Are the bard 'buffs' a Halloween prank?

[ForteNightshade]

problem with a week of data is that that means half the time measured is pre patch, since the patch dropped at 95 percentile dancer beat out bard on every single fight (i checked the data for the day every single day around the same time), also and thats something that gets completly ignored at this point is that both deal shit damage, its not even "oh no, brd now is weaker than dancer" or whatever, its "bard and dancer literally both deal shitty damage" , even mch damage is pretty sucky , just not nearly as bad as the other two.

Also its not only brd vs dancer, no matter how often some people like to act like obviously casters or melees would never take a spot from a phys ranged aways, right now i clear eden through party finder, and as often as people repeat the whole "party finder is all meta comps searching...." in reality you more often than not end up in a group with 2 casters/1 physical or even 2 physical ranged, just that i can tell from experience that the 2 physical ranged group will have a way harder time with enrage than a group that takes 2 casters and a physical

For reference sake, just to emphasise why the new disparity is concerning even with only a smaller sample size

Summoner: 14,861
Black Mage: 14,719 (-142)
Red Mage: 14,184 (-677)
Machinist: 13,886 (-975)
Dancer: 13,452 (-1,409)
Bard: 13,274 (1,587)

Neither Bard nor Dancer are bringing enough to offset the sheer raw damage Black Mage and now Summoner offer. The latter is more concerning since Summoner offers Raise. This won't lock the Range out given people tend to want their pretty numbers, thus the 1%. But it's hardly a good feeling that your preferred job is basically clinging to that 1% party buff for relevance. I said this months ago, and it bears repeating. It's the equivalent of your parents (SE) telling you to take your little sibling (Range) to the movies with your friends because you have to.

[Caitlinzulu]

That might take supporting one's party though. We want to be support, not do support things. /s

No, not all bards want to be support. I didn't care much about the support part at all.
The dps nerf has killed the class I have been maining for close to 5 years now.
Most posts talk about raid dps. Well me do no raid, only 4 person duties and 24, so thecalc will be different

[Rika007]

No, not all bards want to be support. I didn't care much about the support part at all.
The dps nerf has killed the class I have been maining for close to 5 years now.
Most posts talk about raid dps. Well me do no raid, only 4 person duties and 24, so thecalc will be different

Bard was already in a rough place before the DPS nerf, so if you're thinking it was killed, the really killing happened the moment Shadowbringers dropped and Bard was reworked into a more "Greedy" DPS. Stormblood Bard was considered second only to Ninja in raid DPS contribution and was one of the most powerful jobs in the game. Losing all of that support is what killed it.

[SaitoHikari]

I'm still not sure what to make of these changes. The theorycrafters say that the passive support buffs are supposed to add way more contribution to offset the big hit to our personal damage, but it's something that can't be easily measured at all. What I can say is that I have been re-progging UwU with my friends this past week, and my damage in UwU is now consistently 200-300 DPS lower than it was before the expansion. And I'm saying this as someone that earned a 97th percentile in there beforehand.

For what it's worth, a quick stroll through the JP forums seems to reveal that the JP Bards are overall very upset about the current situation, so we're probably going to see some buffs come our way. I'm still personally in the wait and see mode, but even I'm starting to lose a slight amount of faith if even the JP Bards think this is un-salvageable.

[Shurrikhan]

No, not all bards want to be support. I didn't care much about the support part at all.
The dps nerf has killed the class I have been maining for close to 5 years now.
Most posts talk about raid dps. Well me do no raid, only 4 person duties and 24, so thecalc will be different

You not only ignored literally tagged sarcasm, but misconstrued its entire argument. Interesting.

Your rDPS (the only thing anyone really tracks except when looking at how skillful a player is in exploiting compositional buff periods as to give others higher rDPS) is also higher now than it was. If the stroke was fatal, it's only because it only now noticed and died of shock; the previous blow was the more actually devastating.

Raid dps isn't the dps done in raids. It's simply what you contribute in any party setting (for all intents and purposes, 8-man settings, since that's the only player count for which the game allows access to serious content).
It's called rDPS because "party dps" wouldn't hold up well to shorthand alongside "personal dps" (also pDPS) and because target debuffs are technically raid dps despite doing fundamentally the same thing as party buffs and the actual difference between the two only occurs in content not considered in need of any high standard of play or optimization (24-man raids).

[Shurrikhan]

I don't understand the fetish for "support" dps. DPS is dps. Either more of your damage is from rdps or more from adps, that's fine.

We don't need to waffle about on the "1% can be X" or "it has 100% uptime". It does not have 100% uptime. Anytime the group spreads it is not 100% uptime.

And with 100% uptime, you can easily see that the avg raid dps is like 80-90k. Which means we don't need to guess at the damage increase, it is literally 800rdps or so at the top end.

Contrast with DNC's roughly 1500rdps, and you can see where their numbers need to be to make up the difference.

Fundamentally, there is no difference in output except vaguely by inadvertently nerfing the job at lower player counts. The difference, at least when the support is active, is in gameplay.

Active support requires a broadening of interest. Effectively, you not only need to know not only how to optimize your own damage, but everyone else's. You get to stick your greedy fingers in more pies and be rewarded for the cross-contamination when it all pools into your rDPS metric. It's a wonderful thing.

But, that doesn't mean it's for everyone. If the range in rDPS due to my knowledge of things outside my own job leads to skill-gap squishes that trim the complexity of my own native toolkit or leaves me feeling significantly weaker in single-target play, that's excessive. But, if the job already makes for a good cake, certain additions can capitalize on it to make it truly delicious.

I've yet to see Bard do anything like that, but I'd hazard a guess that such is at least possible.

[chadesiel]

I dont want to against anyone here. I just want to say my feelings for the changes as a brd main since SB. It felt great in SB, both rotation wise and supportive wise. At the 5.0, I was disappointed so many utilities were gone but only got exchanged with a small dps increase. I do not have a strong opinion about if brd should be like a ranger or be a supportive role. However, it was definitely not on par imo. Now 5.1, I would say with the potency buffs to dnc and mch, a group should only pick mch ( if want damage) or dnc ( if want raid buffs). I feel dnc and brd are at the same level rn, with brd's buff worse than dnc's. There are 3 songs, but NONE of these song buffs apply to ourselves. Besides, there are only 2 buffs actually useful (DH is a meme). I do PF and dont have a static, I personally feel these 2% crit and 1% damage dont really give a big boost to the party compare to dnc's buff, then why our personal dps deserved a nerf while dnc got it buffed? If more utility means lower person dps, we can see from the 5.1 smn change, it is NOT the case.

Again, im not talking about any math/fflogs(im just a blue on fflogs). I am only talking about my feeling. I only play ff14 for around a year so far.

[Pour]

No worries, Square Enix completely failed with job balancing in 5.1. In Stormblood the Song Buffs were just the icing on the cake for us. They were there, sure, but certainly they did not make bard any more fun to play. Refresh, Palisade and Foes were fun and meaningful buttons. Actual support buttons. I'd gladly sacrifice DPS for those. Also I don't think Square Enix is overestimating support buffs when it comes to balancing. They severely overestimate the ability to circle around the boss like an idiot while keeping 100% uptime.

[Connor]

Maybe the devs decided to lower the overall DPS because they plan to add more active support abilities in a future patch? That seems a little unlikely though. I guess maybe Foe Requiem could make up some of the lost damage too if it was returned? But then, if they’re dong that why make us wait for it to return lol

The sad thing though is that this isn’t even anything new for Bards. It seems like every expansion we’re being nerfed then buffed then re-nerfed and back again. I mean, we went from having support spells in the form to songs, to being full-on casters (kinda), to a balance of support and DPS that was incredibly popular, to ‘more pure DPS’ set-up, and now we’re at the ‘almost pure DPS but with passive support so it feels like you’re not’ stage. And god knows where we’ll end up next patch lol

[Droxybrobotnik]

Can't they just make two versions of the buffs, one stronger version that only applies to you and a party wide one that is what we got now?
Make both mutually exclusive so you can only have one active at a time, and all you'd need are two hotbars which you can easily switch between.