SB Bard Changes: Good or Bad? Thoughts?

[SaitoHikari]

Speaking as a Bard that only began playing after HW release and never got to experience ARR Bard, going into SB was a pretty jarring experience for me. But after practicing a bit in random dungeons, I feel that I have a good grasp on the new Bard even though I'm still missing all skills from 64+.

HW Bard prioritized proper positioning and planning around 90 second burst damage windows and nuking down mob packs with Rain of Death procs.

SB Bard, however, prioritizes quicker reflexes and planning out your moves 60 seconds in advance. It's a different kind of tactical thinking, but it's still Bard at its core. An example of this is a Saint Mocianne's Arboretum run I had yesterday - the tank elected to do the honeycomb skip method, so I decided to go into Army's Paeon mode and throw Windbite on everything possible before dotting the last honeycomb and swapping into Wanderer's Minuet mode. I was immediately rewarded with seven back to back fully charged Pitch Perfects to burn it to the ground.

(On a side note, I also ended up in an Antitower in progress with a lone Red Mage who had the rest of the party ditch him before the dungeon properly began. I proceeded to duo with him all the way to the first boss successfully before a White Mage joined us, and then I successfully tanked everything all the way past the second boss before a tank joined us for the final leg. Warden's Paean is good utility in that dungeon for the first leg on account of blocking the Paralysis and the Concussion, and I am actually really sad that Paean got nerfed, but it's understandable why the devs did it.)

I'd argue we're actually way overtuned at the moment, in every dungeon/24 man alliance I've been in ever since SB release, I was far and away the top DPS (and I've literally had to use Tactician/MP Refresh early in numerous occasions already to avoid taking aggro). SB Bard also gets access to better AoE in earlier levels - and THIS part is something I expect nerfs for, as I ended up in a Tam Tara normal mode for leveling roulette yesterday and found I had access to Invigorate and Tactician too (whereas SB Bard had a higher Quick Nock TP cost and only Invigorate). I was able to spam Quick Nock for one minute straight before running out of TP as a result, which is the kind of sustained mobbing potential most other classes can't even touch until level 40+, if ever. The dungeon ended in 16 minutes, even with the healer being new. A Bard/Machinist duo can easily speedrun all of the earlier dungeons far, FAR faster than any other class, especially considering the two could rotate Tacticians for even better sustain (and also enabling Warriors to use Overpower more).

So far, while it does feel like our AoE burst nuke potential got hugely nerfed, our sustain more than makes up for it, and my single target damage is far more consistent if not even higher than it was in HW. Remember that auto attacks make up a significant chunk of damage in a single target environment, not to mention that Direct Hit by itself feels like it essentially cancels out the loss of damage from old Minuet.