Bard: The (Nearly) Perfect Job

[inhaledcorn]

Other than Army's obviously being underwhelming, I don't know that I agree with any of these being real problems, just aspects of the job that may or may not differ from others.

They honestly don't need to do anything fancy with Army's, they could just make it 6% so that players really feel the speed at max stacks, which would be a very small buff at the end of the day. Though any buff to Army's would lead to optimization nightmares, it really isn't all that far behind Mage's at max stacks as it is, so a buff would likely create a web of conditionals surrounding EA's cooldown and crit buffs.

I was thinking my idea for "Straighter Shot force proc when procs are wasted" would probably be better as just an Army's thing. It makes the full song very useful and gives you something when you hit max, which is a problem that it has now. It gives you more Reflugents, and for the phase that makes you go faster, fitting more Refulgent in that window just seems like the perfect thing to do. Making Army's go any faster would start to run into TP problems. I mean, sure, there's Invigorate and Tactician, and that's just on the Bard itself, but Tactician has a fairly lengthy cooldown. Invigorate's pretty good, but it's also got a decent chunk of a cooldown as well. There's Melee and AST for Goad/Spire, but you're relying on another job to fill in the gaps of yours, and you may not always have them (less likely in an 8-man scenario, but decently likely in a 4-man dungeon run where you'll just bleed TP). (I also want Reflugent to be an AoE with falloff because, I mean, if I'm going to fire that many arrows, why are they only hitting one person. Come on.)

Foe imo is a lot of fun to work with as a group, figuring out Refresh timings and when you can Mana Shift and when you should sing, so much so that I really just wish it -mattered- more. It could be healthy for the game to see it go back to +10% for magic only, or put it to 5% for all damage and change Battle Voice to something not directly damage related.

This is bringing us back to a problem we're still facing since HW: Certain comps are being kind of forced or else. Bard already pretty much needs a Dragoon for the piercing buff or else that's 5% of their damage just flat out gone. Then Dragoon also has a Crit buff for Bard which is absurdly good for this job in particular, and still great for all jobs. Scholar has a crit debuff on a single foe, so they're brought along. I'm not saying that Dragoon shouldn't have that crit buff, and I do realize that this meta comp doesn't matter outside of the top percentiles and speedrunning meta, but even lower ranked players like me can feel a difference when I don't have those things. I don't know how they could change Battle Voice at this point unless they decide to just make it buff the crit percentage that you already pass by playing a song.

My only other real QoL wish is for Pitch Perfect to go to a 1s cooldown. Getting caught with a proc at the end of WM sometimes is a pretty crappy experience for no good reason.

I mean, that's pretty much a given.