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

[LunaFaelyn]

I'd like to thank everyone that understands why I am so disheartened about losing my support skills. To me it was the essence of the bard. I can tell there are a number of you that are just as passionate about playing a support bard as I am. It is deeply moving and comforting to know that I am not alone. Hopefully I can find a job that gives me as much joy in ShB. I have all but warrior at 70 and yet I was always a bard at heart no matter what job I tried.

[Nobuyuki_Sanada]

I'd like to thank everyone that understands why I am so disheartened about losing my support skills. To me it was the essence of the bard. I can tell there are a number of you that are just as passionate about playing a support bard as I am. It is deeply moving and comforting to know that I am not alone. Hopefully I can find a job that gives me as much joy in ShB. I have all but warrior at 70 and yet I was always a bard at heart no matter what job I tried.

The way I see bard is the in between of Dancer and Machinist. They have more utility than machinist and a bit more damage than dancer. I think the reason we are seeing so many dancers doing more damage than their counterparts is because the complexity of the job is very low. It is very easy to perform dancer at 100% compared to performing bard or machinist at 100%. People should remember skill curves effect damages numbers too. Bards still have Nature's Minne, !Battle Voice!, Warden's Paen, and !Troubadour!. Id say stick with it, square enix will tweek numbers as needed and people will get better after they practice rotations more.

[Maero]

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.

Ouch that really does sound bad actually. SB Bard was so good why did they need to change it so drastically

[Suniva]

Ouch that really does sound bad actually. SB Bard was so good why did they need to change it so drastically

Probably in an attempt to make it more enticing to newer players. As stated, it's easy to pick up, fun to play, but was difficult to master. I supposed they figured the less the bard had to manage the easier it would be. Thing is, I still get into groups where bards just refuse to use their battle voice, simply because they don't receive the benefits from doing so, so why bother? At this point, with all the changes and there is no reason why we shouldn't be under its effect as well. Plus, it might encourage the bards that never think to use it because it doesn't buff them a reason to actually used the darned thing.

Monk gives out brotherhood
Dragoon gives out battle litany
Machinist has the new re worked tactician
Dancer gives out technical finish

Bards are the only ones at the present that give out party wide buff and still DOESN'T benefit themselves from casting it. This needs to be looked into.
EDIT: Mistakes were made

[Xieldras]

Probably in an attempt to make it more enticing to newer players. As stated, it's easy to pick up, fun to play, but difficult to master. I supposed they figured the less the bard had to manage the easier it would be. Thing is, I still get into groups where bards just refuse to use their battle voice, simply because they don't receive the benefits from doing so, so why bother? At this point, there is no reason why we shouldn't be under its effect as well. Plus, it might encourage the bards that never think to use it because it doesn't buff them a reason to actually used the darned thing.

To add to that: they probably changed it so drastically so that their new class, that fulfills a similar niche, would be better and thus more popular in team comps.

[Suniva]

To add to that: they probably changed it so drastically so that their new class, that fulfills a similar niche, would be better and thus more popular in team comps.

Oh yea, that's a given. I've already resolved myself to being a main dnc in this xpack since it brings more utility than the current bard, but I am not going to give up on my first love. I'm curious to know how our Eastern friends feel about the changes that have been made to bard as well, but alas. Still far too early I suppose.

[Xieldras]

Oh yea, that's a given. I've already resolved myself to being a main dnc in this xpack since it brings more utility than the current bard, but I am not going to give up on my first love. I'm curious to know how our Eastern friends feel about the changes that have been made to bard as well, but alas. Still far too early I suppose.

Pretty sure I've mentioned it elsewhere but I noticed Bard mains being very unhappy with the changes while those simply having Bard leveled up being happy with the changes. Am curious as well about Japan's view on things as it seems their voice is usually heard over ours, alas I do not speak Japanese.
Still undecided as my go-to class for this expac (that is not Fisher) as Bard was my first love too.

[Cetonis]

I'm not especially attached to being a "support job" either way, and I think Minne and Warden's are neat for what it's worth - "support" does not have to solely mean damage boosts.

The passive song buff had minimal gameplay impact / wasn't interactive at all, so it's really just the loss of Foe that stings in terms of function, but I can't wholly disagree with SE wanting to get rid of something as wonky as it was (and unlikely to rework into anything interesting).

However, (a) Battle Voice itself isn't very interesting, and (b) I do think it's very strange and inconsistent for all the lore and quests to harp on the notion of Bards invigorating their party through song, when for the first 20 levels they don't do that at all, and for the rest they're rather bad at it - BV is roughly tied for the second-weakest raidwide buff with Brotherhood, beating out only Devotion.

What I would like to have seen would have been for BV to be a bit more of a premier lynchpin skill, i.e. if it were available at level 30, and then at level 50 got a second charge, you'd have something cleanly sitting at second-best raidwide buff after Trick, which would be fine, and also make BV usage at least a tad interesting.

It would be tough to do make that sort of change now, but if SE does feel pushed to shift Bard back into a little more raid damage mode I'd be pretty okay with just playing up BV in some form or another, rather than adding random weird stuff.

[Suniva]

You're welcome to your opinion, but the fact is that bard was created to be a support type class, originally. It seems like a lot of people picked up bard hoping it would play more like a ranger/dps and became displeased when they found out that that wasn't the case. I mean, machinist was introduced as the go to for range dps, but people want bard to play like ranger because they get to use a bow rather than a gun. RP and all I suppose. Like, I understand, you want to play how you want and that is fine. But for those of us who did in fact pick up the class to fully utilize what it had and what it is capable of, stripping that away and barely offering us anything in return, after what we had the capability to bring in SB, is disheartening. I mean, even Apex Arrow is legit garbage in it's current state. The only really good improvement is that our repertoire is now is a flat % chance base rather than being % based off crits.

Our AoE is just downright weird from what I've experienced. There's going to be a lot of tweaks coming to fix it as is usually the case after every release, but I am in the camp that bard isn't the same. If you played the class wanting to be top damage, then you were playing it incorrectly. Anyone that is trying to justify it because you (generalized) didn't want to manage and or deal with it is basically your admitting that you were playing the class at half capacity. Imagine if a warrior, or really, any other class available in the game decided that they wanted to play their way without using a little under half of their available abilities just because they didn't like to use them? We would call them bad -insert role here- and tell them to learn their class. It's why you would frequently hear the community talk about how many "bad" bards were out there and how it is rare to find one that would actually use their skills at the fullest.

[Suniva]

I'm not especially attached to being a "support job" either way, and I think Minne and Warden's are neat for what it's worth - "support" does not have to solely mean damage boosts.

The passive song buff had minimal gameplay impact / wasn't interactive at all, so it's really just the loss of Foe that stings in terms of function, but I can't wholly disagree with SE wanting to get rid of something as wonky as it was (and unlikely to rework into anything interesting).

However, (a) Battle Voice itself isn't very interesting, and (b) I do think it's very strange and inconsistent for all the lore and quests to harp on the notion of Bards invigorating their party through song, when for the first 20 levels they don't do that at all, and for the rest they're rather bad at it - BV is roughly tied for the second-weakest raidwide buff with Brotherhood, beating out only Devotion.

What I would like to have seen would have been for BV to be a bit more of a premier lynchpin skill, i.e. if it were available at level 30, and then at level 50 got a second charge, you'd have something cleanly sitting at second-best raidwide buff after Trick, which would be fine, and also make BV usage at least a tad interesting.

It would be tough to do make that sort of change now, but if SE does feel pushed to shift Bard back into a little more raid damage mode I'd be pretty okay with just playing up BV in some form or another, rather than adding random weird stuff.

SE's own description of bard class is as follows:

"The word "bard" ordinarily puts folk in mind of those itinerant minstrels, fair of voice and nimble of finger, who earn their coin performing in taverns and the halls of great lords. Few know, however, that bards in fact trace their origins back to the bowmen of eld, who sang in the heat of battle to fortify the spirits of their companions. In time, their impassioned songs came to hold sway over the hearts of men, inspiring their comrades to great feats and granting peace unto those who lay upon the precipice of death."

As we currently stand, we hardly match our own job description.

Warden's is fine, Nature's Minne WAS fine, until now, where it's CD time has increased from 45s to 90s. I'm also very happy they kept troubadour, though I personally wish it still functioned as it did in SB.