Defensive cooldowns for marginal DPS gain anyone?

[coldreactive]

Bard can't. Paladin and Warrior are the only two Jobs that can equip it, even if several Classes could.

Really. We did a Garuda EX Run with one tank and a bard that tanked the other sister and somehow kept aggro.

[Dotsusama]

Really. We did a Garuda EX Run with one tank and a bard that tanked the other sister and somehow kept aggro.

Without Quelling Strikes, and with all their cooldowns, Bards can dish out a LOT of damage all in a short span of time. So, if they were waiting for the sister to pop and had abilities ready to go, they wouldn't have needed cooldowns.

[Taliph]

Really. We did a Garuda EX Run with one tank and a bard that tanked the other sister and somehow kept aggro.

It's called burst damage.

[coldreactive]

It's called burst damage.

I still can do more damage than a bard in one hit most of the time, so I'm pretty sure Bard is still just plain "DPS" rather than "Burst" :P

[gamesmart]

snip because 1000 limit

That's not quite how BRD burst damage works. With Barrage tripling their number of auto-attacks, stacked on top of 20%, 10%, somewhere around 15%, and an additional 10% chance for 50%, and also increasing the chance for Bloodletter trait to proc, a fully buffed Bard can deal insane amounts of damage in a very, very small amount of time for the duration of their cooldowns, especially because they have no windup time. For them it's not about the size of the hits (though Bloodletter crits can go pretty high), it's about the sheer number of hits.

As for the original intent of this thread, I regularly eat Landslides with Manawall. No damage and no knockback. Manaward is less reliable due to the fact that it only absorbs some amount of damage, but helps in some cases. For non-BLMs, defensive cooldowns are far less reliable, so it's probably not worth it.