Korean Live Letter Summary

[Bright-Flower]

Arm of the Destroyer is only ever worth using on 5+ mobs, but it will burn through your TP fast. So it's far more situational than other AoE abilities, especially due to its low damage.

Yeah. I don't imagine there are that many situations in raids where there are that many mobs at a time. Only one that comes to mind for me is Shinryu's transition phase, and there are also times where you may hit perfect balance and spam rockbreaker as well, in which case you don't need AotD.

One Ilm Punch doesn't see much use either does it? I suppose you could also maybe look at removing riddle of earth/fists of earth if you wanted to prune defensive abilities to make way for more damage focused buttons.

[Magic-Mal]

I doubt it. Bard is probably one of the easier jobs to prune. Fold Straight and Refulgent Shot into the same button, making it so whenever Refulgent procs, it will temporarily replace Straight as you always want to press Refulgent. Afterwards, cut out Repelling Shot and call it done. Bard only received three new skills in Stormblood. So it's a fairly straight forward adjustment.

More like 7 new abilities since I count a rework as "New". Minuet, Ballad, and Paean are all attacks now that individually change gameplay alot when active. And then there's Pitch Perfect too.

[BillyKaplan]

More like 7 new abilities since I count a rework as "New". Minuet, Ballad, and Paean are all attacks now that individually change gameplay alot when active.

I wouldn't say the songs themselves were new to the hotbar, necessarily. But it's also not right to say BRD only got those new buttons - if you wanted to keep your refresh support, you had to bring in your role actions. Some buttons effectively doubled.
Personally, I'd dislike to see some skills go like the sleep skills and Fluid Aura. True, they're only useful in low levels, but they're still somewhat useful there, and I'd hate to see them go.

For Ishgard I do think they'll go the route of the Doman Enclave. Either that or give us another custom delivery NPC with effectively the same story-line. Calling it now, dress-up Lucia at max rank.

New FSH content that isn't a tacklebox... :thinking:

[Bourne_Endeavor]

More like 7 new abilities since I count a rework as "New". Minuet, Ballad, and Paean are all attacks now that individually change gameplay alot when active. And then there's Pitch Perfect too.

Those were already on your hotbar though, thus they have no impact whatsoever on button bloat or pruning, which is what the discussion is about.

[HyoMinPark]

More like 7 new abilities since I count a rework as "New". Minuet, Ballad, and Paean are all attacks now that individually change gameplay alot when active. And then there's Pitch Perfect too.

Your three songs should have already been on your hotbars in the first place... they aren’t new buttons.

In terms of new buttons, we gained 4: Pitch Perfect, Troubadour, Nature’s Minne, and Refulgent. If you want to add in our necessary role actions, Refresh, Tactician, and Palisade (we already had access to Invigorate, Second Wind, and Peloton [Swiftsong] in ARR/HW, so I don’t count them, and Head Graze is situational enough that it doesn’t have priority space on my hotbars; the other cross-role actions are worthless in most content).

And we lost Shadowbind, Hawk’s Eye, Quelling Strikes, Blunt Arrow, Flaming Arrow, and Wide Volley. Not to mention B4B and Internal Release. Repelling Shot is useless enough that it shouldn’t even be on your bar. So we more or less evened out in terms of buttons lost versus buttons we gained.

At most, they can get rid of Repelling Shot, and consolidate Straighter Shot procs into Refulgent Arrow with a level 70 trait, since you aren’t ever going to Straighter over Refulgent save for a niche scenario that can be easily avoided if you’re paying attention (DoT refresh under SS). This is even assuming they’re going to add in 5 new skills in 5.0; they could just upgrade our DoTs again, which would honestly be better since they’re such a large portion of our damage anyways.

BRD isn’t hurting for hotbar real estate. They never have been tbh.

[dotsforlife]

Glad to see that horrid pvp design isn't making its way into pve.

[Magic-Mal]

Your three songs should have already been on your hotbars in the first place... they aren’t new buttons.

In terms of new buttons, we gained 4: Pitch Perfect, Troubadour, Nature’s Minne, and Refulgent. If you want to add in our necessary role actions, Refresh, Tactician, and Palisade (we already had access to Invigorate, Second Wind, and Peloton [Swiftsong] in ARR/HW, so I don’t count them, and Head Graze is situational enough that it doesn’t have priority space on my hotbars; the other cross-role actions are worthless in most content).

And we lost Shadowbind, Hawk’s Eye, Quelling Strikes, Blunt Arrow, Flaming Arrow, and Wide Volley. Not to mention B4B and Internal Release. Repelling Shot is useless enough that it shouldn’t even be on your bar. So we more or less evened out in terms of buttons lost versus buttons we gained.

At most, they can get rid of Repelling Shot, and consolidate Straighter Shot procs into Refulgent Arrow with a level 70 trait, since you aren’t ever going to Straighter over Refulgent save for a niche scenario that can be easily avoided if you’re paying attention (DoT refresh under SS). This is even assuming they’re going to add in 5 new skills in 5.0; they could just upgrade our DoTs again, which would honestly be better since they’re such a large portion of our damage anyways.

BRD isn’t hurting for hotbar real estate. They never have been tbh.

That was the point of my worries though. I don't trust the team to NOT mess up BRD. Last time they deleted "underused" attacks they deleted Flaming Arrow, Hawk's Eye, Blunt Arrow, etc so... All attacks that were constantly used 24/7. While they kept Repelling Arrow and made it completely worthless.

They'll probably do something dumb like delete Raging Strikes and Bloodletter next time in 5.0 or delete Straight. Shot and make it a trait so the buff is up forever. All to "Close the skill gap between casual players and elite players by raising the skill floor"

When I see "pruning" you better believe I am put on edge.

[HyoMinPark]

That was the point of my worries though. I don't trust the team to NOT mess up BRD. Last time they deleted "underused" attacks they deleted Flaming Arrow, Hawk's Eye, Blunt Arrow, etc so... All attacks that were constantly used 24/7. While they kept Repelling Arrow and made it completely worthless.

They'll probably do something silly like delete Raging Strikes and Bloodletter next time in 5.0

They removed oGCDs on BRD under some silly idea that it would make the job “easier to play” by having less oGCDs. I’m not disagreeing that the decision was stupid.

Some of the skills they removed from HW to SB I can understand—Wide Volley, while cool animation-wise, did the same damage as Quick Nock for 40 more TP. Personally, I’d rather have it over a cone AOE, but it is what it is. The only skill I truly miss is Flaming Arrow, because it wasn’t a paltry skill that did nothing—it was a 400 potency ground-AOE.

Blunt Arrow was removed since they did that with all CC actions that dealt damage—now they’re only (useless) CC instead of oGCDs that deal damage; people only used them for the damage aspect anyways, but that’s not a fault of the players. That’s a fault of the developers not making CC useful at higher levels.

Hawk’s Eye I’m fairly certain they removed for balancing issues— +15% DEX every 90 seconds would be ridiculously OP; 30 seconds AP would basically have an argument if you could line up RS and HE with every Minuet window. I currently have 3101 DEX at i382; that would be +465 DEX every 90 seconds. It would be stronger than 2 HQ Grade 3 Infusions now. Keep in mind I’m not even BiS yet, so that value will only increase.

It’s highly unlikely that they will remove Raging Strikes and Bloodletter. The only way they could screw up BRD would be if they overhauled it for a third time; but judging from how universally loved Stormblood BRD’s playstyle is (compared to HW BRD’s playstyle), such an overhaul is extremely unlikely. They’d be outraging a significant portion of the playerbase, since BRD is the most popular job in this game.


I’m more concerned actually about what it would mean for us if piercing was removed from the game. Removing it is a double-edged sword: it removes our reliability on a DRG, but without a buff to our damage, BRD could find itself out of the meta. We don’t deal enough personal damage to be competitive with other DPS. DRG and MCH would also need some love if piercing were removed—piercing keeps DRG in the meta as it is now (and, to a lesser extent, Litany when you have a BRD because of how steroidal BRD is when you feed them crit buffs).

[KageTokage]

I think the main thing fishers could use are some new rewards from their achievements because they haven't gotten anything since HW despite dozens of new big fish being added.

[Magic-Mal]

Hawk’s Eye I’m fairly certain they removed for balancing issues— +15% DEX every 90 seconds would be ridiculously OP; 30 seconds AP would basically have an argument if you could line up RS and HE with every Minuet window. I currently have 3101 DEX at i382; that would be +465 DEX every 90 seconds. It would be stronger than 2 HQ Grade 3 Infusions now. Keep in mind I’m not even BiS yet, so that value will only increase.

If I give the devs the benefit of the doubt and say they maybe, probably, had the foresight to delete Hawk's Eye because of that then I'd say cool. No biggie... But with me having as little faith as I do and the devs never once showing that they have any kind of foresight to see possible future issues early, I say it's more likely they deleted Hawk's Eye because they wanted to cut BRD down to only have one attack buff like the other jobs that still have only one attack(flat damage increase) buff now. Blood For Blood, Berserk, Fight or Flight, Riddle of Fire, etc. Lots of the jobs suffered the same kind of losses so they could all be the same. It feels reasonable to think they deleted Hawk's Eye because the other jobs lost all of their buffs. Like how Blunt Arrow, Head Graze, Leg Sweep, etc were all removed from their respective jobs

It’s highly unlikely that they will remove Raging Strikes and Bloodletter. The only way they could screw up BRD would be if they overhauled it for a third time; but judging from how universally loved Stormblood BRD’s playstyle is (compared to HW BRD’s playstyle), such an overhaul is extremely unlikely. They’d be outraging a significant portion of the playerbase, since BRD is the most popular job in this game.

Going back to what I said above this, the reason why I think the deletion of Raging Strikes is still very possible is because they want to prune jobs to be similar to each other. DRK has no attack buff so it's possible that Berserk and Fight or Flight could also be deleted to make it the same. MCH has no attack buff so they might delete Raging Strikes to make BRD the same. Same with DRG and Blood For Blood. Internal Release for MNK(not a flat damage buff but it's an early personal buff). I mean, the damage up %s have already been nerfed with the release of Stormblood. Once they delete the buffs, they add slightly to all potency numbers to "make up for the loss".

They could either delete the buffs or delete the Press n' Forget buffs like Straight Shot, Hot Shot, Heavy Thrust, and Twin Snakes. These seem more likely to kick the bucket. Once deleted, they add potency buffs. Devs are like clockwork...