repertoire - which meant more Rain of Death / Bloodletter and more pitch perfect. If I recall, we also had foe requiem back then and a few other tools that had some value. When they changed bard to just get repertoire at a steady rate... it became too vanilla.

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Foe's was such a unique skill. I loved it

Yeah I can agree with the points when it comes down to "what fits with the class fantasy" and for example picking up flute to buff your friends seems a bit out of place for me. When it comes down to class fantasy with Bard in FF (I am really bad at giving opinions in this, since I've played it only to level 60) I had totally different expectations of what bard was going to be. Name suggest it as someone who makes songs from heroic tales, but in the Job Quest it gives you impression that they were the marksmen in the infantry. What I would do to make them more "in-line" with the bard style, is to utilize that beautiful bow since it has strings. Buff allies? Play the strings on the bow. Debuff enemies? Slap the strings in aggressive manner on that bow. Would remove the gimmicky "one-man-band" stuff from it that feels really out of place. That way it would focus on the bow part solely, while still keeping some of the bard stuff that SE did seem to be going for.

I think they messed up majorly with what they wanted to do with Bard, since I got the vibe they were "the snipers", but after bringing mechanist it feels like they've taken that role and bard has been just left as "one-man-band-person". So I totally agree that focusing more of ranger/bowman side while using the bow strings on spells would be more epic and fitting. Also would enable on creating some nice animations utilizing those beautiful bow aesthetics.

i would love to see more of a music class from bard when i started playing ffxiv i always tough that the class would include more music ability's but sadly it were still bow ability's

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Originally Posted by Murotar

Yeah I can agree with the points when it comes down to "what fits with the class fantasy" and for example picking up flute to buff your friends seems a bit out of place for me. When it comes down to class fantasy with Bard in FF (I am really bad at giving opinions in this, since I've played it only to level 60) I had totally different expectations of what bard was going to be. Name suggest it as someone who makes songs from heroic tales, but in the Job Quest it gives you impression that they were the marksmen in the infantry. What I would do to make them more "in-line" with the bard style, is to utilize that beautiful bow since it has strings. Buff allies? Play the strings on the bow. Debuff enemies? Slap the strings in aggressive manner on that bow. Would remove the gimmicky "one-man-band" stuff from it that feels really out of place. That way it would focus on the bow part solely, while still keeping some of the bard stuff that SE did seem to be going for.

I think they messed up majorly with what they wanted to do with Bard, since I got the vibe they were "the snipers", but after bringing mechanist it feels like they've taken that role and bard has been just left as "one-man-band-person". So I totally agree that focusing more of ranger/bowman side while using the bow strings on spells would be more epic and fitting. Also would enable on creating some nice animations utilizing those beautiful bow aesthetics.

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Exactly! Bard right now feels as two compressed classes while we could have two rocking around, one true archer and one actual bard buffing allies and cursing enemies there is even in Japanese folklore about musicians shooting slices of air able to cut made out of instrument sound, some kind of magic i guess, not bow tho.

Tbh the best thing that could happen to bard is to make a branching path for ranger as a new job, and focus entirely on the ranger aspect for it, then make bard an actual bard again.
Current weapons would be shared between the 2 but going forward bard would get musical instruments and ranger would get bows. Would be nice

I think archer alone as a stand alone class would be very limited in what you can do with it, i like the idea of bard buffing with music but maybe not with bows, would like it more if it had its own instrument/s and maybe give archer a better fitting job. Alternatively, they could make archer equip different kinds of weapons in offhand (like the paladin shield) so you can have the choice of choosing bard abilities by equipping a bard instrument or other abilities with something like arrow types or arrow coatings for more DoT damage or higher potency, but they will never do this cause their main route is that every ability will be useable and you don't have to sacrifice some for others.

Bard as a raiding job is fine it's viable at least but generally doesn't feel as fun as other ranged jobs to me especially the songs, i like the idea of passive buffs during the entire fight but the songs doesn't feel as impactive to the job itself.

agree. the bard & ranger should have been two separate jobs, rather than a bow wielding bard. brd could be just like edward from ffxiv. using harp as weapon and deal damage with melodies, instead of using a bow. i very much doubt they will be able to separate it now though, sadly.

As a 'bard player who would rather be playing ranger,' I think BRD genuinely only really needs the walking cast system from PVP. Giving BRD walking casts will give BRD a wider range of tempos to play with, and potentially make the job feel more musical. GCDs with walking casts would feel the slowest, but can be sped up with haste buffs, instant GCDs will feel faster, and having a plethora of oGCDs will make the job feel the fastest when it needs to. Having procs will jazz things up. Giving BRD walking casts will allow actions like Burst Shot to hit harder, making it feel like a better archer, and makes spam feel a little better. BRD needs to feel like a combat rhythm game like Hi-FI Rush or Thumper with archery being its focus.