A QoL/Balance Shortlist for DPS (Tanks/Healers only as additional context)

[Shurrikhan]

Your Bard changes are pretty garbage to be honest. They do absolutely nothing to address the issues with Bard game play.

Crit is still the only stat worth bringing. It doesn't matter how much you buff speed if crit is still the only way to get procs.

I don't honestly mind that Crit is a best stat. But, as we have two stats on every piece of gear, I did not find it okay to be hamstrung by whatever came with that Crit in BiS (or what would otherwise be BiS) gear. I've no intent of making (Skill) Speed better than Critical Hit; I just want to make the gap negligible and reduce the rampant scaling issues of Crit/DHit in BL-CS-BV compositions.

Under the suggested version, Speed would slightly outperform Determination and would outperform Direct Hit except at high (e.g. 2600+) DH + Crit stat totals, though by a tiny margin. Much of this hinges on AP's value, though. Critical Hit will remain king so long as Repertoire works as it does. If, however, I would to give all strikes' bonus damage a chance equal to its bonus multiplier to generate a stack of Repertoire, the stats' values would very nearly equalize except in mass-DoTing. If DoTs were to tick per snapshotted player GCD, Speed would be king. The first is a job-specific mechanical change, the second a universal, but in either case stat value could be turned on a dime. I've opted not to change Repertoire for now because I can remove the exponential component from any single stat, but not that stat's effects on others. Critical Hit can be rescaled with buffs recieved just as Skill Speed and Spell Speed have been with effects like Greased Lightning or Fey Wind or Ley Lines, just as I can taper Speed or Direct Hit value accordingly now, but I cannot remove the amount of extra Critical Hit and Direct Hit value Speed would give through its added rate, which would put me back at square one with rampant scaling, whereby a bottom-3 dps job is now a top-6, often outparsing same-percentile DRGs. So long as I want Bard to feel stat-synergetic I can't really afford that, so until I know just how much I have to compensate for, I fear I may have to stick with the version that leaves a larger Crit value gap for its more controllable output.

The songs are still imbalanced, if anything it might be worse with these changes. You will still be trying to get out of armies paeon as soon as possible.

You're right that Army's Paeon needs more, though I don't see why the songs would be even more imbalanced, save that Mage's no longer has as large a compensating imbalance in its AoE throughput.

WM ST dps has only been touched insofar as there is no longer a cooldown. Seeing as the cooldown was already no slower than the rate at which Repertoire can be generated outside of Empyreal Arrow, this buffs only mass-DoT gambles and the last two seconds of the song -- an almost purely QoL change. The buff to Mage's Ballad will likely rope only an additional couple shots per song if already high-Crit.

I don't much like the way Army's Paeon stacks work; they're slow to respond and have little potency value -- at most offering another 2 GCDs over AP's 30 seconds -- and lets none of that bonus linger into further songs. Those are the main things I'm working on now, with a focus on balance and symmetry. I'm sorry; originally I was only putting up those things I'd finished working on, but after the thread went barren for a month I just started posting the in-progress work on the front post for convenience. In the future I'll be sure to flag what's not yet finished. Bard changes in particular seem a hot topic, so I'll take more care with what goes up.

The battle voice/foe req change means it will only be used during mages ballad and wanderers minuet. Once again making armies paeon the least useful song.

I've of course been reconsidering the Battle Voice change too, but I actually expect the power levels will be far more balanced than you suggest, outside of Mage's Ballad probably being the weakest by a slight margin in most situations when healer throughput is not necessary, due to Critical Hit and Direct Hit no longer scaling at all exponentially with themselves, only each other. 4% Haste will tend to outperform 3% Damage outside of burst or DoT cleave, and vice versa. 6% Critical Hit comes out to about a 2.75% damage/healing throughput increase, making it the most useful only when there's healing to be dealt as well, but too close in throughput to overcap mana to avoid. I'm still not too sold on the Direct Hit portion, however, as it always seemed thematic to me that a Bard would be interested in both offensive and defensive/restorative throughput, and Direct Hit will only affect damage.

The button bloat is due to all the support skills, you should be pruning those before nerfing and pruning dps.

There's not a single nerf in these suggestions except to Monk's PB-RB spam and Fire IV spam (compensated for elsewhere to improve BLM breadth of usefulness without guaranteeing a top-2 tDPS spot in certain fights). Pruning, likewise, has only been through slot-swaps or consolidation of wholly redundant abilities (e.g. Doomspike->Sonic Thrust or, here, Battle Voice + Foe Requiem to offer more flexibility of rDPS contribution timings so that even if Refresh wasn't as needed, Ranged classes could still fit in any composition, and now without Bard needing to spend a GCD restarting its rDPS song -- a buff).

Other changes are good though, I really like the raging strikes change.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm still testing the epot values of a few other versions of AP. Ideally I'd like it to be entertaining as well, is the main thing, second only to balance.

It's fine for songs to be imbalanced, honestly. There's really very little wrong with Bard itself -

I agree that it's fine for songs to be a bit imbalanced, but not... unfun, if that makes sense? I hear from many Bards that AP is not only numerically shit, but unfun, for instance, and I'd like to fix both issues there. I disagree though that Bard feels already like a polished product; a lot of it feels just as jagged as Machinist to me.

:: SkS being a weak stat is largely universal and a separate topic. They shouldn't try to address it with a bunch of job-by-job hamfists.

On the chance that this is in reference to my own suggestions, everything here has been a universal change. The job-by-job mentions are merely to clarify that change (ability damage being affected by Speed via damage, unless already affected by Speed via rate as per Empyreal Arrow).

:: The matter of piercing / crit buff is another broader design problem. In and of itself, having a crit-focused job is not a problem, it's a feature.

I can't fully tell what you mean here. Could you clarify? Piercing / crit buff? Is that one thing or two separate issues? What is the "crit buff" problem?

I agree that having some RNG dependence on a job that can be adjusted with stats as to see progression in gameplay over time is a feature, though I do think the scaling issues that come with it can be a problem. I won't sacrifice the feature to curtail the problem, but I will mitigate what I can mitigate without having to sacrifice anything.

:: Button bloat is also largely universal, and will likely be addressed via role skill changes first and foremost.

I certainly hope so, though I still don't think that especially excuses having 4+ a plethora of mutually exclusive job-native skills each taking up a separate slot, either.

Bard is the biggest "ain't broke, don't fix" job in the game right now. Relative to current Bard, the only mostly-QoL things that come to mind are -

:: Make Pitch Perfect cooldown 1s

Agreed. And done.

:: Make Straighter Shot upgrade to a buff that only activates Refulgent, such that it's not consumed if you want to use SS (a blessing and a curse, but one less annoyance). Or make Refulgent re-apply / replace SS, but SE would have just done that in the first place if they were going to.

Agreed. And done.

Then for future things, I'd expect little in the way of messing with core song mechanics. At most, maybe do the oft-tossed-around idea where AP stacks increase your RA proc rate by 5% each or something (this would make 4-stack AP slightly stronger than MB).

An increase of 20% RA generation from HS, given that RA has exactly twice the damage of HS, would produce a 40% damage buff to HSs used over AP. AP can include up to 14 GCDs, with 1-2 spent on IJ, leaving you with 12-13 HSs. That would produce roughly 720 potency, less than two Pitch Perfect. A good WM will go 4-5 3-stack Perfect Pitch casts. That leaves us about 1000 potency short. That's better than what I've included so far for raw ST potency, but we still need more...

Instead, I imagine we'll finally get the regen song (consumes MP like Foe, thus near-useless in 8-mans, but hey folk want it) and probably a little more focus on MP management otherwise. Like it'd be kinda neat to have a skill that procs or gets stronger or something when you're at low MP or empty your MP or something. Then some sort of blatant "this is meant to increase Bard pps to keep up with other jobs' gains" button/trait and call it a day.

I mean, if the Regen Song lets you kick a WHM and solo-SCH/AST, then that could be pretty damn useful in 8-mans. But otherwise, yeah... Not sure why it'd be particularly desired unless we got a song-dependent point-support tool as well. And yeah, some MP management would be nice. Personally I'd love to see it as the system by which song choice is cycled, in place of the more rigid 80-second CDs, allowing us to dip in and out of each situationally, though at cost, with standard cycling slowly restoring mana and thereby leniency. But that is almost certainly just me... /shrug.