Bard's Thematic Future

[ty_taurus]

If you change current BRD into Ranger, you will have to:
—Redo the entire quest chain, because Ranger is completely different from BRD and would likely involve a completely different story,
—Retcon all the lore involved in said quest chain; and you might as well include in future publications of Encyclopedia Eorzea a “Please disregard, this is all defunct now” disclaimer for any and all references to old BRD (there are a few in there),
—Change the BRD quest NPCs’ functions and/or implement new ones entirely, since it make little sense for them to serve the same purpose with a Ranger,
—Reanimate the cutscenes in the new Ranger quest chain, since it would make no sense to see your character playing a harp when they’re a Ranger, and this happens more than just once in the BRD quest chain,
—Rework this new Ranger’s toolkit to make it more “Ranger-like”,
—Oh, and design an entirely new job (this “new Bard”) in addition to all this retconning.

How is this less work than making BRD more BRD-like, and implementing a Ranger job for a future expansion? Please explain; because, while future jobs have to have toolkits made from the ground up, they lack a lot of lower-level quests and lore one would have with an ARR job, since they tend to start 20 levels below the expansion’s level cap. So you get rid of the work needed to make level 30~50, 50~60, 60~70, and level 80 quests/quest chains. You just need to make the quests/quest chains starting from whichever level the new job starts at, and going to current level cap. You also don’t have to worry about retcons (which, a BRD > Ranger transformation is a retcon big enough that it would give the Kingdom Hearts franchise a run for its money), as the lore for a new job is a clean slate that one can put down whatever they want.

Personally, I don’t think you’re actually considering the amount of work one would need to do for this to happen. I think people who are so hellbent on having Ranger, or a Ranger-type job, in this game don’t stop to consider what BRDs want: we don’t want the job we’ve played for years to be turned into something different to satiate those who want Ranger. I don’t care if they add in Ranger as a new job in 6.0. But don’t take the job I started this game on and played as a main for over 3 years (and still play to this day), and change it into something else to please a specific subset of people. Because then, you’re forgetting about the people who played BRD to be a BRD. Why does BRD need to change for those who want Ranger? Why can’t these players be satisfied with Ranger being added in 6.0 or 7.0? Why do they want to take BRD and make it into their job?



You also can’t just give the old BRD quests to this new job, because most new jobs don’t start at level 30 anymore. Any 6.0 jobs will likely start at level 70—so, why is there a 30~70 quest chain for them again? It would make absolutely no sense, and they aren’t going to allow the job to be available at a lower level. I think they’ve set a fair enough precedent for me to say that.

Retconning lore is not an amount of work that you can quantify with man hours unlike actually designing the actions. For the job quests, this concept would definitely require an all-new quest line for the Ranger, but where you would be putting in hours to add quests for the “Old” job quest line, you would be reusing the same quest line for Bard, everywhere that you’re adding work on Ranger, you’re taking away work from Bard and vice versa. Is it more work than creating Dancer or Gunbreaker? Yes, but not so much when you also take into consideration work also done on existing jobs like Machinist. Machinist had a lot of changes made that took a lot of time as well, assuming you don’t need to overhaul any other existing jobs come 6.0, you’re really not looking at a huge differentiation in man hours if you handle it intelligently.

The biggest mess will stem from the retconned lore, but there is no clean answer for how to correct that. Amalgamating Archer and Bard together was a huge mistake from 1.2. It never should’ve happened, but we can’t just time travel backwards and undo that, so at some point we’re going to need to make a little mess if we want to appease BOTH the Archers AND the Bards.

As for the people not wanting to abandon the job they’ve been leveling and gearing up up till now, you can just have the launch of 6.0 include all players who have currently leveled pre-rework Bard to any level have that level transfer over to new bard, and you get the luxury of keeping both Ranger and Bard.

You're still talking about hijacking bard because of the following point:

You want there to be changes to the level 30 onward quests to keep archer tied to whatever hunter/ranger job you would like to see implemented and make bard a separate job in the game not tied to anything. You want to keep the playstyle of bard to be transferred to the ranger, but want the bard to get all the new abilities. You're basically trying to argue that those of us that have mained the class for every expansion up till now, for 6+ years, should have our jobs fundamentally changed, AGAIN, all around simply so those who have made the decision to not main the class because it doesn't play the way it wants get to now have it, simply because of the bow and arrow aesthetic. That isn't fair at all to a majority of the bard mains out there. People don't main a class for 6 years (or less depending when you came to the game, I know I'm old) wishing for it to become something different, a majority main their jobs because they enjoy how the job plays.

The more REASONABLE argument and one that wont upset a majority of the players would be to leave archer -> bard alone and have the development team create a new job of ranger. None of the new jobs that have been added (Machinist/Astrologian/Dark Knight/Gunbreaker/Dancer) are tied to a class, therefore, no quests would have to be touched below level 70 (Since as Hyomin pointed out, all new jobs get introduced 20 levels below current expansion cap, I using this as reference). They all get introduced as their jobs, we do the initial quest, get a job stone and go from there. Hell, I wouldn't mind and actually would find it funny if they made the ranger job quests be a sort of mockery against us "spoony" bards.



We have been fighting, both on English and Japanese forums, to have the bard identity restored. It is not a lost cause, we have been fighting since before Shadowbringers got released because we were concerned with how seemingly our tools got stripped from us to make room for the shiny new dancer. It isn't a lost cause to us. The Japanese forum on bard is 312 pages long and 53 of those pages are of how they are incredibly unhappy with how bard (poet they call it) functions in ShB. Many even pointing out of our 80 job quest is a mockery and a slap in the face to what it means to be a bard. So sorry, but we won't stop fighting for the job we love. Even if we have to fight on two fronts with trying to get the developers to give us some job identity back and on forums with players that want to hijack our class from us so they can get their ranger. We want to keep our job tyvm. Stop trying to take it from us.

The thing about current Bard is that it is and always has been at least 80% archery and 20% music if not even more skewed toward archery. The entire point I want to make is that we shouldn’t have to settle for this mess that’s been created. By separating the two to have 1 dedicated archer and 1 dedicated musician, you make both player bases happy.

We can even just leave Bard alone and not even remove the musical aspects if it hurts people that much, just add in an actual musician using an instrument as their weapon using exclusively musical attacks. If you are a true fan of the Bard aesthetic, why wouldn’t you want that over trying to play tug of war with the Archer players over the current Bard?

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.

Why settle for a half-assed Bard though? Why are you okay with an Archer who plays a song that slightly buffs the party and is firing arrows the other 95% of the time? My whole argument is I’m not okay with that. I’ve never been okay with that. There’s literally no reason any of us should be so obsessed with trying to make the current Bard work for both archer players and musician players when it’s always only ever been a mix of water and oil. They don’t mix together. So long as this job stays merged, it will always either not be enough of an Archer or not enough of a Bard. We need to stop pretending that you can solve this problem while leaving it the same job.

Actually, there is one way I could see you actually appeasing both sides of the arguement, but it’s an extremely time-inefficient method:

Create a Ranger Stance and a Bard Stance that are both entirely cosmetic, almost like an Egi-Glamour system but with your entire character.

You input a command, like /bardstance or /rangerstance, and what happens is this…

Your Bow changes to a Harp, every bow will also have a Harp model used for this purpose. All of your actions, and I do mean literally all of your actions, turn into music. Heavy Shot, Straight Shot, Caustic Bite, Bloodletter, Iron Jaws, Empyreal Arrow, Refulgent Arrow… literally everything becomes a song version of the same attack. They all do the same things, the differences are only cosmetic.

Under Ranger Stance, your weapon stays a bow and your song abilities currently normal on Bard are changed to archer-themed actions instead.

There you have it: An Archer and a Bard existing in the same space. You are basically designing an all new job in terms of animations and weapons, except it’s not a new job, it’s just a reskin of an existing one. THAT would make every Bard player happy because you could then just choose which style suits you with no consequences to your DPS, but it’s the least plausible solution available.

Trying to separate Bard from Ranger as two different roles is messy and doesn’t have a perfect solution either, but at the very least you do get 2 different jobs out of if that would play differently, so there’s more incentive for the designers to consider that route.

Honestly, I don’t really care what happens as long as a day comes where a genuine, to-it’s-name musician can exist in this game, and not a half-assed version that we’re all just tolerating because we don’t think Square is willing to get their hands dirty making the mess they need to make to fix this ancient design mistake.