Bard - they broke my job

[tankie]

I'm not really sure I understand what you're getting at. I don't see how that gives them any scaling they didn't have before. At least, not by my understanding of scaling.

WM is a flat 30% boost. It doesn't give a bigger boost the larger the weapon damage gap is. It's not scaled to how big the gap's going to be.

Hey, i am not really an experienced player and rather new to ff14, but wrt to scaling % usually always better after a certain attack point in any game let me give you an example

you have a base skill that does 100% weapon damage
you are currently running around with a weapon which does 50 dmg
your damage output with 1 skill is 50
if you activate WM its a 30% increase so its 50*130% = 65 Damage
wm addition is 15 dmg

Now after a long time of farming you got a base weapon which does 150 damage,
1 skill damage is 150
1 skill with wm is 195
wm addition is 45 dmg

as you can see the stronger your weapon gets the bigger the damage impact of WM becomes, ofc it will always be 30% but its 30% of a bigger base number and as such you got scaling.

the opposite would be for example a venom skill which adds a fixed amount of 35 dmg with each attack. This would deal more damage with a 50 dmg weapon but less with a 150 dmg weapon and would not scale with equipment.

Another thing i alway read in these Forum which feels a bit strange as a beginner, there is always the talk of how only 9 minute parsers are a good estimation and you have to factor out burst phases on bosses and that the bosses in the current contend die to fast to give a proper estimation.
For me that always leaves the question for what do you want to do the damage? to have some nice damge on a stawpuppet or to kill a certain boss as fast as possible.
For me it would be the 2nd so if the fights in the game are shorter than 3 minutes what point is there looking at 9 minute long parsers?

[Aiselia]

the amount of DPS you can add with a Foe Rec more than makes up for whatever you would be missing in WD.

I'd contest that on a couple levels.

Firstly, you won't always have a caster, or even a group. You will need to do quests, and the MSQ and class quests require you to solo quite a bit. If you do roulettes, you don't control your group. Even if you get a caster in roulette, you don't guarantee they're good. My last trial roulette had 2 DRG, 1 SMN, and me as a Bard. The SMN was the lowest DPS, with me only slightly behind one of the DRGs and ahead of the other. If I had my higher WD, I would have been doing even more damage, but the increase to the SMN's damage definitely wouldn't have outweighed my loss. If a BRD is beating a caster by a fair margin already, Foe's wouldn't even have the caster catch up to them, much less "more than make up for it".

Secondly, Foe's only lasts just over a minute from full MP and the MP bar takes about 2.5 minutes to refill in combat, both assuming that you don't refill your MP somehow. This is also assuming you won't have to play TP/MP song for anybody. A weapon damage increase for the Bard would be "always on". A caster will not always have time to cast during Foe's. They may have to move, they may get mechanics dumped on their head. They may be unlucky and get targeted by AOE circles a lot. A caster may not benefit from the full effect of Foe's but a Bard would always benefit from the effect of increased WD. Therefore, the benefit of Foe's is also limited to what time the caster can actually use it.

I'd also argue the main draw of it being to support people. Archers don't have support songs. Bards do. Unfortunately, we don't get the choice of staying as Archers, or being upgraded Archers. If we want to be even remotely useful, we have to be Bard. I rolled Archer because it was mobile ranged DPS. Bard was forced upon me. If there was a split like SMN/SCH where there was a mobile ranged DPS option that doesn't have the support songs, I'd swap in an instant. Also, 4/5 of the new Bard skills are for personal DPS gain only, while the last is just a mostly useless prEsuna.

ofc it will always be 30% but its 30% of a bigger base number and as such you got scaling.

The problem is that since there isn't a damage buff in the game that adds a flat X to each attack, they're all percentages, every class will have the same "scaling" with weapons getting better. But since Bard weapons have an inherently lower weapon damage than everyone else, WM does nothing to actually fill the gap. Everyone got tools to increase their DPS in some manner, not just Bards. In order for a Bard to stay at the same relative point as they were before, they MUST use WM. They could have just as easily increased Bard weapon damage and not required WM at all and given some nifty new support tool.