Bard - they broke my job

[Snowaeth]

Also people that are stating that bard is weak for dungeons are mistaken.
If you feel the dungeon run is slow it's either your dps, small pulls or the bard playing badly.

Because bard actually got buffed in the aoe department and can do very high and almost sustained aoe dps.
The more crit they have on their gear the more this is going to be noticable.

[awesomeuno]

Also people that are stating that bard is weak for dungeons are mistaken.
If you feel the dungeon run is slow it's either your dps, small pulls or the bard playing badly.

Because bard actually got buffed in the aoe department and can do very high and almost sustained aoe dps.
The more crit they have on their gear the more this is going to be noticable.

I am really enjoying the changes to bard AOE. almost constant refreshed on RoD

[Empty-handed]

Yes the aoe is nice up until you glitch out and can't use any skill for 15s.

[Snowaeth]

Yes the aoe is nice up until you glitch out and can't use any skill for 15s.

Well the bug is going to get fixed. But anything else is up in the air.
So for discussions sake we can ignore the bug and say how the class plays without it which in the aoe department is looking more than fine.

[aabe]

I just did two Ravana EX at ilvl180, i parsed 630 without WM all the time and 578 with WM with a DRG in party....

Ilvl 180? I'm still missing like 6 180 pieces and I parse 700 with a dragoon with full WM.

There are like, 8 GCDs TOTAL over the entire fight that you can't pull full DPS. And they're RNG based. That's during the orbs, and it's 4 GCDs or so depending on if they tether to you or not (if they don't tether you can just run the opposite direction which your group is going and keep dpsing)

[lugiaXD]

All i'm asking for is the reason why you're crying so hard. Am i just supposed to assume you're all endgame raiders with 100% optimal rotations? Yes? I even went back in the thread and saw posted rotations that could use some easy rearranging.

Or, i mean, I can just let you get back to your whining, whatever that's cool. Do you.

Buff WM to 40% or we all quit, here here

I personally don't have any parses (play on a ps4 *shrugs*) but i can tell you what my rotation is and see your thoughts on that cause i feel like i do more dps but when it comes to anything requring avoiding AoEs. i've noticed a huge drop in overall damage.

currently my rotation with WM up (not 60 yet so don't have sidewinder)
precast RS + HE before the tank pulls, if they have a timer i wait for 4 seconds and then precast them.
i then use SS -> B4B + IE -> WB -> BL -> VB -> Barrage + EA -> HS -> FA and then IJ so that i can clip my dots with about 2 seconds left on IE + RS.

after that depending on the fight i either turn off WM and play 2.X bard style or stay in WM if there isn't too many AoEs to deal with or i can position in such a way that it doesn't hurt.


what i've seen from personal experience though is that if there are a lot of AoEs/the Boss dashes across the Arena WM will lead to massive DPS drops.
I did a vault run with the same party twice once where i had WM up all the time and once where i had it off after the opener and i saw a vastly greater increase in the speed of the run (when it came to bosses anyway) than when i had it up all the time.


Now For the basic reason as to why we're all QQing about this.
Wanderer's minuet was toted as something that would allow us to get to comparable DPS as the other classes. even without that we're seeing classes have a lot more support based utility crop up yet we are still getting punished for it.
now i'm fine with this i've always been fine with it because a good bard could always still do comparable dps as the other classes in spite of this.

the issue comes when we get a DPS stance and yet it barely increases our damage and when you look at all our damage compared to other classes you'll notice that the gap is now so big and we are underperforming so badly that the offtanks are now doing more DPS than we are.

for this reason we have people complaining about both bard and MCH DPS because we are DPS and do less DPS than Tanks. Regardless of whether we are support based classes or not that never stopped us from only lagging behind the melee dps by at most about 40-60 points. it was part of adding to the class to know when to be a support and when to bring out the burst and sadly they basically nerfed the original palystyle to crap because of the Determination changes and the barrage changes.

[Darkthrone]

Raising the bow wpn dmg would alleviate most if not all bitching.

[Morticide_Baenath]

Raising the bow wpn dmg would alleviate most if not all bitching.

I agree entirely. This way, you could use WM if it was appropriate, and do comparable DPS (Which it isn't - need AA), or play Bard 2.0 style and stay slightly under the Melee as before, but still have freedom of movement.

I don't want to be a black mage. There are black mages for that, and they've got some serious nukes which Bardmage doesn't.

Aoe, however - is wonderful this way. Although Wide Volley seems kind of pointless. Costs more, same potency. Position yourself right, and Quick Knock is fine.

[ChloeGrace]

SE completely s**t the bed on bard. It's nothing less than a giant F U.
I've been a bard main since launch. No longer.
Machinist isn't even an alternative option - they're the same pile of crap, just with a different bad smell.

[SethLex]

Just adding to the choir of concerned voices here, hoping that the size of the thread will force a response from SE.

Bard is broken. It's not broken in the sense that it doesn't work at all, it's broken in the sense that it's no longer bard. Call it whatever you want, but the core of the class has been shattered. Fixing it will not mean looking at numbers and buffing WM or adding auto-attack back, because it's not a matter of numbers, it's not a matter of how much dps BRDs put out, but a matter of how the class is played.

People that went for bard generally went for it because of its fast paced, mobile style. Now everything which made bard a bard is gone. What we have instead is an afterthought of machinist. Speaking of which, how lazy or uninspired must you be as a designer in order to create the same lv52-60 skills for two separate classes and just name them differently?

Fixing this... shameful display of lack of game design skill would mean understanding the class and what makes it tick. I'm surprised they didn't make it melee.