Bards - Help me understand

[Fyce]

No, it sounds like you're trying to make a statement against the bards that refuse to use minuet out of principle. I use minuet and stance weave and have managed to put up solid DPS, but I hate the job. I have never enjoyed BLM, and I've never enjoyed SMN. The people I see that hate the new buff the most are the people that have dedicated most of their playtime to mastering bard, a lot of those people are now disillusioned and some are moving to other classes. The end effect is that you're going to have less bards playing the game and the ones that do are going to be newer to the class.

So enjoy your dungeon runs with bottom tier bards without minuet on, I'll be the ninja in your party jumping around the monsters like a fool because I can.

That only applies to people with BRD main and only BRD. If you were playing any other ranged job with cast times, then playing BRD with WM would be fine since you would already be familiar with cast times.
I played a lot of WHM in 2.x and switched to SMN now, so when I tried a lv60 BRD on my gf's account just to test it, I was completly fine with it. She even told me "you don't even play BRD and you're already better than me with WM...".
Well, yeah. I'm used to cast times so WM isn't a big deal for me.

I guess the issue lies in people's habits. If WM was a Lv10 skill, there wouldn't be any problem with it. But since it's a new skill, it obviously impact long term BRD the most.
On the other hand, people playing BRD as an alt job might be completly fine with it, and even perform better than 2.x main BRD because of that reason.

Since the change is so big, speaking of "mastering BRD" doesn't make any sense now, because everyone is on the same foot right now. It's just a question of "can you/do you want to change your habits or not ?".

[RiceisNice]

....

The other end of the spectrum is that full-time bard mains are the ones that can feel how fragmented bard's gameplay is with WM. It's not cast times itself the problem, its the problem that comes from having a cast time.

Then you have people who leveled up machinist first then level up bard and immediately notice that the two more-or-less play identically the same because of WM/GB, so we don't even have class diversity when it comes to gameplay for ranged physical (think BLM/SMN, melees, or healers in how they approach with their role), except only one of the two classes was built from the ground up with cast times in mind and doesn't feel as awkward.