#NerfBRD

[Connor]

Wouldn’t most of the Bard vs Machinist debate be quelled if they just focused on giving Bard more utility next expansion instead of even better better?
Then Machinist gets more DPS oriented skills which makes deciding between the two more interesting?

Just a suggestion. As for crit scaling, I don’t know much about how that would be balanced properly but maybe they put a cap of some sort on it so that Bards can’t past a certain crit rate that would make their damage too high?

I don’t believe (from what I understand) that Bard DPS itself is too strong. I think it still technically does the lowest damage of all DPS jobs in a vacuum (I may be wrong). But, I do think Bard itself does a little too much, too easily. It’s the entirety of its toolkit relative to competitor jobs (Machinist in particular) that makes it seem ‘too strong’

Also i know I’ll be flayed alive for saying it but I really liked the original idea for Bards having to spend gcd / cast times on support songs instead of it all being off-cd instant cast. I don’t mean the damage reduction from songs, just the DPS loss itself of having to do something that isn’t Heavy Shot. Wouldn’t something like this balance Bard without them having to bother with crit scaling? That way our abilities don’t technically have to change and it’s easier to balance against Machinist with them having instant-cast stuff but on cooldowns.

It’s also worth considering that there will be more ranged physical DPS in future (probably lol). How strong would they need to be to fully compete with Bard?