SB Bard Changes: Good or Bad? Thoughts?

[Escadora]

Hmmm... that's pretty much impossible, I'm at 306 ilvl and around 1500 crit

Impossible? Lol.

My lodestone: https://puu.sh/wq4zS/527cf0784f.jpg

[Recklessfun]

I have kind of a newbie question since I haven't been playing long... I just unlocked iron jaws and I was trying to learn what it is and what it does.. Goggled it before I came on here and still kind of confused on the whole kind of reapplying dots thing... When in the rotation is it best used? And with a certain skill maybe?

[Jilliebeans]

reset your dots lol, use it when ur dots are at 1-3s left

[Akashica]

Tbh, I am actually okay with both the bowmage style and the 4.0 bard, though I cannot really say anything much about the 4.0 bard's dps, since I have not check it with act or those tools. As in gameplay, I feel 4.0 gave bard a more unique character, which is nice. (I have to adapt a lot from the old bowmage style though...)

Some things that I noticed though: Even though Traubador's idea is absolutely interesting in theory, getting the preferred effect in the right time is pretty hard, since throughout the fight, you will be rotating through all the songs endlessly. For you to get the correct effect at the right time, a lot of planning in song rotation needs to be done, imo. I will need to check it out :P.

[Akashica]

The second thing is how you will be pressing just heavy shot and not having any ogcd in between. This seems rather different from the bowmage in 3.0, where there's just too much ogcds to use in the 0.5s duration after the cast time. Furthermore, since the cast times are gone, you can basically put in 2 ogcd in between each gcd really, but there's nothing to press in most of the situations... It just seems awkward, but it's not bad or anything.

[Akashica]

There is only one concern with the current bard for me: it's heavily RnG dependent (rely heavily on crits), which makes the bard's dps varies a lot. Is this a good thing? It depends on the POV. Normally, I feel RnG should act as an add-on to the skill rather than a core mechanic to the skills, meaning it's not that bad to have the RnG on your side, but having it procs would be very good. This, I feel, is not that case for Bard, as all songs rely on crits procs to activate its additional effect. However, even though I said "concern", I am not going to say that it's bad, because there's no proof that RnG ruins bard (no dps statistics and such). It could turn out really good in the end :P

[Shurrikhan]

My question with the new Bard is one of control vs. variation. Essentially, I want to control what song I'm using at a given moment; their being oGCD now would otherwise wholly enable this. But, because of their CDs, one only has control over an average of 3 seconds per song (the difference between the 80s CD and the 30s duration each). And yet, if we had this control, and an obvious better choice for a given situation, we wouldn't see much variance. AoEs would be MB. Focus targeting from a DoT spread would be WM. Acclerating the spread of more DoTs or struggling to fit in an extra IJ across 7 targets in preparation for a rushed MB — AP.

Yet, would having control over the durations, not just the order of the songs its initial cycle, really be such a bad thing? If the choices were just a bit more balanced, such as AP being more worthwhile, or MB reduced to its original River of Blood strength, the ability to swap as we please seems like an enjoyable change to me.

I'd rather be able to swap songs at will, but each stack, of buff or 'ammunition' lasts for a given amount of time, allowing you to better swap between songs.
...And that all this info should be optionally visible on status bars...

That's to say nothing of how I'd rather regain some of the more finely tactical or bursty aspects of the HW Bard, or even being able to actually choicefully support our comrades as when it actually made a difference what song we played. At least, we're only ever going to be a permanent Crit Fey Wind, could we at least have some more control over our how our songs affect us, as to better make something of their rotational impacts?

[ChloeGrace]

HW Bard is like the second Highlander movie. Let's just pretend it never existed, and everything will be fine.

Requiem is like explosive diarrhea now, especially since bard has a thimble sized mana pool. They could have just put hard timers on it (like 15s, 2m cooldown).
I find I'm really missing the old aoe. The new ballad mechanic is clunky. I only have 3 choices for a big group of trash mobs.
A) I'll need to mutli-dot to reliably proc. If I do that, I'm not aoe-ing, and the big group of mobs is dead (or close to it) by the time I'm ready to use ballad and it's wasted. The dots don't see their full duration either, so there's another inefficiency.
B) Use ballad with only a few dots, and hope I get lucky with RNG. Sure, empyreal auto-procs, but you get one (maybe two) per song. Usually, the effect is marginal at best.
C) Just not use it at all, or go with Paeon instead.

[Warlyx]

this job now feels like wow fire mages , crit dependant to the max ...if your dots dont crit your whole job mechanic doesnt do anything for u ...thanks good EA trait exist but still ugh.

i would love to see 1 change...remove Nature's Minne and give Brds a way to "bane" dots , with Mana song and 5-6 mobs doting 1 and spreading the dots would with lovely to spam rain of death .....

[Aerolithe_Lion]

Impossible? Lol.

My lodestone: https://puu.sh/wq4zS/527cf0784f.jpg

I'm all for debates on the boards, but when someone calls you a liar, rebuttals like this are gold. Seems to be a learn to play Issue if she's unfamiliar with min/max itemization.