Advice for returning to Bard after 12 months

[Chevronone]

There is no stance dancing. It's not worth the headache. WM 100%, put Feint on your bar to allow you to at least keep dps up if you must move. You can move and shoot with Feint with WM up. The end.

[Greedalox]

There is no stance dancing. It's not worth the headache. WM 100%, put Feint on your bar to allow you to at least keep dps up if you must move. You can move and shoot with Feint with WM up. The end.

I don't know if Bard follows different rules for Stance Dancing than MCH, but it's not an exceptionally difficult concept to try to bring into your kit. You should attempt to implement it WHILE you're learning the changes to gameplay when you get WM/GB instead of learning your cast bars and then relearning your cast bars + toggling when your damage starts to plateau from your class comprehension and you're looking for where to improve.

I just don't think that whole heartily discouraging optimal play for 'good enough' is a great concept to teach our less learned players. They'll find their balance :3

[Chevronone]

We are not talking about blm cast times here. My cast times are at present 1.32s. You do not need to stance dance to handle cast timers less than 2s.

Without WM, you drop 30% dps. I main bard and I've yet to come across a fight in any EX primal or savage where stance dancing was needed where simply using Feint didn't suffice.

Toggling off WM puts it on CD, so you cannot immediately go back into WM. You will loose Iron Jaws to reset your burst buffs and your Empyreal arrow. Stance dancing on bard is absolutely never a net gain for any serious bard.

[HyoMinPark]

Toggling off WM puts it on CD, so you cannot immediately go back into WM. You will loose Iron Jaws to reset your burst buffs and your Empyreal arrow. Stance dancing on bard is absolutely never a net gain for any serious bard.

I think you meant toggling WM on puts it on cooldown for 15 seconds. When you toggle it off, it toggles off just like any other oGCD stance. :3 Still, I agree with you that stance-dancing on BRD is not worth it at all. Especially if you can make use of your skills that don't have casts (Bloodletter, Straighter Shot procs, Sidewinder) and use them while moving. I frequently weave in BL and SW during parts of fights where I have to move around (Sophia Ex, looking at you), and still manage to keep up my DPS and DoTs.

[Slevin_Impudicus]

Without WM, you drop 30% dps. I main bard and I've yet to come across a fight in any EX primal or savage where stance dancing was needed where simply using Feint didn't suffice.

Some pointless math... IF (and this is not actually the case) WM made your dps 1.3x your non-WM dps, then when you turned off WM, you would lose (1.3-1)/(1.3) or approximately 23% of your dps, not 30%.

BUT, when you go into WM, you are sacrificing a bit more than mobility and auto-attacks. When it was a "20% boost", it ended up being a dps loss, so they raised it to 30%. If we give it the benefit of the doubt and say that the 20% boost came out as even dps, then the difference between non-WM and the "+30% boost" is only a net 8.3% increase in dps. Unfortunately, to add insult to injury, Sqenix then nerfed some skills a bit to force us into using this IMHO crap stance, but it's not a flat 30% increase in dps compared to non-WM despite oversimplification of interpreting the tool tip.

That said, anyone wanting to absolutely maximize their dps on BRD must learn to perform well under WM. Performing not-so-well will quickly kill any dps boost from the stance. Of course, if you want to absolutely maximize your dps, you can also pick a higher dps class. Many players opted for that approach.