Quote Originally Posted by ty_taurus View Post
On another note, if trying to salvage Bard is THAT much of a lost cause for people... why not just abandon it entirely?

Let's just gut Bard's music completely...
Battle Voice = Gone
Warden's Paeon = Gone
Nature's Minne = Gone
Troubadour = Changed to Palisade
Mage's Ballad = Changed to Owl's Eye
Army's Paeon = Changed to Hawk's Eye
Wonderer's Minuet = Changed to Eagle's Eye

We can just get a new Ranged or Caster DPS called "Minstrel," "Musician," "Flautist," or something like that. They use a Harp or Flute or some instrument as a weapon and music exclusively musical attacks:

Battle Voice, Nature's Minne, and Warden's Paeon can all be transitioned here, or perhaps everything is completely different.

Bard will just be an incredibly misleading name choice that has literally nothing to do with music.
That would flat out break the bard storyline, shredding it to pieces. And I'm all for altering lore to fix core problems with the class, but I don't think this is the right solution. I'd sooner see Army's Paeon removed, turn Mage's Ballad into an AoE stance, and Wanderer's Minuet into a single target stance and remove the stance weaving aspect of bard outright (it leads to weird game design if nothing else and the rotation for aoe and ST just feels rough because of the stance, AOE being especially bad).

And then find a way to work the song aspect into other parts of the class instead. BRD feels at its best in WM, at its worst in AP, and merely okay in MB, and with how busy the rotation is right now, changing stances regularly doesn't feel good.

All the class needs is a constant, persistent raid-wide buff and it can maintain some level of thematic cohesion. So just make it so they passively give 1.5% crit like they did in SB (if that's what it did) and that's the constant morale boost they give, Battle Voice can handle the rest.