How to Bard?

[LunarEmerald]

Don't play songs when you don't need to. Except foe requiem. If you have a caster in your group, foe requiem is always nice. It's the only song that doesn't lower your dps.

If a healer dies and is revived, play mage's ballad to help them get their MP back up. A healer with no MP is pretty useless.

Try to keep an eye on your healer's MP and if falls to 20% or lower, play mage's ballad. This is for white mage. You should almost never have to play ballad for a scholar unless they don't know what the hell they're doing.

Do not run around trying to kite enemies in fates in or dungeons. If you get aggro, you keep your butt still or run to the tank. The only exception is when people want you to kite because they're desperate and you're trying to finish off the enemy.

Give the tank a few seconds to establish aggro before unloading with your cooldowns. Or use quelling strikes. If the tank is inexperienced or you heavily outgear them then definitely use quelling.

Remember that you have to be facing the enemy for your auto attack to work. This is especially important for barrage. Barrage only lasts long enough for 3-4 auto attacks and if you're facing away during one, that's a lot of wasted dps.

Don't be a scrub. Get your lancer to 34 for blood for blood.

If you're doing aoes then keep straight shot up. Many don't seem to realize that it's a flat 10% critical hit increase for everything. Including your aoes.

[Obysuca]

Don't play songs when you don't need to. Except foe requiem.

Just like to point out, when not in a fight, constantly keep swiftsong up, it makes running to the next fight a lot quicker. Even if it's only a few second run, still makes it quicker.

Try to keep an eye on your healer's MP and if falls to 20% or lower, play mage's ballad.

Personally, I do it around ~45%. Depending on what you're doing, 20% could be too low if the whm has to spam cures to keep people up.


Now for my brd advice >.> You need to see everything. It's quite different from the standard DD where you just look out for AoEs. As brd, you should be constantly checking over at the mages mp every so often, while looking out for AoEs and anything you should or can if theres nothing dangerous, like a magic AoE like Fire or something being casted, silence. Also, I see so many brds not doing this, but keep your DoTs up as much as possible. Theres so many brds out there who just spam 1-2 skills instead of using their DoTs (actually this applies to a ton of people who never use DoTs lol). Drg spamming their AoE? Paeon. As that image said, it doesn't matter if it lowers your damage, you're support, you help the pt overall do more, not to mention theres damage buff skills you can use if you need more while having ballad or paeon up.

This bugs the crap out of me when I have other brds in my pt. Check the other brd before using a song, it's a waste to have two of the same song up. I've come across so many brds who, while I already have ballad up because of low mp on the healers, that they go and decide to throw it up too and completely ignore that mine was already up and I still have a good chunk of mp left. Not trying to be rude or anything, but is it that hard to take 2 seconds to look at what song, if any, the other brd is using?

Also, bring elixirs and stuff, you can never be too prepared.