WHY ARE YOU PLAYING A BARD IF YOU'RE NOT GOING TO SING?!

[QT_Melon]

The timer changes as well. Bloodletter and other abilities change. I'm not sure at this point I can see Charisma is theorycrafting and not actually playing the class.

Even with Macros with a timer, you still have changes. I play high level WHM and BRD and understand some of the frustrations with Bards not playing songs when appropriate, but this "X class is easy" I found WHM Easier than BRD. But everyone's mileage can vary in this game.

[Appleh4x]

Yeah I'm gonna go with Airikay on this one. Using macros on bard is probably the worse for your dps than keeping ballad up in most cases. It isn't a super complex class, I just like to think of it as "whack a mole" where you just keep waiting to tap all your procs and reapply your dots.

[Rayokarna]

They should make it so that Bard has no damaging attacks (or set their attack value to zero) and make it so every button is linked to Foe's, Mage, or Army's and all the classes will be happy. And if you press all three at once Battle Voice comes on.

[abzoluut]

I agree a 100 percent that you should not need to tell a Bard to sing one of the songs needed. A bard should know X song is up in X situation .

On the other hand though, there are oh so many bards just pure DPSing. Isn't it time for us to admit (I'm with this theory* from day 1) that BRD was poorly designed when 9 out of 10 bards just skip songs? It's doesn't really feel like a support job.

* theory

We had those weird jobs in 1.0. Another team took over and they wanted the classic jobs back: pugilist = MNK, conjurer = WHM, marauder = WAR etc. Then I read archer = BRD, wait.. what!? Ranger would be the obvious choice but SE needed some form of support for mana/tp regen and dps buffs. Instead of creating a true BRD, they just merged ranger with BRD because there was no time to actually create a new job. Just like how SMN was added later which is a copy paste from WoW's affliction warlock and just how SCH was added last minute and now has the attributes problem.

[Welsper59]

I agree a 100 percent that you should not need to tell a Bard to sing one of the songs needed. A bard should know X song is up in X situation .

On the other hand though, there are oh so many bards just pure DPSing. Isn't it time for us to admit (I'm with this theory* from day 1) that BRD was poorly designed when 9 out of 10 bards just skip songs? It's doesn't really feel like a support job.

* theory

We had those weird jobs in 1.0. Another team took over and they wanted the classic jobs back: pugilist = MNK, conjurer = WHM, marauder = WAR etc. Then I read archer = BRD, wait.. what!? Ranger would be the obvious choice but SE needed some form of support for mana/tp regen and dps buffs. Instead of creating a true BRD, they just merged ranger with BRD and gave us a pretty lore story how bards use bows bla bla.

That's because it's not a support job, as Yoshi-P and the mods have stated in the past. It's a DPS class, the same as you would look at a BLM/DRG/MNK/SMN as.

The way they made Requiem work is just awful as a learning experience for BRD as a first class/job for a player. A huge radius debuff that will aggro everything in range. Anyone that was around early into ARR launch will probably recall moments that Requiem accidentally aggroed a large number of dungeon mobs that may have wiped the group. In many parts of the game, you're essentially discouraged from using it. I honestly don't blame BRDs that don't use Requiem as a norm, just because of that fact. Now if they don't cast things like Ballad or Paeon, that's another story.

[Velox]

WHM however on a dungeon run should not run out of MP even with HOLY spam

You've obviously never had a derpy tank. Case in point, I was healing a Hullbreaker run last night. Right out of the gate the tank goes "this is a speed run." Now the DPS were a monk and a dragoon, so in the back of my mind I was thinking, "this guy can't be serious." He takes off and pulls every mob up until the bridge. It took so long to kill them that the tank ran out of cool downs and I had to spam Cure II just to keep him alive. Ran out of MP and we all died. He raged and left.

Point of the story, a WHM running out of MP is a responsibility that the whole party has control over, not just the WHM. The best WHM in the world is at the mercy of derpy players in party content.

[abzoluut]

That's my whole point "it doesn't really feel like a support job", yet they have to do support stuff which most don't do. Why? They're not support right. Hence poorly designed or even better, poor remnant of 1.0 which hopefully get's fixed in 3.0 when they hopefully decide to change the whole job system Yoshi mentioned.

[SirSaber]

BRD was once a support Job, until it got tweaked, nerfed and changed that is. Now it's only a DPS with some small support spells.

If a BRD doesn't use Ballad/Paeon/Requiem at the right time then he should feel bad.

But hey, just like a BRD not using his songs you have BLMs not using Flare in massive trash pulls, MNKs not keeping their buffs up, DRGs just sitting there and poke the boss without evading AoEs, PLDs not using shield oath, WHMs spamming medica II, SCHs not calling Eos, SMNs not looking at what Garuda is doing, WARs spamming Until out of PT ....

It's just bad players...they're everywhere.

[Jinglybell]

I once got yelled at in Garuda ex for using foe req. The spiny kept ending up on me and the off-tank yelled at me because it was somehow my fault that he couldn't grab it off (wut) whole group (the whole friggin group) threatened to kick me if I didnt stop using foe req. Also I usually don't use foe reqs for whm nuking unless I see them nuking because I forget to. A lot of whms won't nuke.

[Cyrus-Wallace]

This thread amused me. It was all fun and lols until I read that "the healers should only heal and not DPS". God. Yeah, hate and don't help the healer that makes the run even FASTER by adding some extra DPS. I, however, prefer to use Foe's on a healer that is DPSing, because he SHOULD stop when he's at 1/3ish of his MP. Being Foe a magic buff, in combination with the party DPS, the trash should be done by the third holy. I mostly play tank, and if you didn't heal me because you over-used your MP, I'll stare at you in disgust. Be wise on that one.

Now, when I play BLM, I hope the bard uses Foe. Most of the time I don't ask him to do so, not because I usually don't notice it, but I really don't like to tell people how to do their job when I barely play that class. Pretty much my bad, there. Probably the bard just forgot to use it too and I should ask, but there're some people with that shitty philosophy of "I do what I want, don't tell me what to do" that I prefer to avoid.