Bard skills in 5.0?

[Cetonis]

Army's is worth ~16 pps or somewhere around there at max stacks. It is definitely not "barely does anything". At early ilvl crit, it is not really all that far behind MB.

Is failing to use procs past the fourth a problem, or a feature? Personally, I appreciate that each song interacts with crit in a slightly different way. There's nothing wrong with that at all. Why should every song be +damage for every proc? Remember when we only got paid off for crits on a coinflip? That was never seen as a huge deal.

Still, like I said, it could use a little more happiness to it. And, it's not actually bad if it does become better than MB, in fact if it's better than MB at base crit, and worst with crit buffs active, that'd be kinda neat in my book.

I just do not want Bloodletter v3, and I don't want anything similar where you're forcing it to convert every proc into damage like both the other songs do. My strong preference is for there to be some payoff for hitting max stacks instead. Leverage AP's uniqueness instead of making it more like the other two songs.

[Kalise]

Why should every song be +damage for every proc?

Because Bard is designed around wanting to get Crits so as to proc Songs?

Like, every Song wants you to get as many DoT crits as possible to maximize your songs.

Apart from AP. Which wants you to get as many DoT crits as possible to maximize your song, up to a maximum of 4 times. With the rest of its duration being "Lul who cares" when it comes to procs - Such as using Emypreal Arrow or caring about DoT crits (Outside of the fact that DoT crits will be damage increases because of the crit itself)

It feels bad when everytime Empyreal Arrow comes off CD during AP, I immediately look to see if MB/TWM is available because switching to actually get use from the EA proc would do more than staying in AP.

AP is a song that you only want to stay in for 20 seconds while both MB and TWM you want to ride out their full durations.

Why should that be an intentional design? Why should we have a song that we actively want to cut short because a major point of our kit flat out doesn't work during it?

You can have AP remain unique in how it passively does its thing, rather than creating Bloodletter II or Pitch Perfect II.

Just... Make it so that the Bard's playstyle of "You want to maximize crit to get more Song procs" is a thing in all 3 songs. Not just 2 of them with the third wanting you to maximize crits to get up to 4 stacks ASAP and then not care about procs at all.

Especially when the song that doesn't care about extra procs GENERATES extra procs through Empyreal Arrow's CD being affected by SkS...

My strong preference is for there to be some payoff for hitting max stacks instead.

It already does. You get your 4th stack of Repertoire for an extra 4% SkS making it a total of 16% SkS for the rest of the duration.