The Disappointing State of Bard Going Into 7.0

Hello, everyone. This is my first post on the official forums so apologies if this gets formatted weirdly. Without further ado, I'd like to open a discussion of the current issues with the Bard job and offer some simple and effective solutions that aim to address these issues while largely leaving the core of the job untouched. While these issues are nothing new within the community, the dispelling of the 7.2 sweeping job change rumor has inspired me to attempt bringing this to the larger communities attention in hope that these may be addressed sooner than later.

So, what are these issues with Bard? Simply put, the current iteration of Bard makes it one of the most strict and punishing jobs to play at a high level while removing a large amount of optimization that made the job fun previously. Endwalker converting the rotation from 80 seconds to 120 seconds while also removing the cooldown reduction that was provided by one of our songs has made it so that recovering from any delay in playing a song is essentially impossible, whether that delay is intentional or not. Bard is also one of, if not the most, punishing jobs to die on because the long song cooldown creates a very large amount of song "downtime" in which you lose access to the buffs and rotation associated with the songs, as well as all of your job gauge while also being the only job in the game to lose access to building gauge for a period. This is by far the largest pain point in the Bard kit, but I would also like to bring attention to DoTs no longer having any interaction with the rest of the kit, "snapshotting" DoTs being non-existent outside of the burst window, and Army's Paeon continuing to provide the same boring "filler" effect since this iteration of the song came out in 4.0.

I know that I'm quickly glossing over some of these issues as I want to keep this post fairly reduced in length, and I'd be happy to elaborate on any of these points in a reply. I do have a Google Doc that goes into much more depth about these points, but I'm unsure if sharing links is allowed on the forums.

As for some ideas on how to address these issues, I have a few ideas that will leave the core of Bard more or less completely untouched. My goal is to provide some constructive feedback in the form of simple quality of life and minor effect changes that would return some flexibility and optimization to the job while slightly reducing how punishing it is to play. (1/3)

1. Reduce the cooldown of songs from 120 seconds to 110 seconds. This reduces the song downtime when recovering from a death back to roughly how long it was during Shadowbringers and Stormblood while leaving the core rotation unchanged. It also provides a little bit of flexibility by allowing you to sit in a song longer or shorter depending on the situation without ruining the timing of your rotation.

2. Introduce a new self buff tied to the Empyreal Arrow skill. This buff would have a low chance to be received with every Empyreal Arrow use and be guaranteed while under the effects of Raging Strikes. This buff would have a short duration and when using Iron Jaws with this buff active, it would be consumed to slightly increase the potency of the DoTs that get refreshed by Iron Jaws. This would return the concept of "snapshotting" DoTs to the job while being consistent to receive while in the burst window.

3. Add a low chance to receive a second song "proc" whenever gaining one, based on how many DoTs you have applied. This would leave the base 80% chance every 3 seconds on receiving a proc unchanged, and would add a small chance per every DoT applied to an enemy to gain two procs instead of one when the 80% roll is successful. As an example with numbers attached, say each DoT provides a 10% chance for a second proc. In a single target fight with both DoTs on the boss, this would mean you have an 80% chance every 3 seconds to gain one song proc, and every time you successfully gain one proc you now have an additional 20% chance (10% per DoT applied to an enemy) to gain one additional proc for two total. This gives DoTs a small interaction with the kit once more without making them our primary source of song procs and without making Bard overpowered in multi target fights, some of the core issues that plagued the job in previous expansions.

4. During the Army's Paeon song, convert the Army's Paeon action button or Pitch Perfect (to avoid button bloat, though separating them would be an option) into a new GCD weaponskill. This weaponskill would be a combo action to go after Burst Shot, deals slightly more damage than Burst Shot but less than Refulgent Arrow, and would guarantee a proc of Hawk's Eye (the buff introduced in Dawntrail that allows the use of Refulgent Arrow or Shadowbite). Burst Shot retains its 35% chance to grant Hawk's Eye, and this combo is not interrupted by the use of Refulgent Arrow. This effectively creates a 3 part GCD combo during the Army's Paeon song while ensuring that you don't lose the 3rd action when switching songs. Combined with the shortened song cooldowns from my first suggestion, this could add some interesting decision making on whether you should sit in Army's Paeon for an additional GCD or not. (2/3)

I tried to keep my suggestions fairly succinct without leaving out too many details on how I envision them working. Regardless, the purpose of my ideas is to show that Bard is so close to being in a very good position as a job and is just being held back by a few small but very inconvenient issues. I also understand that all but the first suggestion are to address points that a majority of Bard players probably don't think about, but I feel that adding this little bit of depth to the job once again would go a long way towards making it fun to play for both casual players and those that enjoy having something to optimize and having some flexibility to their rotation. I will try to reply to any discussion about this topic and if you've made it all the way to the end, thank you for reading all of this! (3/3)

I have mained rphys since forever and played BRD exclusively for savage/utlimate in Endwalker, and I'm on two minds about this.

• The songs could definitely benefit from a lower recast than a strict 2min. Being able to float songs around and extend or condense their duration according to the encounter, downtime, etc, is what makes BRD actually very flexible around downtimes unlike a lot of other jobs (like MCH and its stupid tool alignment).
• Being punishing when dying is actually a good thing in my mind, but perhaps it's my rose tinted glasses speaking when thinking about older job design. I do like when dying is punishing. I do like when it brings consequences on the job's rotation. I don't like DNC for that very reason: you can die, you have have all the downtime you can imagine, the job is literally immune to every hurdle. I mean perhaps it's good that some jobs have strengths in that area while others have weakness for identity, but I do like that BRD requires some finer play to come back from the dead. It's also possible I've been permanently damaged in the head for playing SB MCH which has always had the most punishing death of every job across all expansions...
• I do agree however that not being able to put up a song after death sometimes because you died at the beginning of one for example, can feel kinda bad because you're left doing almost nothing. I'd legit like to have a deeper system behind songs which would make it ok for them to have no recast time, but would still ask for the players to go through a significant amount of their duration cycle somehow.
• DoTs having lost their interaction with the whole kit feels just wrong. Not only the repertoire procs are extremely predictable and lose a lot of the frantic sudden spikes of activity they used to have, but the removal of the dot interaction on Sidewinder is just incomprehensible to me: why did they even do that? Well, the obvious answer is, to water down and simplify everything because apparently, making sure that any failure states are removed from abilities has been the main goal of job design for years now. It's just sad.
• Army used to be okay before when the songs were 30s long, because Army would only last 20s, and it was a breather between cycles. Today however, it's resident sleepers for 45s, and I'm actually happy that in DT Ballad is going to take over it so that it's Army that turns into the shortened filler song of 30s, that's already 15s shaved off the resident sleeping so... i'll take it.
• On snapshotting dots with IJs, I don't understand the complaint however. We still do snapshot dots under Raging/burst and it's important and still a big gain to do so. If the idea is to make it even more of a gain, sure, I guess though? But it's hardly a problem for me either way right now.
• I like your idea to give some depth to Army's rotation. I'm also partial to it because it feels like old MCH proc management with ammo.

Thanks for the feedback! I do agree that death should be punishing to a degree. Bard just feels uniquely punishing when compared to other jobs because it loses access to basically its whole identity until the next song is available. Which has always been the case, but the longer song cooldowns have greatly exacerbated the issue. You went from the maximum possible song downtime after a death of roughly 25 seconds when accounting for rez animation to almost 40 seconds now in Endwalker. That's a massive amount of time to be locked out of part of the kit! Some sort of mechanic that allows song recast to be instant while still requiring the use of all songs would be incredible to be honest. Combined with Dawntrail removing the target requirement, songs would be in a very good place.

As for DoT snapshotting with the Iron Jaws buff, the idea was to bring snapshotting back to the rest of the non-burst rotation. One of my favorite parts of Bard in Stormblood and Shadowbringers was needing to pay attention to which buffs you had applied to yourself or the boss at any given moment and figure out whether it would be a gain to refresh your DoTs with those buffs or not. 'I have a Spear card applied to myself at the moment? Well, that's worth roughly 3% damage gain and the last refresh had Trick Attack and Brotherhood, so I'll pass on this snapshot. But if they pass me the next card too, I'll refresh on that one!' That kind of decision making was a lot of fun to optimize, but I also realize it was a lot of effort and not something that a lot of people may have liked. Plus, with the two minute meta making all raid buffs outside of AST cards go into a single burst window, there's essentially zero buffs outside of the raid window for us to take advantage of. That's what I was hoping to bring back to a small degree by adding a periodic buff to Iron Jaws. Ideally the potency increase on the DoTs should make it so it's only a very minor loss to use the buffed Iron Jaws if you get it with every Empyreal Arrow, but if you know that the guaranteed proc is coming up or are feeling lucky, you could bet on getting the next buff instead, let your current buff fall off, and potentially gain even more potency out of your refresh. It's just something small that adds a bit of the thought process back to refreshing your DoTs outside of the burst window without requiring other jobs to provide buffs again. I hope I explained this in a way that makes sense!

I don't like babysitting buffs and timers on my end. Keeping an eye on a timer for 40s and being distracted within the last 5s and missing the refresh just feels awful as a system to me and I never liked it. While I liked the dot correlation with repertoire before EW, now that it's been removed, only the part that I actually dislike is left on the job. I can understand the engagement snapshotting for specific situations can generate for people, so if that's what bard mains like, then so be it.

I just hate timers.

I have become kind of a DOT hater as well mostly because xiv doesn't handle them well at all. I do miss how procs scaled in AOE, but that can be achieved though means that aren't DOTs like making a portion of your procs be tied to weapon skills delivered that way you get a proc chance for every enemy hit by Ladonsbite for example. On top of that, Iron Jaws just feels out of place on BRD, its animations are neither music nor archery related. If BRD really needs timers to manage, then I feel like making song upkeep a bit more of an active process would be more bard-like than DOT management.

What I really want are walking casts that PVP BRD currently has. The main GCD Powerful Shot has a cast time, but you can still move while casting albeit at a slower speed. To me, this mechanic fixes a lot of thematic issues that come with having a bow-wielding bard. While it isn't BLM levels of casting, it's still casting so BRD's personal damage output can be increased so can be balanced, and designed like it is a caster, and provide better game feel to players wanting to play archer/ranger. Walking casts also open up the bard gameplay as well by broadening the tempo range in its rotation. GCDs with cast times can provide the slowest APM, instant GCDs can be middle speed, hastened GCDS can be faster, and oGCDs can be the fastest. Song buffs can also provide a personal haste buff so that playing a song can be more viscerally felt by the BRD player themselves. Relatively speaking, BRD could be the PCT of phys ranged where yes, it still has raid buffs, and utility, but it is treated more like a DPS. Let DNC be the synergy DPS, and let BRD be more independent.

I also want more instances of multi hit attacks like Barrage. To me this is also another mechanic that marries bard gameplay, and archery gameplay. Where a bard will amplify the attack power of their allies with music, an archer can amplify their own attacks through abilities like Barrage -- take a smell attack, and turn it into a big one.

Rework Shadowbite, it's terrible and shouldn't rely on Barrage.

- Buff the potency
- Remove Barrage potency increase.
- Shadowbite Ready should come from Rain of Death, as a 100% proc chance so it becomes a combo.

So realistically, a streamlined AoE combo would be: Ladonsbite > Rain of Death > Shadowbite > Repeat.

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Originally Posted by Rekujin

Rework Shadowbite, it's terrible and shouldn't rely on Barrage.

- Buff the potency
- Remove Barrage potency increase.
- Shadowbite Ready should come from Rain of Death, as a 100% proc chance so it becomes a combo.

So realistically, a streamlined AoE combo would be: Ladonsbite > Rain of Death > Shadowbite > Repeat.

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So essentially removing GCD rng procs from the AoE kit?

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Originally Posted by mallleable

I have become kind of a DOT hater as well mostly because xiv doesn't handle them well at all. I do miss how procs scaled in AOE, but that can be achieved though means that aren't DOTs like making a portion of your procs be tied to weapon skills delivered that way you get a proc chance for every enemy hit by Ladonsbite for example. On top of that, Iron Jaws just feels out of place on BRD, its animations are neither music nor archery related. If BRD really needs timers to manage, then I feel like making song upkeep a bit more of an active process would be more bard-like than DOT management.

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If you don't mind elaborating, how do you feel DoTs could be made better in XIV? I can see how DoTs and Iron Jaws don't really fit the Bard aesthetic and are more of an Archer thing, but if we're being honest, that's kinda what Bard is in XIV. The only parts related to music at the moment are their buffs. Songs, Radiant Finale, and I suppose Battle Voice could be considered "musical." I wouldn't mind leaning more into the musical side, removing DoTs and providing something else to upkeep. But that's getting beyond the scope of what I intended with this post and far beyond something they could provide to us in the time span of 7.0-ish. My hopes were to bring these core issues to attention so that they could hopefully be addressed without a rework and before 8.0 or later.

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Originally Posted by Valence

I don't like babysitting buffs and timers on my end. Keeping an eye on a timer for 40s and being distracted within the last 5s and missing the refresh just feels awful as a system to me and I never liked it. While I liked the dot correlation with repertoire before EW, now that it's been removed, only the part that I actually dislike is left on the job. I can understand the engagement snapshotting for specific situations can generate for people, so if that's what bard mains like, then so be it.

I just hate timers.

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In my opinion as a fellow Savage/Ultimate raider, learning when you need to refresh your DoTs on the boss is just part of learning the fight. I admit that while progging a fight I would frequently let my DoTs fall off until I had a mechanic mastered. But afterwards I would be able to associate needing to refresh with a specific mechanic or movement within the fight and it became something to almost not even think about. It's just part of the rotation at that point. Not to mention that with the current iteration of Bard and non burst window party buffs, you have almost zero variance in when you should be refreshing. Also, as a side effect of getting buffs that encourage refreshing DoTs earlier than the end of their duration, the amount of times someone runs into the risk of forgetting to refresh the DoTs before they fall off should drastically decrease assuming they take advantage of the buff.

Having said all of this, I'm not completely opposed to them removing DoTs and giving Bard something else to focus on further down the line. But at the present moment, they're one of the few bits of "complexity" that Bard still has in its rotation and removing them without a replacement would reduce our already bare-bones GCD rotation down to 3 buttons (4 in burst) and a couple oGCDs that we spam.

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Originally Posted by Embed

If you don't mind elaborating, how do you feel DoTs could be made better in XIV? I can see how DoTs and Iron Jaws don't really fit the Bard aesthetic and are more of an Archer thing, but if we're being honest, that's kinda what Bard is in XIV. The only parts related to music at the moment are their buffs. Songs, Radiant Finale, and I suppose Battle Voice could be considered "musical." I wouldn't mind leaning more into the musical side, removing DoTs and providing something else to upkeep. But that's getting beyond the scope of what I intended with this post and far beyond something they could provide to us in the time span of 7.0-ish. My hopes were to bring these core issues to attention so that they could hopefully be addressed without a rework and before 8.0 or later.

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Mostly that they are needlessly cryptic. Nowhere in the game does it say that they deal damage every 3 seconds on the server tick, we have to find that out from other players -- frankly, they would feel better if they dealt damage every second. The amount of damage that the actual dot debuff deals does not show up in the combat log. And when you do take the time to figure out how much damage they can deal, it turns out to be less than auto attacks per tick of damage -- unless they have snapshotted buffs -- which again, the game does not say anything about snapshotting. So what we have are buttons that slaps a little icons on an enemy, and we just have to sit back and trust that it's doing its thing -- a bit too passive for my taste. And this is BRD specific, but the DOTs really do just feel like clutter at this point. They are 2 different actions that apply 2 different debuffs, and are refreshed by a third button that treats them like a single debuff -- 3 different actions for effectively one DOT. It may as well just be just be one DOT at this point. Also the game keeps kicking Stormbite off bosses in large scale fights so there's debuff limit shenanigans as well. Iron Jaws isn't even a good archer skill - - your character just kind of wiggles their finger for the "attack." Layers upon layers of jank.

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Originally Posted by Embed

In my opinion as a fellow Savage/Ultimate raider, learning when you need to refresh your DoTs on the boss is just part of learning the fight. I admit that while progging a fight I would frequently let my DoTs fall off until I had a mechanic mastered. But afterwards I would be able to associate needing to refresh with a specific mechanic or movement within the fight and it became something to almost not even think about. It's just part of the rotation at that point. Not to mention that with the current iteration of Bard and non burst window party buffs, you have almost zero variance in when you should be refreshing. Also, as a side effect of getting buffs that encourage refreshing DoTs earlier than the end of their duration, the amount of times someone runs into the risk of forgetting to refresh the DoTs before they fall off should drastically decrease assuming they take advantage of the buff.

Having said all of this, I'm not completely opposed to them removing DoTs and giving Bard something else to focus on further down the line. But at the present moment, they're one of the few bits of "complexity" that Bard still has in its rotation and removing them without a replacement would reduce our already bare-bones GCD rotation down to 3 buttons (4 in burst) and a couple oGCDs that we spam.

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I tend to have landmarks in the rotation that make me automatically check and refresh dots, notably the empyreal arrow around 25ish seconds of Mage Ballad (which is also where the odd minute Apex Arrow is often used). In Army's it's a little more tricky to find true landmarks because it's in the middle of nowhere but well, it's also always at the same time after all since the dot duration is fixed. As for the burst it's a no brainer since it's usually snapshot at the end.

So as long as the rotation stays like on a dummy, it's an afterthought, but if there is downtime, or unexpected shenanigans, it becomes a real annoyance to me. I do like that it's about learning the fight, but it doesn't remove the fact that I find is utterly annoying to babysit. It adds to the complexity of executing the job for sure, especially with non standard encounter layouts, but I find it utterly uninteresting and tedious/distracting.

Not just a bard problem though, every job with a manageable dot (not a long recast dot like tanks) faces this issue, however bard is the most egregious since it has the most amount of those manageable dots and the very existence of IJs makes it even more punishing/annoying when you drop them.

You know, that's a really good point, I remember being really confused reading "60 potency for 18 seconds" or whatever and then noticing the ticks clearly aren't every second.

And it still would be way less annoying eyeballing the arithmetic if it just said "deals total of 360 potency over 18 seconds".

Playing a bit of devils advocate for just a moment. Last time they really tried some major innovation with Bard was HW's infamous Bow Mage and well it no longer being a thing speaks for how much it was disliked. After that they went to the iteration of the songs we know today which at the time was maybe not praised but generally welcomed warmly. I'm wondering if they're too afraid to try anything drastic or even something that would change the general flow again.

And with that out of the way;

I've always played BRD, Main at first sight 1.0 and beyond. Now what could they do? A thought I had after 4.0 was to do something like Dancer before Dancer, Actually play the songs in a similar method that DNC Dances a simple quick button game and bam song played, though that wouldn't solve the issue of what it is the songs do just more of a thematic change.

In terms of openers and death recovery. I know they're on a more button bad kick but just two more or maybe even make it one that changes. Pre pull on a nice big timer (4min+) and only available outside of combat something like "Opening act" Gives you full coda effect minus the new big hit we're getting. Turning that into "Encore" a massive recovery button only available if no song is active but all are on cooldown that refreshes the songs (though if in my dream world if this does actually happen it would probably just refresh wanderers or in a nightmare world Paeon)

DOTS! Honestly they could be easily removed at this point for potency buffs elsewhere since nothing really relies on them being applied anymore, Sidewinder no longer gets it potency buff if they're applied and them not effecting procs anymore. Bring back my procs on crits then we can start talking about what to do with them.

The Songs, Wanderers and Mages are.... Ok. One more clearly aimed towards single target and one more to AOE. Honestly how bad would it be to increase the duration of those two and just lose Paeon entirely? That just seems like a lazy fix. The clear thing for Paeon would be to make the reducing effect...effect EVERYTHING. and/or Dive into the music aspect Paeon decreases the cooldown aka upping the pace in the rush to get back to wanderers Build off that and the support aspect of the job and have Army's Muse effect the whole party as you enter wanderers for the two minute buff window giving everyone a little haste in that burst window. Make it act like a crescendo into a finale There is so much more they could do with the music theme of BRD that they just blatantly ignore at this point. Crescendos, Accelerando,...etc there are so many terms you can use to just make it feel more thematic than an archer that can pluck a string once in a while.

Low key I always felt like Dancer is what Bard Could have been. Dance partner? Called Harmonize/Duet if it was on BRD. I went into the whole actually playing songs like Dancer dances above. The feathers? Improv notes, to use in the same way dancer uses them.

What they could is turn Stormbite low level Resonant Arrow. It could look like this.

Windbite, and Stormbite now deal flat damage with AOE falloff.

Level 30 unlock Barrage -- it now has a shorter cool down

Level 38 Enhanced Barrage - Barrage now grants Storm of Arrows allowing for the execution of Windbite

Level 64 Bite mastery - upgrades Windbite to Stormbite, and Venomous Bite to Caustic Bite

Level 96 Stormbite mastery - upgrades Stormbite to Resonant Arrow

This leaves Caustic Bite as the only dot, and Iron Jaws could either be scrapped or replaced with a new AOE GCD that applies the Caustic Bite dot -- call it Grogon Bite to keep with the light snake theming.

I think the songs are unique and creative enough and that they keep it is a good thing for the job's identity. If we want to see more around songs, they could definitely add some flourishes/procs to an extended repertoire adding variety to each. BRD could be a job that plays music that dynamically reacts to what happens in the fight, like if the party takes damage, perhaps some flourish suddenly proc up and provide benefits, for example. Could think of a lot of different context dependent little things like that.