Bards viability now?

[JayCommon]

I keep seeing this reasoning come up for why Bards do less damage. Does everyone not know that any time a Bard sings paeon or ballad we ALREADY receive a 15% DPS loss? Our penalty for supporting the party is already built in. There is absolutely no reason for Bards to have significantly lower DPS when not supporting the party with songs.

Yes there is, because Bard's songs are not necessary to beat anything. All they do is help you win when you're not good at the fight yet. For the last 3 months all I sang in every single turn of FCoB was Foe. Healers never need mana when they know how to stop over-healing the fights, and no one ever needs TP when they know how to manage their Invigs. So if BRD damage wasn't lower than everything else, you would see the same thing that happened in 2.0. Full BRD parties in Titan HM. DRG/MNKs getting kicked out of parties for dungeon runs if they couldn't switch to BRD.

We aren't going to be singing 100% of the time ever. To hit like a Monk and have free mobility is absolutely absurd on every level. No one would play anything else. Again, this happened. This was a reality. It would be again if our WD was returned.

It obviously wouldn't help everyone be better though...not when 2yrs later there are still people out there that think BRD's songs don't affect themselves? SMH

[Waeksyn]

The problem is probably this perception that Brd is a "DPS+Support" class. There is no such class in the game. There is: Tank, DPS, Heal. That's it!

Maybe the solution is to give the other DPS jobs some additional "support" abilities so that they are perceived the same as bard in that area (many believe they already are but perception is reality to most). Then, increase the dmg from BRD to be on par with the other DPS jobs and there will be complete parity.

As far as the loss of mobility is concerned, that's not a big issue IMO (as long as the dmg is balanced, which it currently isn't), except that you are forcing players to change their fundamental play style when they hit the level at which they get WM. No other job has such a dramatic shift.

[JayCommon]

As far as the loss of mobility is concerned, that's not a big issue IMO (as long as the dmg is balanced, which it currently isn't), except that you are forcing players to change their fundamental play style when they hit the level at which they get WM. No other job has such a dramatic shift.

That's exactly what I told my friends. I was BRD Main all of 2.0. I switched to DRK for expansion but had to at least level my bard...

With knowing how DRK progresses, and in talking to my friends as how their characters progress...BRD is the only job who got such a fundamental change to their job role that it doesn't even feel like the same job anymore. This is basically a paraphrase of what I told my raid:

"When a job is "expanded" in an "expansion", it should take the skills you already have and know well, and bolster them. When leveling DRK from 30-50, you get a large portion of the CD's and tank-y type moves that are necessary to a tank job. Level 50-60, favored bolstering your DPS abilities by giving you some oGCD's and a very hig potency move. This isn't a shift, it's taking the skills you already have and adding to them as compliments to a larger, but more complete skillset.

When I read the changes to Barrage and our AoE moves I thought, "Why?..." Then when you get to level 52 and get WM, you start to see why. When you get to 56 and get Iron Jaws, you know why.

Wanderer's Minuet is the only skill/song/anything in the game that I can currently think of that completely changes the fundamentals of the job. And instead of it being a skill that you can decide when and when not to use, SE integrated being in this stance to almost everything you get post-50. So instead of expanding upon an existing Bard's skillset, they completely revamped the job, including old skills, to work under the influence of one single new ability."

In essence, you could have changed the name of the Job itself and noone would complain because what we have in the game right now isn't a Bard. It's an extremely weak caster if we are intended to play it with SE's re-design in mind. It left a very foul taste in my mouth, and even though DRK has some pretty glaring balance issues of its own at the moment, at least I have fun when I play DRK. Playing BRD currently in 3.0 is excruciating if you stay in WM.

[Garan]

Yes there is...

We aren't going to be singing 100% of the time ever. To hit like a Monk and have free mobility is absolutely absurd on every level. No one would play anything else. Again, this happened. This was a reality. It would be again if our WD was returned.

It obviously wouldn't help everyone be better though...not when 2yrs later there are still people out there that think BRD's songs don't affect themselves? SMH

To clarify, I'm not saying we shouldn't have some damage penalty for our mobility. I'm saying the reasoning that we "support" the party and should have lower base DPS is absurd. Our penalty for lower DPS when supporting is already built into those support skills. However, if WM stays the same, then there's no reason we shouldn't be able to pull comparable numbers as every other DPS when we no longer have any mobility advantage.