7.1 and Bards got nothing...

Header says it all. TONS of people have posted about this yet not one change...

Not even quality of life changes that will actually make it easier to play that have been asked for by qualified BRD players. Nothing.

A second charge of Empyreal Arrow would be nice.

Trying not to despair too much , but also realizing BRD only received potency buffs twice in the entirety of Endwalker's patch cycle. Dawntrail might be another painful expansion for BRD players.

Hearing reports that tanks can actually out damage BRD even when the BRD player is bis, and doing their rotation correctly.

You're surprised that the strongest phys range by a large margin didn't receive changes? Really?

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Originally Posted by mallleable

Trying not to despair too much , but also realizing BRD only received potency buffs twice in the entirety of Endwalker's patch cycle. Dawntrail might be another painful expansion for BRD players.

Hearing reports that tanks can actually out damage BRD even when the BRD player is bis, and doing their rotation correctly.

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At least it's doing surprisingly okay in the damage department compared to its 2 brethren.
But rotational issues continue to be ignored, much like the whole role.

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Originally Posted by Valence

At least it's doing surprisingly okay in the damage department compared to its 2 brethren.
But rotational issues continue to be ignored, much like the whole role.

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You must be doing something wrong on the others cause bard is far below the others. MCH can pull pretty good numbers, bards are FAR behind.

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Originally Posted by Brigog

You must be doing something wrong on the others cause bard is far below the others. MCH can pull pretty good numbers, bards are FAR behind.

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I think it’s you who are doing something wrong with BRD

BRD is and continues to be the strongest physical ranged (if just has a larger IQR since it’s harder to play) at its top end it’s pulling melee numbers

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

I think it’s you who are doing something wrong with BRD

BRD is and continues to be the strongest physical ranged (if just has a larger IQR since it’s harder to play) at its top end it’s pulling melee numbers

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aDPS, and nDPS tell a different story. It means that the potency on BRD's direct damage actions is low, like really low. And these damage problems are related to BRD's rotational, and stress issues because it means that the raid buffs are too important, and the damage actions aren't important enough. If anything bad happens to its songs from either user error or just getting KO'd in a fight or other things that aren't in the BRD player's control, the job evaporates. Like I get that BRD is supposed to be k'know a bard, but it has structural problems that need to be fixed, and unironically fixing its personal damage is a solution.

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Originally Posted by mallleable

aDPS, and nDPS tell a different story. It means that the potency on BRD's direct damage actions is low, like really low. And these damage problems are related to BRD's rotational, and stress issues because it means that the raid buffs are too important, and the damage actions aren't important enough. If anything bad happens to its songs from either user error or just getting KO'd in a fight or other things that aren't in the BRD player's control, the job evaporates. Like I get that BRD is supposed to be k'know a bard, but it has structural problems that need to be fixed, and unironically fixing its personal damage is a solution.

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I mean what’s the problem of having a job that focuses extremely strongly on rDPS, BRD in 11 doesn’t even do damage in a functional way

If anything I’d prefer they nerf its pDPS even more and make its buffs even bigger

Their 'no nerfs' (except you, BLM Enochian) approach definitely doesn't help it either. Any potency buff on any job increases their rDPS, and to keep that balanced their personal damage output will get further left behind for it.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

I mean what’s the problem of having a job that focuses extremely strongly on rDPS, BRD in 11 doesn’t even do damage in a functional way

If anything I’d prefer they nerf its pDPS even more and make its buffs even bigger

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Good thing xiv isn't xi, because that sounds dreadful. I want BRD's musical aspects to be active, and not passive. What's going on now is too passive, and is causing problems

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

I mean what’s the problem of having a job that focuses extremely strongly on rDPS, BRD in 11 doesn’t even do damage in a functional way

If anything I’d prefer they nerf its pDPS even more and make its buffs even bigger

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I actually agree with this, I like the idea of some jobs heavily leaning into Party DPS, I do think physical ranged needs more outside of dps buffing aspects too though, I really wish there was more "support dps" which physical ranged used to be.

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Originally Posted by Azurarok

Their 'no nerfs' (except you, BLM Enochian) approach definitely doesn't help it either. Any potency buff on any job increases their rDPS, and to keep that balanced their personal damage output will get further left behind for it.

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Yeah SQEX's unwillingless to nerf 1-2 outliers out of 26 jobs and instead wanting to buff 24-25, in turn causing more imbalance (naturally, that's so many jobs to gently and equally buff up) is just bewildering. Plus it makes PvE far far too easy apart from specific boss abilities, as nothing about our jobs matters any more, we've all been buffed entirely too often.

I guess if I had to sum things up:

* Nerf damage across the board by 10%-15%.
* Nerf all healing output, in particular of healer oGCDs and non-healer heals except maaybe Red Mage and Paladin (since that comes with an inherent downside, being a GCD and all).
* Nerf mana regen by 30%-50% on all jobs, make Piety about 100% stronger per point. Or remove the extra manaregen effects ~everyone has.
* Nerf all tank mitigation by reducing their base damage resistance significantly, from 40%-50% more to 10%-20% max. The rest is in active mitigation skills.

That'd get us back to PvE at least posing some semblance of danger to players again, and requiring a modicum of thought. And a huge added bonus, with everyone getting nerfed at everything, any imbalance between jobs automatically becomes (comparatively) smaller than before.

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Originally Posted by Brigog

You must be doing something wrong on the others cause bard is far below the others. MCH can pull pretty good numbers, bards are FAR behind.

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Note that when I wrote the message you replied to, patch results weren't there yet and MCH/DNC were lagging a little more behind, especially MCH before its buffs. Do we agree on the metric used?

https://i.imgur.com/Qhae85w.png

Now waiting for the goalposts to move...

Do keep in mind though that even then, we are only talking about a 3k damage difference from the very top to the very bottom.

Meaning it's a 10.35% total imbalance, and since usually you take these imbalances from the middle (even though in SQEX's case that's tricky since they seem 100% unwilling to nerf stuff in a meaningful way unless it's Dragoon's and their gameplay), that'd mean the biggest outliers need to be moved in just over 5%. Which is, actually, more or less "balanced". 5% is always the goal MMO devs used to cite for what their target imbalance is, and we're just barely not fitting into that on the lower end (since the average is slightly higher it's more 3.5% top imbalance and 6.8% bottom imbalance). We've gotten quite used to very tight numerical balance so what we perceive as imbalanced is "We're done, game balanced now" to most dev teams.

Plus I mean, it shows, you can pick just about any combination and easily clear content since the DPS is so close to each other. We're not early WoW where some DPS just did double the damage output of others. I think GW2 was even "better", at some point they found a spec setup after a patch that beat the previous best by something like 150% (so 250% total) just spamming one button.

SE: ‘we have delayed fixes for Bard they are coming soon and will fix everything’
The fixes: ‘Potency of Empyreal Arrow increased by 10’

As others have mentioned though Bard is doing relatively good dps, so I imagine SE will ignore its existence for the entire expansion then be like ‘buT yOuR dAmAgE iS gOoD’ whenever someone mentions the actual gameplay being bad

Without any real changes in years, Bard is now a great job on account of them ruining a bunch of other jobs

BRD's damage is good? 3rd to last damage dealer on total party contribution, is good? That's a joke right?

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Originally Posted by Valence

BRD's damage is good? 3rd to last damage dealer on total party contribution, is good? That's a joke right?

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Maybe they meant the whole comment just towards PRanged.

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Originally Posted by Valence

BRD's damage is good? 3rd to last damage dealer on total party contribution, is good? That's a joke right?

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third to last lol. So there’s two jobs worse than it. Which is exactly my point lol.

From what I can see from funny number site it’s also the least popular of the three, but again, SE doesn’t really give a shit about actual gameplay in any way as long as the job gives the illusion of ‘balance’.

I mean, if you have some way to somehow increase Bard’s dps and not have it become as personal dps oriented as Machinist or as support oriented as Dancer and still having ‘acceptable’ personal dps output that cannot exceed that of any other role then sure. Oh and it’s support has to be good enough to make it a worthwhile job to bring but also has to be entirely passive and almost exclusively on 120s cooldowns. But until the devs actually look at the job as a whole and stop doing incredibly lazy basic potency changes the job is forever going to remain shit because it has literally more restrictions and caveats put on it by the devs than any other job in the game.

Tl;dr Bard gameplay is shit because the job can’t be anything but shit because devs are still petrified or that like, one week of Coils doing 4X Bard or 3X BRD 1X DRG or whatever. It’s desperately trying to squish a circle into a square hole to make Bard be some bizarre middle-of-the-road not too dps-y not too support-y ranged physical dps. To SE, third from the bottom is an extremely good place to be as a Bard, so it’s going to be hard to convince them to ever put it even higher.

So your point is saying that because there is 2 jobs following by an inch behind, then BRD's damage is doing "relatively good dps"? All those 3 jobs are all 10% behind the top group.

Dancer is also not more support oriented than Bard, that's a misconception that's been born from early ShB release, and has been further debunked by how the jobs both shifted in EW even further together (DNC getting more damage nukes and BRD getting more raid buffs in 6.0). They're always very similar on personal output. Increasing Bard's damage, much like Dancer's damage overall contribution, can be done by buffing the personal damage side, by buffing their buffs, or by doing both, whereas for MCH they can only buff it on the personal damage side unless they produce a raid buff action out of the blue for it.

I do not understand what you mean by "other restrictions and caveats than any other job in the game", can you elaborate?

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Originally Posted by Valence

So your point is saying that because there is 2 jobs following by an inch behind, then BRD's damage is doing "relatively good dps"? All those 3 jobs are all 10% behind the top group.

Dancer is also not more support oriented than Bard, that's a misconception that's been born from early ShB release, and has been further debunked by how the jobs both shifted in EW even further together (DNC getting more damage nukes and BRD getting more raid buffs in 6.0). They're always very similar on personal output. Increasing Bard's damage, much like Dancer's damage overall contribution, can be done by buffing the personal damage side, by buffing their buffs, or by doing both, whereas for MCH they can only buff it on the personal damage side unless they produce a raid buff action out of the blue for it.

I do not understand what you mean by "other restrictions and caveats than any other job in the game", can you elaborate?

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I’m saying that to the devs this is the case. Not that it’s an objective fact.

I mean by restrictions and caveats that Bards being pigeonholed into an extremely specific and unsatisfying ‘middle ground’ concept where they want somehow want it to perfectly fit in a balance between Machinist and Dancer instead of ever just being it’s own job. And that’s purely conceptual; in terms of gameplay there’s everything from ‘it has to easy’ (ironically) to ‘the support has to be entirely passive’ (because apparently non-passive support is a Dancer thing lol). It has to be lower dps than melee and casters but it also has to somehow compete with the majority of them having better/equal raid buffs and utility.

I’d argue the only reason they even bothered to shift slightly was because there was a ton of negative feedback about them trying to make Bard some weird personal dps-er so Dancer could be the only support. Pretty sure even JP were fairly negative about things like no song buffs. But I’d also argue the changes they made were primarily performative and not actually indicative of them somehow changing their stance on where/what Bard should be.

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Originally Posted by Valence

So your point is saying that because there is 2 jobs following by an inch behind, then BRD's damage is doing "relatively good dps"? All those 3 jobs are all 10% behind the top group.

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The bolded part here entirely depends on what FFlogs data you decide to use when it comes to the dps of all the jobs in the current Savage tier.

To elaborate, you've posted the 90th percentile cDPS ranking of standard comp parses, from patch 7.1. This shows BRD at a dps of 26,287 dps, which isn't actually that crazily behind SMN (26,529) or RDM (26,963), both of which saw potency buffs with the patch.

The issue with using this data, is that you're looking at parses during a catch up patch, one that has dropped 4+ months into a current tier. A significant part of the progression-minded raiders (who, in turn, are likely to parse higher) will be done gearing their main job by then. They'll either be raiding (and parsing) on alt jobs, or be done with savage until the next tier.
Using the same percentile cDPS ranking, but shifted towards the standard comp parses from patch 7.05 (the tier release patch), will suddenly paint a different picture. This shows BRD at a much higher dps (29,468), placing it above VPR, RPR, BLM, RDM, DNC, SMN, and MCH (in that order). Considering the absence of changes to BRD with 7.1, and a sudden drop of roughly 3k dps, it's pretty clear that a significant amount of these parsing BRDs are either done with savage, or playing on non-BRD jobs until the next tier).

And it's not like BRDs aren't being brought to ultimate either, considering 5 of the current top 10 FRU clears brought one.

If BRD were actually balanced to be a true 'middle of the pack' job then its personal damage output should be closer to like RDM's or SMN's with out touching its raid buffs. Which means increasing the potency of skills like Burst Shot, Refulgent Arrow, its dots, or even lowering the cool down of Barrage to like 60 seconds or less that way it can maintain its own damage outside of buffs. But right now, BRD is pigeonholed into the same spot as DNC

Another thing to consider is the second they nerf PCT (if they do -- but they should), it will be a nerf to BRD, and every other job with a raid buff so thigs like potency buffs should be considered.

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Originally Posted by mallleable

If BRD were actually balanced to be a true 'middle of the pack' job

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They’re going for ‘middle of the pack amongst ranged physical’, not amongst all jobs in the game. They don’t seem to really care how phys ranged in general compare to casters. Otherwise they’d actually see the imbalance caused by casters having capabilities like Raise and higher personal dps and some utility lol. I mean, how do they expect Bard to compete with…an Esuna on cool-down and a healing boost nobody really wants or needs?

Raid buffs are so common now that it’s hard to say they’re really a ‘Bard’ / ‘Phys Ranged’ thing at this point, plus there’s Machinist muddying the waters since it’s somehow ‘taxed’ as if it had raid buffs purely for being in what the devs somehow think is a ‘support oriented role’.

But basically, the devs are looking at the fact that personal DPS output for phys ranged goes ‘Machinist > Bard > Dancer’ (even when it actually doesn’t lol) and being like ‘yes all things in perfect balance’. Completely disregarding how things compare between those three and the other dps sub-roles. It’s incredibly short sighted, but it’s what they seem to be doing I think.

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Originally Posted by Connor

I mean by restrictions and caveats that Bards being pigeonholed into an extremely specific and unsatisfying ‘middle ground’ concept where they want somehow want it to perfectly fit in a balance between Machinist and Dancer instead of ever just being it’s own job. And that’s purely conceptual; in terms of gameplay there’s everything from ‘it has to easy’ (ironically) to ‘the support has to be entirely passive’ (because apparently non-passive support is a Dancer thing lol). It has to be lower dps than melee and casters but it also has to somehow compete with the majority of them having better/equal raid buffs and utility.

I’d argue the only reason they even bothered to shift slightly was because there was a ton of negative feedback about them trying to make Bard some weird personal dps-er so Dancer could be the only support. Pretty sure even JP were fairly negative about things like no song buffs. But I’d also argue the changes they made were primarily performative and not actually indicative of them somehow changing their stance on where/what Bard should be.

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I just don't understand this specific statement. How is BRD passive? The songs? Sure, but the bulk of the buffs exist and happen in the exact same way DNC's buffs happen: through buttons your press every 2min during burst, which in the case of BRD is Battle Voice and Radiant Finale. And DNC also has passives as well, being the partner buff and if your argument is that it's not passive because it gets refreshed by standard step, then so are the song buffs when you change songs.

I do not know what their stance is on where BRD stands because I don't read their minds, but if their actions are to be taken at face value, since the release of Endwalker and consolidated in Danwtrail, both jobs have been granted very similar profiles in the buff department.

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Originally Posted by Nezerius

The bolded part here entirely depends on what FFlogs data you decide to use when it comes to the dps of all the jobs in the current Savage tier.

To elaborate, you've posted the 90th percentile cDPS ranking of standard comp parses, from patch 7.1. This shows BRD at a dps of 26,287 dps, which isn't actually that crazily behind SMN (26,529) or RDM (26,963), both of which saw potency buffs with the patch.

The issue with using this data, is that you're looking at parses during a catch up patch, one that has dropped 4+ months into a current tier. A significant part of the progression-minded raiders (who, in turn, are likely to parse higher) will be done gearing their main job by then. They'll either be raiding (and parsing) on alt jobs, or be done with savage until the next tier.
Using the same percentile cDPS ranking, but shifted towards the standard comp parses from patch 7.05 (the tier release patch), will suddenly paint a different picture. This shows BRD at a much higher dps (29,468), placing it above VPR, RPR, BLM, RDM, DNC, SMN, and MCH (in that order). Considering the absence of changes to BRD with 7.1, and a sudden drop of roughly 3k dps, it's pretty clear that a significant amount of these parsing BRDs are either done with savage, or playing on non-BRD jobs until the next tier).

And it's not like BRDs aren't being brought to ultimate either, considering 5 of the current top 10 FRU clears brought one.

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Point taken considering that a lot of jobs dipped by similar amounts while some didn't change much.
However people picking a rphys for ultimate isn't indicative to anything to me as far as I'm concerned. It's part of the social contract we have with SE and their party bonus. 5 out of 10 makes sense considering it's currently the less crappy rphys to take from.

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Originally Posted by Valence

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Bard songs - Press song button, done.
Steps - Has to play steps mini game, has to consider Flourish cool-down, dance partner considerations.

Pretty sure I said in both posts that I’m not really counting raid buffs because firstly they’re not exclusive to the job (in case you noticed everyone that’s not BLM/SAM/MCH has one), and they’re literally defined by being 120-second button presses that could very easily be automated because they require literally 0 input from the player. And even then , which job is the only job in the game that actually interacts with that ability? Oh yeah, Dancer lol. It’s mostly a performative interaction by making you press more than 1 button, but that’s still more than any other job had to think about their raid buff. I guess maybe Ninja too? Do they even still need to hit positionals for Trick Attack to apply?

Just because Dancer is at a 1/10 in terms of active support doesn’t somehow make it ok for Bard to be a 0. Dancer only having to use 1 brain cell isn’t really a justification for Bard to use 0.5 brain cells - they should both feel enjoyable and interesting to play in all aspects of the job.

But let’s go further.

Minne - Press the song button, done (Gee I’m beginning to see a pattern)
Curing Waltz - possible consideration of dance partner and personal positioning, isn’t reliant on party members actually healing within the time frame of the buff. Oh also half the cool-down of Minne despite arguably offering the same healing.

Paean - Press a song button, done. Who’d have thought?! I guess you can say you have to look at the party list to see who has an ailment, but most people don’t even bother doing that anyway (and nobody cares about removable debuffs apparently anyway. Oh yeah, and a 45 second cool-down because fuck Bards I guess?
Improvisation - These are in no way functional equivalents but it’s the only support skill that’s not a rais buff left. Positioning of both self and accounting for party members needs to be considered. You could argue managing stacks too but nobody is going to channel longer than an ogcd outside of downtime anyway so that’s probably a moot point.

If you’re really still going to deny that Bard and Dancer function differently on how they perform their support role, I really don’t know what to say. Just because said role is already paper thin doesn’t mean those differences don’t exist.

Furthermore, by your logic Ninjas, Dragoons, Pictomancers, Summoners, Red Mages, Reapers, Monks, Astrologian, Scholar…are all providing support that is practically identical to what Dancer and Bard can do, because they have an automatic button press every 120s to raise party damage?

Things they could do to make Bard more active?
- 1.5 cast on songs like they were originally, would cause massive backlash because precious APM
- Button press musical notes mini game, but that’s just copy+paste from Dancer. Technically more APM if they’re 1.5s gcds or whatever like steps. Win?!
- MP costs and/or removed/reduced cooldowns.
- Higher potency but single target buffs that actually require any kind of conscious thought, ideally gcd though that’s practically impossible in current design
- Interaction between dps and support, i.e mp costs on songs but certain actions give mp restoration.
- Song exclusivity and rotational choice. I.E ‘do I want to sing Ballad for MP or Requiem for damage or whatever’ (please god someone don’t come at me with the ‘but it’ll always just be the damage song!!!!’, it’s not a literal example)
- Warden’s Paean updated to at least be in line with the actual spell it’s supposed to reflect lol. Esuna is now instant cast, gcd, has no MP cost…yet somehow Bards are only allowed to do it every 45 seconds? Why? Because ‘you’re not a healer’. Neither are Red Mages or Summoners yet they’re allowed to have healing/recovery support coming out of their ass lol

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Originally Posted by Connor

Bard songs - Press song button, done.

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Something we actually kinda see eye to eye with. This is generally why I'm pretty frustrated with BRD, it goes all in on passive mechanics. Song buffs are just slap a sticker on everyone, and call it a day. Almost all of its songs are damage buffs so its personal damage rotation feels meaningless. Its DOTs are passive. Even the song proc mechanics where you just wait for stuff to happen are passive compared to something like Brotherhood where everything you, and your party does is opening chakras. All on top of being a phys ranged with no environmental or positioning considerations for its gameplay unlike the other roles. Passive passive passive. BRD may be considered the "strongest" phys ranged, but it doesn't feel great to play. I suspect a lot of people are only playing it because it's "meta," and not because it's fun.

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Originally Posted by mallleable

Something we actually kinda see eye to eye with. This is generally why I'm pretty frustrated with BRD, it goes all in on passive mechanics. Song buffs are just slap a sticker on everyone, and call it a day. Almost all of its songs are damage buffs so its personal damage rotation feels meaningless. Its DOTs are passive. Even the song proc mechanics where you just wait for stuff to happen are passive compared to something like Brotherhood where everything you, and your party does is opening chakras. All on top of being a phys ranged with no environmental or positioning considerations for its gameplay unlike the other roles. Passive passive passive. BRD may be considered the "strongest" phys ranged, but it doesn't feel great to play. I suspect a lot of people are only playing it because it's "meta," and not because it's fun.

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Definitely agree, and I can only hope they plan to address this at some point. Whether it’s minor changes or even a SMN-style (not gameplay wise lol) rework where they look at the entire skill set again, how it interacts, how to make it feel more engaging, etc.

And yeah, I’d definitely say that Bard is a bit like healers in that people primarily take one because it’s (somewhat) necessary, not because they’re all having fun playing it lol.

I really hope SE won’t be dismissive of people’s concerns because of its ‘damage output’ or ‘balancing’ or whatever - because while that’s all well and good and important, it doesn’t really do anything about the actual gameplay of the job lol.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind if Bard did like 1 DPS as long as the job is fun and has fun/interesting ways to support the party lol. Not that I’d mind if it done 100,000 DPS, though it’d probably still end up behind Pictomancer somehow lol. And that’s not to say Dancer couldn’t use its own improvements in various area Tilana lol , but I do think they have that tiny bit more ‘activeness’ or ‘engagement’ with their non-offensive abilities compared to Bard.

Something I've wondered is would BRD feel more bard-like if damage buffing took a bit of a backseat in favor of more unique buffs. First, delete the coda system, and just make Battle Voice upgrade to Radiant Finale. And then like Wanderer's Minute could be BRD's only damage rotation song, like shorten its cool down, and duration so you have to press it more often to keep the song rolling. Move Heartbreak reduction procs off Mage's Ballad, and move them to Burst Shot, and make MB like a 10% magic mit + 10% chance that spells have no MP cost buff. Rework Army's Paeon so it's like 10% physical mit + party movement speed buff, and move the personal haste buff to WM. This would technically simply the song rotation, but it would mean that all proc mechanics are active all the time, might make getting KO'd a little less punishing, and make each song a little more unique in terms of what kind of party buff they are which might be a worthwhile tradeoff.

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Originally Posted by mallleable

Something I've wondered is would BRD feel more bard-like if damage buffing took a bit of a backseat in favor of more unique buffs. First, delete the coda system, and just make Battle Voice upgrade to Radiant Finale. And then like Wanderer's Minute could be BRD's only damage rotation song, like shorten its cool down, and duration so you have to press it more often to keep the song rolling. Move Heartbreak reduction procs off Mage's Ballad, and move them to Burst Shot, and make MB like a 10% magic mit + 10% chance that spells have no MP cost buff. Rework Army's Paeon so it's like 10% physical mit + party movement speed buff, and move the personal haste buff to WM. This would technically simply the song rotation, but it would mean that all proc mechanics are active all the time, might make getting KO'd a little less punishing, and make each song a little more unique in terms of what kind of party buff they are which might be a worthwhile tradeoff.

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I could certainly get behind having Bard as a more ‘defensive’/‘utility’ focused party support while Dancer remained more ‘offence’ focused. It’d definitely be nice to see their support become more diversified and unique. I feel like the devs kinda use ‘damage up’ as a ‘token support effect’ instead of thinking up more interesting and fun ways to support the party, so seeing them rely less on those kinds of skills would probably be a good thing.
And it’s not like they’d have to disappear entirely either. Like if there were MP costs on songs there could be a ‘Foe Requiem’ type filler song that increases damage taken by enemies, but at a fairly low value to compensate for potential high uptime. So there’d still be things the Bard could bring for when the ‘defensive’ support isn’t required. Honestly I’ve even say for them to go all-out and have Bard as like, a Summoner style healer-supporting dps (not the best title lol). There’s already Esuna which they could put on the gcd, it could have a Regen song that has an additional effect if Minne is on the target, they could even give it a Raise, though no Swiftcast would make that difficult, but then they could always bake in a ‘makes next raise song instant cast’ onto a defensive cool-down or something.

Naturally I’m (mostly) throwing balance out the window with these thoughts lol just things I think would be fun.

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Originally Posted by Connor

Bard songs - Press song button, done.
Steps - Has to play steps mini game, has to consider Flourish cool-down, dance partner considerations.
Pretty sure I said in both posts that I’m not really counting raid buffs because firstly they’re not exclusive to the job (in case you noticed everyone that’s not BLM/SAM/MCH has one), and they’re literally defined by being 120-second button presses that could very easily be automated because they require literally 0 input from the player. And even then , which job is the only job in the game that actually interacts with that ability? Oh yeah, Dancer lol. It’s mostly a performative interaction by making you press more than 1 button, but that’s still more than any other job had to think about their raid buff. I guess maybe Ninja too? Do they even still need to hit positionals for Trick Attack to apply?

Just because Dancer is at a 1/10 in terms of active support doesn’t somehow make it ok for Bard to be a 0. Dancer only having to use 1 brain cell isn’t really a justification for Bard to use 0.5 brain cells - they should both feel enjoyable and interesting to play in all aspects of the job.

But let’s go further.

Minne - Press the song button, done (Gee I’m beginning to see a pattern)
Curing Waltz - possible consideration of dance partner and personal positioning, isn’t reliant on party members actually healing within the time frame of the buff. Oh also half the cool-down of Minne despite arguably offering the same healing.

Paean - Press a song button, done. Who’d have thought?! I guess you can say you have to look at the party list to see who has an ailment, but most people don’t even bother doing that anyway (and nobody cares about removable debuffs apparently anyway. Oh yeah, and a 45 second cool-down because fuck Bards I guess?
Improvisation - These are in no way functional equivalents but it’s the only support skill that’s not a rais buff left. Positioning of both self and accounting for party members needs to be considered. You could argue managing stacks too but nobody is going to channel longer than an ogcd outside of downtime anyway so that’s probably a moot point.

If you’re really still going to deny that Bard and Dancer function differently on how they perform their support role, I really don’t know what to say. Just because said role is already paper thin doesn’t mean those differences don’t exist.

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Alright, I see your point better. Essentially you say something is "passive" when there is one button press on cooldown, versus something a bit more active when there is 4 button presses on cooldown, if I follow correctly. That's... more involved for sure, but since later you bring up the thought process behind and the considerations, BRD songs do actually have a lot more consideration process behind thier use than using Steps on cd. Songs can be cut, extended, clipped, to adjust to different fight sequences, which steps don't really objectively do much if at all. Moving or altering songs also comes with consequences on gauge generation, apex usage if you get out of the 2min pattern, and repertoires and each benefit they all bring in terms of damage.

You seem to think that I defend the utterly poor state of mechanically brainless execution that all jobs in XIV are left into, but believe me that like you I do wish we had actual agency and choices that matter beyond stupid excel spreadsheet optimization to adjust to oh no, another boss downtime in a 99% scripted encounter anyway.

I never denied that BRD and DNC do work differently at a mechanical baseline level, but that doesn't say much, does it? All of their buffs, whether it's one or the other, could just be macroed, whether one takes 4 lines and the other only 1. This also doesn't still make DNC more support oriented than BRD, it just makes the amount of inputs in button press required higher, but when it comes to the amount of agency and choice? Songs have more than steps, but as you say, waltz and improv have more than minne.

The differences make me speechless really.

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Originally Posted by Connor

Furthermore, by your logic Ninjas, Dragoons, Pictomancers, Summoners, Red Mages, Reapers, Monks, Astrologian, Scholar…are all providing support that is practically identical to what Dancer and Bard can do, because they have an automatic button press every 120s to raise party damage?

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Yes. The difference is just in numbers.

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Originally Posted by Connor

Things they could do to make Bard more active?
- 1.5 cast on songs like they were originally, would cause massive backlash because precious APM
- Button press musical notes mini game, but that’s just copy+paste from Dancer. Technically more APM if they’re 1.5s gcds or whatever like steps. Win?!
- MP costs and/or removed/reduced cooldowns.
- Higher potency but single target buffs that actually require any kind of conscious thought, ideally gcd though that’s practically impossible in current design
- Interaction between dps and support, i.e mp costs on songs but certain actions give mp restoration.
- Song exclusivity and rotational choice. I.E ‘do I want to sing Ballad for MP or Requiem for damage or whatever’ (please god someone don’t come at me with the ‘but it’ll always just be the damage song!!!!’, it’s not a literal example)
- Warden’s Paean updated to at least be in line with the actual spell it’s supposed to reflect lol. Esuna is now instant cast, gcd, has no MP cost…yet somehow Bards are only allowed to do it every 45 seconds? Why? Because ‘you’re not a healer’. Neither are Red Mages or Summoners yet they’re allowed to have healing/recovery support coming out of their ass lol

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I too wish we could go back to having short recasts on most parts of a job's toolkit, and gate their use instead behind resources, and/or even better, actual choices to use them when it makes sense to use them. Alas, this isn't the direction the devs have chosen because we're playing an action DDR scripted game where everything has to follow a script to a T. And when it doesn't by doing non standard, they'll make damn sure you do anyway.

I too wish we had MP being relevant again.

I too wish we had songs being played for specific goals in mind.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Valence

Alright, I see your point better. Essentially you say something is "passive" when there is one button press on cooldown, versus something a bit more active when there is 4 button presses on cooldown, if I follow correctly. That's... more involved for sure, but since later you bring up the thought process behind and the considerations, BRD songs do actually have a lot more consideration process behind thier use than using Steps on cd. Songs can be cut, extended, clipped, to adjust to different fight sequences, which steps don't really objectively do much if at all. Moving or altering songs also comes with consequences on gauge generation, apex usage if you get out of the 2min pattern, and repertoires and each benefit they all bring in terms of damage

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Looking at them side by side like that, it’s ironic that both jobs have what the other lacks. Bards have the thought processing behind song usage and management but little/no interaction with them, whereas Dancer has that little bit of interaction but little/no thought process required since Steps need to be used so rotationally/on cd. And even then, as you say it’s not like those differences aren’t paper thin.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Valence

You seem to think that I defend the utterly poor state of mechanically brainless execution that all jobs in XIV are left into, but believe me that like you I do wish we had actual agency and choices that matter beyond stupid excel spreadsheet optimization to adjust to oh no, another boss downtime in a 99% scripted encounter anyway.

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I don’t mean to ‘accuse’ anyone here despite how my posts sometimes sound. They do tend to come across more ‘belligerently’ than I initially realize, usually I imagine it coming across purely neutral, but then forget that those nuances only make sense to me because I’m the one who wrote it. And it’s definitely coloured by my frustrations with the devs for ignoring so many of us for so long. One way or another, I think everyone here ultimately wants the same thing - for Bard (and the other phys ranged too ofc) to feel both fun, and valuable as it’s own job again. Even if people have different views on how that can/should come about, it’s still the same end goal.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Valence

I never denied that BRD and DNC do work differently at a mechanical baseline level, but that doesn\\'t say much, does it? All of their buffs, whether it\\'s one or the other, could just be macroed, whether one takes 4 lines and the other only 1. This also doesn\\'t still make DNC more support oriented than BRD, it just makes the amount of inputs in button press required higher, but when it comes to the amount of agency and choice? Songs have more than steps, but as you say, waltz and improv have more than minne.

The differences make me speechless really.

Yes. The difference is just in numbers.

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True, and it’s definitely sad that the differences between jobs have become so paper thin as a result of how similar they’ve all become. Both in terms of ‘support’ and in more general terms. I think the main point I was trying to make with this is that, they’ve simplified everything so much that these tiny little mostly meaningless differences between jobs are the only thing we have left. But, and I may be completely wrong, I do also think the devs look at these tiny things and genuinely think they constitute ‘tangible differences in job gameplay’ and not just the exact same thing with a funny moustache. Though maybe that’s just being overly cynical.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Valence

I too wish we could go back to having short recasts on most parts of a job\\'s toolkit, and gate their use instead behind resources, and/or even better, actual choices to use them when it makes sense to use them. Alas, this isn\\'t the direction the devs have chosen because we\\'re playing an action DDR scripted game where everything has to follow a script to a T. And when it doesn\\'t by doing non standard, they\\'ll make damn sure you do anyway.

I too wish we had MP being relevant again.

I too wish we had songs being played for specific goals in mind.

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Yeah, I think the saddest thing for me is that there really wasn’t any major resentment against the songs or how they worked in ARR to Stormblood. Not that I remember anyway. Heavensward complaints were all naturally about them superimposing Gauss Barrel onto Bard’s entire skillset, but they weren’t like ‘we don’t want to cast not even when we sing!, I thought the issue was having another job’s mechanics stuck on top of Bards. Likewise in Stormblood, people were naturally complaining about the party synergy debacle. But, I’m pretty sure they were complaining about personal dps output being heavily contingent on party composition I.E needing a Dragoon for ranged/piercing, slashing jobs needing Ninja (or was it Warrior, etc). Not sure what part of that message included ‘we hate that Foe Requiem still exists’ or ‘don’t make us use our MP anymore!’

I think what’s frustrating is that PvP skill sets feel (or maybe I should use past tense given the recent changes lol) more ‘inspired’ than anything we have in PvE. The balancing is way off in so many difference ways, of course, but ultimately I still find the skills much more fun to use. Even taking Bard’s Paean and Nocturne. The Warden’s Paean is/can be extremely valuable when used, and it even has additional effects for removing ailments to incentivise proper usage. Silent Nocturne is usually used to snipe kills on bewildered enemies panicking that Recuperate isn’t working (lol), but it can also be used for things like shutting down battle highs before they can use their high potency skills or on healers to stop them healing/supporting/etc while everyone else ganfs up on the dps.
Even with just those two skills I’d say they feel more fun/interesting to use than any of the things we have in PvE. Though I guess that’s largely to do with content design as well as jobs

I'm pretty sure that to the devs the difference are definitely standing out because the only thing they can see is mechanical execution, because that's what they keep pushing their game toward: an action DDR brainless game where all is about memory, execution, and dancing like frogs in a blender around sometimes obnoxiously obfuscated abstract geometry. The actual RPG part of the battle system has been thrown away ages ago. We're not playing a RPG, we're playing a guitar hero game. Playing a game from the Final Fantasy series you know, I expected to play a RPG but.. something went lost in translation somewhere for sure, since most people that haven't played since before SB don't seem to care at all.

I think people were complaining about many things with caster rphys, and that was essentially making us casters when we could you known have gone and played actual caster jobs that waited nothing more than us picking them up. I actually played a lot of BLM and SMN back then because they were genuinely fun and not yet completely focused on playing a frog in a blender due to encounter and battle design like today. Today, they're just obnoxious to play for me and the irony is that they've become so mobile now (they can even move faster than BRD/MCH by miles).. People were definitely more okay with MCH and cast times but it really does depend whom you ask I feel. Thing is, nobody complains about Iajutsu or Communio because it's not literally constituting the main filler and uptime of those melee jobs. It's fun casting a little something here and there especially as a big finisher. But cast times define casters on their main uptime and filler spells, which also defined heavily BRD and MCH back then as well, and there was a lot of players that played throughout all of ARR as rphys main that suddenly had to play casters in disguise out of nowhere, and I can really understand the backlash and why they removed the system.

We also complained about piercing and slashing debuffs and they removed it in ShB, one of the few good things that expansion brought. Perhaps they could have reworked into something else to be honest (I do have a lot of ideas about damage types ironically, like damage type resistant mobs or trash or whatever that will only take full damage from specific jobs or roles, like for example you'd need a rphys to shoot down ranged targets, or slashing resistant targets, or inflict a specific debuff on a timer to them to break their resistance in order to allow other roles to fully damage them for example, but that's veering off topic).

They removed Foe Requiem for the same reason they remove everything good we have, because it doesn't fit to a game design enforcing macdonaldized scripted plays that should always play the same and Foe Requiem was the only raid buff that allowed actual freedom of skill and party expression, and I do feel they didn't like that it comboed well with mana transferring abilities like manashift, and pushed people to bring the infamous double rphys comp just to manasong the Bard for more Requiem uptime (and in HW, for more Turret promotion uptime as well). They literally hate anything like this. It's the same story with MCH, we asked them to fix the job, to remove or adjust problematic mechanics back then that were mostly located around latency and rapid fire because of their jank netcode, what did they chose to remove? Ammo! Hello?? Nobody asked for ammo to be removed?

PvP skill sets rely on many features that make them interesting:
- They do rely on complex/intricate mechanics building upon each other and interacting with each other well, which tends to reward good play by generating positive feedback loops, most notable example in DT pvp being DNC and Dance of the Dawn.
- They do rely on a multifaceted battle system with many variables, which is the opposite of the monofaceted damage meta system pvp is built around because they shifted 99% of it toward DDR mechanics that are ironically causing more and more accessibility issues those days.
- They do strive to emulate job identity.

aDPS and nDPS don't matter in this game. They balance around rDPS which BRD is the best at compared to MCH and DNC at least with FRU. BRD is basically the only Prange to use.

Bard is the best physical ranged rn tho?!

BRD being the 'best' phys ranged doesn't mean it's actually a good job.

Sure, we can complain about its design, but in regards to getting anything at all during patches whether for balance or not, it's not necessary at least for high end. BRD is solid right now.

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Originally Posted by RezRanger

Sure, we can complain about its design, but in regards to getting anything at all during patches whether for balance or not, it's not necessary at least for high end. BRD is solid right now.

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Couldn’t you apply this logic to healers too though? I mean, pretending WHM doesn’t exist just like the devs , they all do what they need to do properly and efficiently in high ends raids. White Mage and Sage have issues but it’s not like people are locking them out of raids or anything. But are they actually enjoyable to play? I’d say the many times infinity posts the ‘healer strike’ has by now, suggests not lol.

My point is; just because a job has a ‘solid’ raid performance doesn’t mean it should not / cannot get improvements to how it actually plays. Nor is it unreasonable to expect (minor) changes in response to common feedback as part of a main/numbered patch. Like, if it was patch 7.31414 or something then sure, maybe not the time to expect job changes lol. But when a big patch comes around isn’t it natural for people to hope for gameplay improvements? Why should Bard be precluded from that solely because it performs adequately in raids?