ShB bard has turned me into a ball of rage and depression

[HyoMinPark]

I don't think it's fair that you speak for everyone here. BRDs could've mained BRD for different reasons, be it the mobility, the job appeal, the rotation, etc. Not everyone necessarily mained BRD because it had support capabilities. The only difference between jobs isn't if they have support skills or not, even if you take away every support aspect of BRD, the rotation and flavour will still be completely different from the one of a BLM, so I couldn't disagree more with you.

I don’t think it’s fair that you should imply we should be satisfied with our losses in utility for “solid damage”—because that is what your post comes off as, whether it is your intention or not. As I said prior, BRD was already doing solid damage. In Alphascape, we were actually out DPSing both NIN and DRG in personal damage (in Deltascape and Sigmascape, it out-damaged NIN and RDM), and our raid contribution was monstrous between passive crit, proper Foe’s usage, and BV. This isn’t including our other support, like Refresh, Palisade, and 4.0 Troubadour (the latter was godly in UwU for mitigation—especially during the primal roulette, because you could cover 2 primal Ultimates with it and I believe at least 1, if not 2, Viscous detonations with proper timing).

In the vast majority of posts I have seen from career BRDs, they have lamented the very things I spoke about in my post: their job lost the utility aspect they loved so much about it and that’s why they jumped ship (or are still playing it but feel like its lacking that certain something that pulled them in initially). They mention nothing about ever being in the job for strictly damage dealing capabilities—which, honestly, it never struggled with (outside of the dark days of early 3.0 BRD, but we don’t talk about those days). 4.0 BRD actually had massive issues with power creep, so it was stronger than intended by the end of the expansion. I don’t think it doing solid damage is really a comforting thing. It isn’t for me, anyways; because I was never concerned with my damage not being solid.

I’m not asking you to agree with me; I am merely explaining my perspective and relaying what I have seen from other BRD mains. If I wanted to play a Big D job, I would have played something like BLM, which exists to do nothing but deal high damage. I was speaking for myself in that part of my post. No one else.

So you don't care about how your job plays? You don't care about your rotation? You'd swallow an inedible rotation as long as they gave you a support kit?

You’re strawmanning.

4.0 BRD had the smoothest rotation of any of the job’s incarnations—from ARR to HW to SB. It was universally loved by just about anyone who played it—I honestly can’t recall seeing anything negative about its play during 4.0. Bringing up an “inedible rotation” is irrelevant here simply because it was never a thing BRD suffered from in 4.0.

Stormbloods Bard at the end was nearly perfect so what happened?
I have not levelled it yet as Dancer is my first but heard from a friend and he is not happy with Bard changes

They’ve removed most of our utility and raid contributions. We lost the passive crit buff from our songs and Foe Requiem. In addition to this, Refresh was removed, so MP support is also gone. Palisade was removed, so we no longer have a free tank cooldown for physical damage (something that was useful in raids and Ultimates). All we have now is Nature’s Minne (which is still decent—it seems to affect healing abilities AND weaponskills now, but is on a 90s CD) and Troubadour for support (Troubadour is basically -10% all damage for 15s on an 180s cooldown—it’s actually 15s shorter now, so it gets less mileage per use), and Battle Voice for raid contribution (20% D.Hit every 180s—I don’t think they’ve determined how impactful it is yet).

In terms of rotation, it’s mostly unchanged aside from the removal of Straight Shot management: however I’ve seen many BRDs equate the current state of the job as a glorified ranger. AOE is supposedly pretty decent now with the additions of Shadowbite and Apex Arrow, but single-target wants for complexity. The new Army’s Paeon trait has been described as “technically not nothing, because it still gives 10s of your Haste Repertoire to your next song...but not really hype either”.

Apex Arrow is also a very underwhelming level 80 ability. It scales up to 500 potency, meaning that you will press it at 95+ gauge and no sooner. Which kind of makes the Soul Gauge relatively worthless as a mechanic. They could have at least made it something like NIN’s Ninki skills or DNC’s Saber where it procs at 50 Gauge and has AOE dropoff as a trade off for more frequent usages. Instead its a button you press at max gauge and ignore otherwise due to the damage loss. I’m guessing you probably also try to hold on to it for bursts, but I haven’t been in the BRD Balance lately due to paying more attention to DNC’s channel.