Change to Wanderer's Minuet

[ShaneDawn]

Actually, if there's one thing I'm starting to notice going through the live letter, it's that it looks like the developers want to kill the concept of double weaving entirely, by massively reducing the amount of oGCDs that have potency attached to them and getting rid of personal damage buffs that have nothing to do with resource building. This would make it so that people with low ping no longer have such a major advantage over higher ping players of equal skill level. This also has the added effect of people no longer blowing their crowd control abilities to push out extra damage, if said crowd control abilities no longer have potency attached to them.

Consider this picture from the live letter when Yoshi briefly swapped to Bard to show everyone the ranged role skills.



Note how many off-GCDs are missing. One of the reasons why Bard is so hard to optimize is due to the sheer number of personal oGCDs we have to juggle, and from the looks of that picture above, a good 3/4ths of them are gone. The only ones that remain either assist with party utility or are key attacks.

(The damage buffs such as Hawk's Eye and Internal Release aren't the only ones that are missing though, there's stuff like Flaming Arrow too, which I'd be legitimately sad to see gone, so I'm hoping that Yoshi either just forgot to put it on there or Bard has a number of other replacement skills that weren't ready to be shown in any capacity. Indeed, if they're pruning THAT many skills from Bard, that would leave the early leveling phase pretty barren, because everything that's missing are entirely from the first 50 levels.)

Indeed, think back to the new job UI with all the resource/meter building, compared to the combat environment of today. Today's raiding scene places massive emphasis on the concept of openers, where everyone has all of their best tools ready to use at the very beginning of a fight. Said openers were also fairly reliant on player ping and the limited class synergy currently available, which is a part of why the BRD/MCH/NIN/DRG setup became so popular this late into Heavensward. With what appears to be the overall removal of straight personal damage buffs AND most of our strongest abilities now appear to be locked behind resource building now, the focus on 'openers' will essentially shift to building towards our strongest attacks as quickly and as often as possible, so combat is now less about perfecting burst damage windows and more about consistent gameplay throughout.

This is actually somewhat concerning, although not just for Bard. A major factor separating great players from the good ones was often knowing how to line up your buffs and using them to their best effect. You would often want to delay certain cooldowns to get a stronger alignment with others, most likely discuss the cooldown usage with your party members to benefit more from your shared multiplicative damage modifiers. This is especially true for buff-heavy, dot-snipping class like Bard, whose damage is very relative to how well you know your buffs and get the best out of them. A thing that a lot of people seem to disregard is snipping your dots outside openers to get extended effects of things like Raging Strikes and Internal Release. As you also mentioned, the usage and general party timing for openers and mini-openers that usually happened several times throughout a raid were a key to maximizing the DPS.

Just like CPM, the general know-how is what takes players a long way in increasing their DPS. As it is, you can achieve decent DPS just by knowing your priorities. To achieve good DPS, you also need to know your opener and use your damage modifiers. To achieve great DPS, you also need to be able to use your cooldowns in an efficient manner. If you want to go even beyond that, you need to start effectively syncing the party cooldown usage so that you gain the maximum effect out of the shared modifiers. It is a somewhat more technical system than meets the eye, but adds a big layer of complexity for those wishing to go above and beyond.

It's probably too early to jump to conclusions, but the possible pruning of damage modifiers from classes could serve as a bigger dumb-down to the game (and especially Bard as a class) than removing the cast times ever did. Unless the consistent performance as you mention it will become more difficult to achieve than it currently is. However, since the removal of cast times will be dumbing that part down as well, the ease or difficulty of our consistent rotation is going to be largely dependent on how the song system is going to work out and how the combat changes will reflect in general battle design .

[akaneakki]

This is actually somewhat concerning, although not just for Bard.

I saw legsweep actually got changed too, instead of 20 seconds it's 40 or something in SB. So his theory might be right but this is really concering for the people who know how to line up their cds well and so on. I hope the gap between bad players and good players will be lower in next expansion but I have my doubts too.