Bard or Machinist?

[Rathael]

I have no idea what MCH is like but I've been slowly levelling BRD.

Frankly, coming from BLM DPS perspective, BRD feels more like fighting fire than other classes. Trying to track several cooldowns at once and smash them as soon as they are needed (bloodletter, empyreal, raging, barrage, Pitch perfect if you're in wanderer's, Iron Jaws to keep the Dot's going, Straight Shot buff, Sidewinder)

I am not thrilled with the implementation of the songs. They only make the fire fighting situation worse in two of the three. Furthermore, I just picked up Troubadour and I am having trouble seeing how you can be expected to work this into boss fights without EXTREME forward planning... like knowing exactly what song order to do right from the start of the fight such that you're in the correct song at the correct times.

The songs can be rotated 1 at a time in a cycle of 3, but their cooldowns make it so that once you've decided upon an order, you are fixed into that order for the rest of the fight unless you want to spend a period of the fight with no song up. That means you have to time boss abilities to activate while you are in the song that causes troubadour to give resistance to that ability's damage type.

Honestly I haven't tried max level bard but so far it is extremely chaotic and convoluted. I can see why people think it's "simple" but at the same time It doesn't seem to be. BLM feels a lot more tight and satisfying to me. I feel like the songs could use some heavy reworking. You don't really get much choice with them. They are not empowering you. They are simply forcing you to constantly play 1 of 3 mini-games while trying to pay attention to several other cooldowns.

I've been told tactician gets better in raids, but so far in dungeons it is seemingly useless on most other party members. Only Warriors, Bards (myself) and Paladins to a lesser extent seem to even use TP enough. Obviously both BRD and MCH have Tactician so I guess it's not really part of the discussion, but It was just to add to my current BRD rant.

[PuppytimusLeoroccanz]

BRD rant.

I agree with you, in regards to what you've stated about bard. There's just plenty of things to track, way more than of a Machinist in my opinion.

As for the role skill tactician. Its great and mostly used as tp restore for progression and/or enmity halving/dump since refresh is priceless for healers.

[Dualgunner]

I've been told tactician gets better in raids, but so far in dungeons it is seemingly useless on most other party members. Only Warriors, Bards (myself) and Paladins to a lesser extent seem to even use TP enough. Obviously both BRD and MCH have Tactician so I guess it's not really part of the discussion, but It was just to add to my current BRD rant.

If a TP user doesn't need TP during an AoE pull, they're not AoEing enough. MNK, DRG, NIN, SAM, BRD, MCH and BRD all will burn clean through their TP pools on AoE without good use of tactician and invigorate. I bring this up specifically in response to "tactician is better in raids", where the case can be made that yes, if a physical dps dies its useful, but no, it sees a lot more and better use in dungeons on big pulls.