Bard and how to fix it.

[Snowaeth]

I realize that I should separate my suggestions from the introduction so excuse me for double posting.
Also excuse me in advance for my formatting skills, someone else could have probably done this much cleaner.

Summary of the Issues I am seeing with the new bard playstyle mainly when under effect of Wanderer's Minuet. (Suggested fixes near the bottom)
TL;DR below

I am not complaining about the playstyle change, I dislike that it happened, but I am trying to find solutions for actual QoL issues that came with Wanderer's Minuet.
Wander's minuet now that it got the instant cast treatment is something that isn't as bad to use anymore compared to how it initially was.
Since Wanderer's Minuet is here to stay most likely in its current state I am focusing my suggestions on how to improve bard with the current WM as part of our kit.
I am very well aware of the damage potential and am able to output more than decent numbers myself. (Here is for example my 3min solo, xpot, apkallu on dummy (i180) http://i.imgur.com/43IgjiI.jpg)
It's not our dps that is the real problem it is the issues that stem from cast times being implemented on a kit that wasn't built for it.

One of the big issues is the way our rotation works, it now became super twitchy because of casts combined with double rng procs topped off with a bunch of ogcd's.
One of the main bard mechanics now is Wanderer's Minuet which comes with cast times and cast times are interfering with one of our main mechanics from 2.0-2.55 namely Bloodletter+River of Blood proc's.
Bloodletter combined with its trait is a very strong skill, but it's also based on RNG and Bloodletter being OGCD in our old rotation never interfered with this mechanic.
Now that we have cast times and even one of our new main damaging skills Empyreal Arrow being an OGCD skill but with cast time we have a non stop flow of interference's with our Bloodletter.
Now I am not saying it is impossible to play around this what I am saying it is not fluid and a lot less enjoyable imo because of this.

Then there is the high amount of ogcd's that don't work well with casts to begin with, pre 3.0 the bard was a job that used to double weave OGCD's (as long as you had half decent latency) without loosing any GCD time.
This is not possible anymore since the window to weave OGCD's became smaller by 1,5ish sec because of cast times.
As mentioned before Bloodletter is RNG based so it can reset pretty much anytime, or not at all. You can't build around Bloodletter RNG so you will have to delay it.
You also have to prioritize Bloodletter over actual GCD's now because it can reset during the cast of those which scews the timing of our GCD's which has two buffs that have to be kept up around set times.
So any of the lower valued OGCD's have to take a step back even further, which is not a big deal, but for QoL sake they should be adjusted.

Now as I've been saying it isn't impossible to play like this and it's not a dps issue.
It's the flow of the bard that is affected by these and really needs improvement to make playing the job a more streamlined experience like it was in 2.X patches.
This affects bards of any skill level, good or bad.
I also understand that not everyone cares about improvements and some might even consider a job with flaws like these a challenge, I am however a fan of a fluid skill flow.

Now besides the big culprit Bloodletter + River of Blood Trait not meshing well with cast times there are smaller improvements that can easily improve our QoL.

Repelling shot with its 5y range becomes really hard to use with cast times, so as part of our old dps rotation there is only room for it when we get SS proc's and nothing else is up and we can get close enough to the target.
When used normally the repelling animation will cancel out our next queued cast and thus becomes not worth using as a dps skill.
However it could very well serve for it's main purpose of mobility if adjusted the way I suggest below and be like the bard style of BLM Aether Manipulation.

Flaming Arrow is a ground targeted skill yet we can not activate the targeting circle until we are done casting.
The input of where we place the skill was already often not registered before 3.0 but now the OGCD window is even smaller making this skill feel very, very clunky.

Barrage was our highest potency buff before 3.0 and it still is very strong, it did get nerfed however and on top of that changed in functionality.
The reasons for the functionality change is obvious, but for the sake of QoL it would be cool to have two stances for it for when WM is on and off, so we can still leave it as a part of the rotation for situations when bards have to disable WM.
Also Barrage in WM is now meant to be used with Empyreal Arrow, yet Barrage is an OGCD and EA is an OGCD with cast time. In a normal case this means that we will be cutting into our next GCD by the full duration of EA cast and if Bloodletter procce'd on top of it even more from using BL.

Heavy Shot's trait Heavier Shot serves the same purpose as the BLM firestarter trait and I feel like it could use the same benefits as firestarter.
Having it proc more often would give us more room to use our OGCD skills too improving overall flow and it would give us that little bit of extra mobility to compensate for the new cast times.

Warden's Paen is considered close to being a ueless skill which is pretty disappointing for a lvl 58 skill.

The changes we had to Rain of Death left one of our AoE skills Wide Volley that was already not the best option to use close to completely useless and it needs some attention in one way or another.

From a design perspective the job's gameplay suffered quite a bit. You can claim that people adjusted to it, and that much is true. Poor implementation remains poor implementation, regardless of whether the players adjusted to it or not. Hence why the OP made this thread.

Since you are asking for explanations, I'll indulge you:

The base design of BRD and WM as implemented clash because cast times and reliance on off-GCD abilities & procs don't mesh well. The intent of the changes also doesn't make much sense, since WM is introduced so late in BRD's relative "life" and implemented in such a ham-fisted way that it doesn't feel like natural growth of the job. It's no surprise that people who are just picking up the job also seem to be saying that the change is too abrupt and feels clunky as hell despite the nice DPS numbers.

It sounds like Bards feel like their current skills are clunky, and don't flow well together, and the fixes are more about adding fun to the class without adding power.

TL;DR:
Bard is capable of doing damage, the new playstyle has QoL issues with the new skill-flow that weren't present pre 3.0 and are caused mainly by cast times.
It is playable, but can be more enjoyable if the skill flow was not as clunky.
I am suggesting some changes to skills with as little rework as possible.
Bloodletter & its trait are the main culprit of this skill flow issue. There are however some other skills that should be looked at too.
(This does not sum up every bard issue players have with bard, but focuses on the issues that result from using the new song.)

Here are the fixes that I came up with and think would improve the bard (in Wanderer's Minuet)

- Repelling Shot Remove the skills potency. Put the potency on another skill. Add extra 10~13 yalm to the range of Repelling Shot from where you can activate it.
~ Thoughtprocess behind this: Easing up OGCD flow while giving us a mobility skill that works with casts from medium/far range (A la Aether Manipulation from BLM). Also the repel part of this skill bugs the next GCD cast and cuts heavily into GCD when this happens.

- Blunt Arrow Remove the skills potency. Put the potency on another skill (Like Emperyal Arrow, Sidewinder or Bloodletter).
~ Thoughtprocess behind this: Easing up OGCD flow while still making the skill serve it's true purpose of silence. This would also make silencing smoother when silence is actually needed.
* Another option if you don't want to take an extra OGCD attack from bards is adding the potency from Repelling shot to Blunt Arrow since Blunt Arrow does less harm to the rotation than Repelling.

- Flaming Arrow *option1: Castable even when casting other skills.
*option2: If casting this during another skill is not possible then make Flaming Arrow a targeted skill that places the current aoe circle under the main target.
*option3:

An option added where ground-target AOEs, if you just double-tapped the skill's hotkey, would simply be placed on top of the current target, centered around them. I think that'd work for things like Flaming Arrow.

~ Thoughtprocess behind this: Currently with cast times we are not able to queue up Flaming Arrow during the actual cast time, by the time we are able to queue it up and actually place it without the server eating our input we are cutting into our GCD's

- Straight Shot Needs a faster animation or faster proc detection.
~ Thoughtprocess behind this: With the added cast times Straight Shot is suffering from the same issues as firestarter, which is just bad design. When we cast Heavy Shot with cast times and it proc's Straighter Shot, by the time the proc goes through we can already be casting the next skill (if we needed to re-apply Straight Shot buff this means we will be casting SS and then have an SS proc happen middle of our SS cast).

- Bloodletter I am going to add some extra solutions here as this is the main culprit of our QoL issues in WM.
* option1: Bloodletter is now usable during the cast of other skills.
* option2: Blooldetter can now store up to 2-3 charges when it proc's.
* option3: Bloodletter now increases in power every time a proc happens, up to 3 stacks (lasting 10sec) First stack adds 100% of the damage, 2nd stack adds 75% of the damage and 3rd stack adds 50% of the damage (all stacks are fired next time you use the skill).
~ Thoughtprocess behind this: Bloodletter is OGCD, but we have cast times now. It can proc during a cast and has the same potency as HS. Thus making it a priority over HS since another BL can proc during the cast of HS. Since the proc's are based on RNG you can not plan out for them entirely because there are skills that have a forced use like refreshing Iron Jaws/Dots and Straight Shot buff. This can cause double procs before you can use the skill at all, basically loosing lots of Bloodletter procs over a longer fight.
The first change would adress the issue entirely, the other two would give the bard a very cool new mechanic to play with especially option 3. Have to be careful here though, since the cooldown is now bound to Rain of Death, the effect needs to translate to RoD too.

Blood Letter should just operate differently whilst under WM.
If you get a BL proc whilst under WM, your Bard will fire two shots with your next Weaponskill. Potency + BL_potency together, or it could just boost your next skills potency by 150.

Make blood river proc boost the next heavy shot/quick nock for 150 potency (stack max 3)

- Heavy Shot Removes the TP cost of Straight Shot on proc. Now has a 40% chance to proc Straight Shot vs the current 20%
~ Thoughtprocess behind this: It currently serves the same use as firestarter proc's on BLM. Why not make it the same thing with bard flavor instead of this currently inferior option.

Shorten HS's animation.

- Barrage Has two modes now. (Changes to barrage would be a low priority fix though as it isn't horrible or anything, just could be improved now that it is combined with EA cast time).
* Wanderer's Minuet is turned on: Barrage has current effect.
* Wanderer's Minuet is turned off: Barrage has the old pre 3.0 effect. Increase the amount of extra hits by 1 to compensate determination nerf and lower potency outside of WM so 3 bonus auto attacks vs 2 on old.
~ Thoughtprocess behind this: Currently the idea is that bards should be able to turn off WM when movement heavy phases are happening, this would allow the bard to not delay their rotation for those phases and still keep some of the pre 3.0 feel on a 90seconds cooldown.
This does not solve the issue where Barrage + Empyreal Arrow are 1 OGCD + 1 OGCD with 1,5sec cast time which guarantees to cut into GCD's, so the potency of Barrage or EA in WM might need to be looked at a little bit more to compensate for this.

Maybe an inherent barrage+EA skill since any bard worth his salt is going to be pairing those 2 up anyways; Why not cut the clicking down some and have every EA every 90 seconds to 3x damage?

- Wide Volley Has become close to useless and needs a rework.
I would personally lower its tp cost, make it single target and make it lower piercing resistance. Then add a piercing resistance debuf to machinist too, to balance all physical dps to have their own ability of debuffing targets.

- Warden's Paen (The lvl 58 skill that is useless) Needs some reworks.
At the very least make it last 45 seconds (so we can use it pre-pull on a warrior). But even then the actual skill feels very lackluster.
So you could add an actual esuna effect to the skill, this would give it a little bit more use, but still not make it very useful at all especially with the 3sec cast time.
Preferably you look at it again really hard and make something more useful out of it than it is right now.
If we'r copying BLM's why not make it a Physical Damage Apocastasis kinda thing instead.

Change level 58 song's effect to an AoE damage reduction bubble for one hit. Range... let's say 5y radius around BRD, and 8% reduction.

WM:

Wanderer's Minuet: 3 second cast time
Increases overall damage by 15%, cannot be played with other songs and is unaffected by Battle Voice. effects end upon reuse
Additional effects: Barrage now causes a single target non-critical weapon skill to hit 3 times. can only be applied for one attack.

Wanderer's Minuet could add more damage in melee range and go down when farther away, that would be great

Latency
Bard used to be the most latency friendly dps pre 3.0
The lag difference is easily tested between players by Ninja Mudra spam. For example with my latency from EU it varies between 9/10 where US players are reporting 11/12 mudra's.
I'm not complaining here, just pointing out that there is another group of players being affected by these changes in ways that might have been not meant like that.

For extra info i live in australia playing on gilgamesh so i have inherent latency issues, i've done as much as i can to fix it but being on a ps4 my options are limited, and after basically being shown that i should never be able to dps as well as non-latency players it felt really good to even come close to fellow bards in 2.x now i can physically see just how much my latency screws with me and it's most the reason i didn't switch to ninja, blm or smn because they really aren't lag friendly classes.

Bard Animations in WM
What is this?
(I personally don't watch animations mid combat anyway, but as people pointed out they are pretty bad)

After any of these changes would happen, some potency tweaking would be needed once again, but that's fine.
Potencies are the lowest concerns right now making the bard skills flow smoothly is the priority imo.