Bard still seems really good (and media tour info seems incomplete and will change)

[Singularity]

Apex Arrow costs the entire gauge when you use it. Any extra gauge consumed beyond the required 20 "increases the potency", but the exact curve on which it scales, and therefore the best way to use it, is not known.

[Connor]

Apex Arrow costs the entire gauge when you use it. Any extra gauge consumed beyond the required 20 "increases the potency", but the exact curve on which it scales, and therefore the best way to use it, is not known.

Thanks for clearing this up, makes a lot more sense to me now lol. I guess we won’t know how much it adds to Bard until release, but given that Bard already has pretty good DPS capabilities, I can only imagine it’ll make them even better. I don’t see Bards being left by the wayside for another job in any scenario, since it sounds like they’ll make up for having less utility by having higher DPS

[Cetonis]

So as long as you have more than 20 gauge you can use Apex Arrow without any real repercussions or gauge management?

That's actually kind of the hope - if Apex starts at 450 and scales to 1200, or some similar arrangement, there will be minimal inherent advantage or disadvantage to using it at any particular time.

What that would mean, then, is that you'll want to hit big Apexes under your tallest stacks of raid buffs. And that is very much a Thing - if you're closing out a 1:20-1:40 Raging Strikes, and let's say you've gotten some nice proc luck and you're at 60 gauge, do you use it now? Should you wait for 2 minute buffs? What is the risk that you'll overcap by that 2:15 mark? How bad is that? And then the next pull you might be 30 gauge at that point.

So I am honestly hoping it gets tuned like that - the alternatives, where it's either only good at 20-25 or only good at 95-100, are much more boring.

On Foe, I also would have liked the MP angle to stay - actually I was hoping they'd build on it - but I think getting rid of Refresh as a design decision is pretty sound, and with that gone it was going to be pretty hard to make Foe interesting / balanced without spending that kit space really going in on MP as a theme. And I can't super fault SE for not wanting to that here, in light of other priorities? It's still a feelsbad but like really all of the things they trimmed, I think it's defensible on its lonesome.

[SaitoHikari]

You will miss "CASTING "Foes at the beginning of every fight?? Hell naw, screw that. i'm glad it's gone. good riddance. The core mechanics of Foes was a flawed design to begin with. I mean seriously, playing Refresh [which is now gone in 5.0] just to get mana back to play Foes again- healer mana be damned?? That's just bad design. And if refresh is gone, Foes will truly be worse off anyway......

However!! it is jacked up how SE preaches homogenization & support class, then proceeds to gutt Bard and give Dancers all the abilities befitting of the term SUPPORT class. Now that's crazy. just WoW!

They could have made it a castless oGCD that actually used/charged up the soul voice gauge in some way. Or well, our Soul Voice gauge could have just been our MP bar.

Thematically it's a bit awkward that something called the 'Soul Voice' gauge is used to charge up an arrow attack instead of something actually song-related, and it's charged up by... DoTs. Not only did our support get gutted, but we're thematically all over the place now. AND new Bards are going to run into a 12 level gap towards the start of the game where they don't get any new skills at all. It's almost like one of the removed skills could have been left in there to soften the blow of all of this...

And agreed on all counts on the last part.

[Kolsykol]

I really don't like the '' laser beam shot '', it looks so weird in contrast with your other abilities...
It's the same with Pitch Perfect imo.
It doesn't feel like it belongs with the rest of the abilities.

[Cetonis]

I guess we have to think of it as using music to enchant arrows, even if there's no actual lore to that effect. That's kind of the least of our concerns, though. No BL charges in the EA build is big spook, very nervous now -.-''

[SaitoHikari]

Really? I haven't heard of any changes in the E3 build, probably because pretty much no one even tried out Bard in the E3 build against Titania in the first place to report back with.

It's going to be another week and a half wait until we figure out exactly what's going on.

[Xieldras]

Really? I haven't heard of any changes in the E3 build, probably because pretty much no one even tried out Bard in the E3 build against Titania in the first place to report back with.

It's going to be another week and a half wait until we figure out exactly what's going on.

Wait, wait. No one tried Bard in a Primal fight?! Seriously?? Oh wow that is even more worrisome now.

I fully expect chaos when ShB Bard drops for us Bard mains.

[SaitoHikari]

Well, it's more like anyone who tried out Bard probably weren't people that have much knowledge of FFXIV to begin with. Even less people that actually do play the game know enough about Bard to memorize the tooltip information and report back on any changes, instead of trying the shiny new Dancer at E3.

[Cetonis]

We got a brief video of someone playing Bard, and could see that there were not BL charges available.

In retrospect, it is possible that it's some higher-than-level-74 trait, since it was Titania normal they were fighting.