5.0 Job change wishlist

[HyoMinPark]

To emphasize this, take a look at Bard. What does the gauge actually do? Nothing. It's there to basically tell you when you should be singing something, and alternating between the DoT and the main offensive skills.

You are absolutely wrong with regards to this. SaitoHikari already addressed it, but as another BRD main, you need to stop speaking about things you have zero idea about.

For your information, the BRD gauge doesn’t even have any visual indicator with regards to our DoTs, so you’re wrong in saying that it tells us when we switch between “DoTs and something else”—DoTs are only displayed on the enemy’s health bar, and it is up to us to visibly watch them. It does, however, contain information about the length of our songs (so as to tell us when we need to transition into a new one), the length of our Straight Shot buff (so as we can know when to refresh it, because this is an extremely high priority buff for BRD), and how much Repertoire we have (which affects our skillset/rotation in 2 out of 3 of the song).

In the case of Wanderer’s Minuet, the gauge shows us our Pitch Perfect stacks—Pitch Perfect is the strongest at 3-stacks (and the strongest skill in our arsenal short of Barraging Empyreal or Refulgent), and the Gauge is crucial in telling us when we can use it. It is also crucial for allowing us to keep track of our PP stacks, because there are cases where you actually do not use 3-stack PPs, but 2-stack PPs (AOE situations where targets are multi-DoT’d and situations where there are multiple critical hit-enhancing rBuffs present—mainly Battle Litany and Chain Strategem). For Mage’s Ballad, it flashes when Bloodletter/Rain of Death reset, indicating that we should immediately weave it between our next two GCDs for more damage and so as to put it on cooldown again for another quick reset. For Army’s Paeon, it shows us our Repertoire up to 4 stacks to inform us of how high our haste buff currently is—the mechanic for Army’s is lackluster, and the gauge isn’t needed too much for Repertoire, but it is needed to tell us when we are to transition, because Army’s is almost always clipped at 10 seconds remaining unless we are in the middle of AOE, or if the boss is going to transition and we will lose out on a lot of Minuet+Raging Strikes.

BRD cannot function in its Stormblood incarnation without its gauge. WHM, on the other hand, can—playing WHM with no lilies is the exact same as playing it while spending your lilies. The only minor difference is now your big oGCDs (Tetra, Asylum, Assize, Divine Benison) have slightly shorter CDs. WHM would function exactly the same without the lily mechanic and its gauge, hence why so many deem it bordering on worthless. I seriously urge you to actually read what both I and SaitoHikari have written, as you are talking about our job like you know it better than we do (especially with your rude response to him about basically ignoring the entirety of his post because he snapped and said that he was tired of you derailing thread after thread to reflect your own personal agenda—something I cannot even blame him for). Saito may even have a better understanding of BRD than I do, as he has had more experienced with the hardcore aspects of it, and where as I have only started to optimize it since the end of Creator.

For the record, I do play WHM. It may not be my main, but I think I have a fairly decent understanding of it, and I know that a lot of people in this thread (the WHM mains) have an even better understanding of it than I do. You are blinded by your skewed perceptions of raiders, parsers, FFLogs and the like, and you are so convinced that you are 100% right about everything you say that it is incredibly astounding. I think you need to come back to earth and accept that maybe, just maybe, the people in this thread are perhaps a bit more experienced than you are even willing to giving them credit for.

As for Bards themselves... Bards as they are now are in a rather 'perfect' state. We only have three real weaknesses, all of which are minor problems compared to what every other job has to wrestle with design-wise.

1) Our lack of a knockback prevention skill (which MCH also lacks). Perhaps this is something that should never be addressed for obvious reasons - we don't really *need* it unless the party as a whole has failed a mechanic somehow (O5S and the lack of boxes for the Bard/MCH to use to defend themselves against the knockback wind in particular).
2) Army's Paeon being used as filler compared to the other two songs. I imagine this will be addressed come next expansion - perhaps for the return of a Flaming Arrow-type skill to be used when we reach max stacks during Army's Paeon.
3) No way to force Refulgent Arrow during our openers, being purely at the mercy of the RNG. This is probably something that will be addressed come next expansion.

To also bring this thread back to it’s original intent, I am glad to see a fellow BRD asking for similar QoL improvements that I did previously before this thread turned into the crapshow that it is now.

1.) I would love a knockback prevention; I know that people think it’s “too OP” because BRD/MCH are so mobile, but since every DPS (and all healers and 1 tank) can prevent knockback, it would be nice for BRD/MCH to have a similar skill rather than try to time Repelling Shot. If the mitigation skill was something exclusive to 1 or 2 jobs, I could honestly be fine with BRD/MCH not having a knockback mitigator. But it’s basically every DPS job but these two.
2.) I agree that Army’s could use a little bit more love. I suggested bringing back Flaming Arrow for usage during Army’s for more AOE potential to make Army’s a stronger song, and to give it something more instead of Quick Nock spam until 4 Repertoire...and then Quick Nock spam some more. Mage’s has really strong potential, and Minuet does as well, so I’d love to see Army’s have more to it than a simple Haste buff.
3.) And this change would just be a godsend.

Another request I had was to remove the enmity dumps from Refresh/Tactician and add it to Repelling Shot a la Elusive Jump. That way BRDs don’t have to blow a utility skill to manage opening burst and not have it in the unfortunate event that a DPS dies and needs TP regen (and that there is no Goad/Invigorate). Plus, it would make Repelling Shot more than a situational skill (timed knockback mitigation).

[SaitoHikari]

Saito may even have a better understanding of BRD than I do, as he has had more experienced with the hardcore aspects of it, and where as I have only started to optimize it since the end of Creator.

For the record, I do play WHM. It may not be my main, but I think I have a fairly decent understanding of it, and I know that a lot of people in this thread (the WHM mains) have an even better understanding of it than I do. You are blinded by your skewed perceptions of raiders, parsers, FFLogs and the like, and you are so convinced that you are 100% right about everything you say that it is incredibly astounding. I think you need to come back to earth and accept that maybe, just maybe, the people in this thread are perhaps a bit more experienced than you are even willing to giving them credit for.

To the bolded: Probably not. It seems we both began raiding at roughly the same time, and you cleared O8S earlier than I did.

I mained WHM for a time before switching to BRD too. I might understand the cure spam mentality if we were back in ARR, but HW gave WHM so many instant cast heals (and SB -SHORTENED- the cooldowns on most of them across the board - remember when Assize used to be 90 seconds? Or Benediction used to be 300 seconds? Pepperidge Farm remembers.) that expecting WHMs to spam cure to utilize the lily gauge to its fullest isn't feasible from a design standpoint. One could even go back to the SB class showcase, revealed during the live letter before SB's release where everyone finally saw their new skills and gauges for the first time. For every other job, it was obvious what the gauges did and how to build up charges/utilize them (sans Bard, except Bard was completely overhauled and -nobody- knew/was allowed to talk about how SB Bard worked until the information embargo was lifted two weeks later).

What happened during the WHM showcase in that trailer? Lilies proccing in not obvious ways, showed off Rescue which every healer has, and not even showing the lilies being consumed. It confused the hell out of most people that watched it, resulting in guesses that... Actually weren't that far off the mark in terms of overall disappointment. The hysteria that followed was a product of WHMs essentially being entirely kicked out of the meta during the Creator raid tier, when AST Balance was buffed to extremely broken levels, their Noct stance did not provide anywhere near enough shielding for WHM/AST combo to compete against SCH/AST combo, and SCH's shielding was incredibly broken in a raid tier where there was barely any raid-wide AoE. WHMs didn't die out upon SB release like many predicted, although that wasn't because of the lily gauge being better than people thought, it was because raid fights became longer, the frequency of AoEs increased (about doubled or tripled - O4S in particular was the first fight to introduce the 'top off everyone's HP or you get a highly debilitating debuff' concept to the game), and Scholar had been nerfed into the ground (the Adlo MP costs at the start of Stormblood meant that pre-shielding before pull was VERY costly) until the developers buffed them back up again via potency increases, slashing their MP costs, and reducing summon cast times a patch later.

And the above is a lesson on how context matters.

Again, it feels like a placeholder rather than a proper system, compared to the complexity and responsiveness of the meters for every other job. It doesn't help that the WHM meter is largely RNG-based. (BRD meter is largely RNG-based too, but it's tied to a key gameplay mechanic that we already had prior to Stormblood, and Bards gain a lot out of proper usage of the meter - basically turning us into machine guns at high skill level with high crit gear. And even BRDs still have a way to force procs. Why do WHMs have to wrestle with the RNG for their meter when every other job doesn't have to?)

As for the BRD (and slightly related to MCH) stuff we spoke of earlier, moving our enmity dumps from Refresh/Tactician to Repelling Shot/Blank sounds like a good idea. Tying our enmity dumps to party-wide resource regeneration is a questionable design decision, the same way that tying the only healer enmity dump to their primary MP regeneration skill is. Lord knows I stopped using Repelling Shot once we lost the bowmage gameplay and it no longer inflicted any damage. As it is now, it kind of only exists to look fancy at the risk of clipping into our GCDs, or if you need to re-position and manually moving isn't fast enough. Or accidentally repelling off of platforms.

Other things:
- I see us getting some sort of trait to force proc Straighter Shot for Refulgent Arrow use. Maybe an upgraded Barrage trait.
- Oh, maybe Army's Paeon could be potentially overhauled in that once you hit max stacks, it automatically resets the cooldown on Barrage? Combined with the above, it'd be absurdly broken, though. I like the Flaming Arrow idea better, because I really, REALLY miss Flaming Arrow, and with Flaming Arrow, Army's Paeon would retain the current feel of a song that exists between Ballad's AoE damage and Minuet's single target damage.

As for everything else about the holy train wreck of an argument exploding all around us: Everyone else already said what I wanted to say. *shrugs*