Ways to fix BRD and MCH in a realistic way

[Temjiu]

On note of the subject...I don't mind the concept of WM and how its supposed to buff our damage, but It's simply horribly implemented. Trying to attach it to our Songs is bad idea, as the song mechanic is outdated and clunky IMO. it works as it is mostly because it's a non-essential aspect of our personal play. we trigger a song on request, and go back to doing damage. but making our job depend on adding a song with a huge cast time in our rotation is horribad. There's lots of different ways they could have done it, and for some reason they chose the worst.


It would be one thing if it actually buffed our DPS to levels of other DPS classes. at THAT point we could say, "OK, turning it on sucks, but i can keep up with a BLM, so im good with it. i can turn off and move and still do some damage if i want too." but instead, we have clunky mechanic with cast time to initiate, that gives us the DPS of a tank. exciting. I'd rather keep it off, keep my movement, and still have the DPS of a tank.

On the flip side, they are planning on boosting our damage from what I hear. Not sure how i will take it even if the damage is buffed...again, like many others, if i wanted to play a caster class, I would have rolled a BLM. There's a reason that my BLM is lvl 25, and my archer was my main in 2.x ... the same reason that they killed with WM.

Id almost prefer a trigger stance like Conjurers have. give us a 10% damage boost or something basic, you can lock the new damage skills behind it, and you can do something like, "in Battle stance Bard may not perform songs as his harp is put away!" or something like that. so if we want to buff the party and do stuff like that, we drop the stance, and lose our big hitters and the 10% buff. simple and easy. we get damage, but we lose our buff ability to do it.

Meh...now that I think about that, it's not much different from the songs themselves (damage debuff while they're active). perhaps they should just get rid of the song altogether, and just make our new skills have cast times, and label them as "sniper skills" or something like that. or make the stance buff a damage increase as long as were standing still. either of those stay with the mobile concept, allow us increased damage but at the cost of extra mobility during those high damage periods.

In another post someone had mentioned having a stance that increased your damage when standing still in a tiered method...for each time frame you were standing still, you got X% buff in damage. the second you move, you lost it. that would give us a reason to stand still, but the more movement we had, the less damage we'd do. and we couldn't just stand still for a second and get max damage...the buff would have to stack 4-5x for maximum bonus, so you'd need to be still for at least that many cycles.

As an example, if the cycle was a second, you'd have to stay still for 5 seconds to get the full buff. or perhaps 1.5 seconds, and 7.5 seconds for full buff. the cycle time depends on whats reasonable given boss mechanics in most runs. That would also open up an option for them to add a skill on a longer CD that would immediately give us a full stack, so once every minute or so we could drop full burst without having to pick our nose for 5-7 seconds first.

This would give us the damage boost, limit it if we have to move (similar to cast times), and keep the theme of the bard/ranger/sniper thingy (stand still for higher damage, but be mobile with lower damage). adding it as a stance makes it a trigger we have to think about outside our standard buff cycles, and locking the new skills behind it would assure that we are only going to do the high levels of damage when we are using our mobility "limiting" stance.