"New" Bard.

[Brandedblade]

I'd prefer my contribution to come from my actions, rather than merely whether I exist within X yalms of my allies... If that can take the form of active support, all the better, but I'd rather have active damage-dealing alone than lose potency to passive ("You exist") support.

I get what you're saying. But it doesn't seem like its "I just passively sit there and buff my group" and more "My reward for cycling through my rotation is to buff my allies" to me. That being said I can already visualize some ideas. Ranging from implementing Foe's, which while could still work on the 10k standardized mana, I keep wanting to see attached to the Soul Voice Gauge, to even things like Sidewinder debuffing the enemy with a small damage vuln if you execute it with both dots on the target. There is more then can do absolutely. I was just expressing my gratitude towards getting something back.

[Antoine_Lenheim]

I'm pleased that the Dev's are at least considering are requests and giving us some utility back

Ye, they gave us utility... again Why they took it back from us in first place? Because they didnt want Bard to compete with Dancer about whos a better support? Its even in job's lore that Bard is a support class, yet they made us pure DPS for some reason. Sometimes I just dont understand how come with zero class variability, SE still cannot balance classes decently lol. It was perfect before ShB, yet they go from one extreme to another, they give song effects, they take them back, they give them back again. They dont know what they want to do with bard so why even change what works just fine?

[Connor]

Sometimes I just dont understand how come with zero class variability, SE still cannot balance classes decently lol. It was perfect before ShB, yet they go from one extreme to another, they give song effects, they take them back, they give them back again. They dont know what they want to do with bard so why even change what works just fine?

From what I remember, they rework Bard every expansion because they’ve never been able to balance it properly, so they basically seem to want to just keep rolling the dice until it lands the way they want.

From how it seems to be they just flat out couldn’t be bothered finding a way to balance out support abilities, so they just deleted them all and replaced them with a generic ‘increases damage by X%’. Astrologian suffers the same problem. They created these support-oriented jobs, decided to remove all support abilities, then thought nobody would notice that the ‘support’ jobs had been gutted.

But I mean, none of this matters because we can just play Dancer? According to the developers, anyway. I don’t see any reason why Bard (and to a lesser extent Astrologian) had to have their support abilities removed other than solely to make Dancer more attractive. Maybe they thought that if Bard could still do something (literally anything) to actively support the party nobody would want to play Dancer?

I mean, would it really have invalidated Dancer both in terms of ‘meta’ and general popularity if Bard could still use Foe Requiem? Or if Minne / Paean worked like old songs so we could use them when they’re needed and not as their cooldown dictates? Hell, even if they had just kept the passive buffs but with the same effects we have now instead of the perma-crit boost

In terms of them removing/re-adding things, this is unfortunately a classic SE move at this point. See Energy Drain for a repeat; SE removed something for barely any reason, people ask for it back, they immediately acquiesce. And it’s anyone’s guess as to why they crumble so quickly for one popular request, then pretend another doesn’t exist (like adjusting the effects of Astrologian cards, or healer playstyles in general because of the 1 nuke 1 DoT thing). And I mean, Bards got their passive buffs back but there’s no sign of Foe Requiem ever being returned. Is it really too much to ask for something we’ve had for like 6 years to come back after they randomly removed it? Even if it’s with a different effect than a flat damage taken debuff

[Antoine_Lenheim]

From what I remember, they rework Bard every expansion because they’ve never been able to balance it properly, so they basically seem to want to just keep rolling the dice until it lands the way they want.

My opinion, if players are silent about a certain job, its balanced perfectly. In SB nobody complained about Bard being OP, nobody complained about Bard being weak either. If they are so keen on listening to their players, why they do not when its concerning initial job changes? It was a perfect job, yet they felt the need to change it for no reason and now they dont know what to do with it at all D:

[Shurrikhan]

I get what you're saying. But it doesn't seem like its "I just passively sit there and buff my group" and more "My reward for cycling through my rotation is to buff my allies" to me.

That's fair. I just consider it passive because you don't have to do anything more than what you already do for your own personal damage; there's no point at which you'd ever stop cycling, or essentially just doing all the exact same things, even if the buffs didn't exist.

That being said I can already visualize some ideas. Ranging from implementing Foe's, which while could still work on the 10k standardized mana, I keep wanting to see attached to the Soul Voice Gauge, to even things like Sidewinder debuffing the enemy with a small damage vuln if you execute it with both dots on the target. There is more then can do absolutely.

Yeah, that would be right up my alley. I'd love anything with more control that makes me actually care about what my team will be doing and when.

[Aiscence]

My opinion, if players are silent about a certain job, its balanced perfectly. In SB nobody complained about Bard being OP, nobody complained about Bard being weak either. If they are so keen on listening to their players, why they do not when its concerning initial job changes? It was a perfect job, yet they felt the need to change it for no reason and now they dont know what to do with it at all D:

Let's be honest, people complained about brd being OP the whole expansion lol, often in the mch threads tho. lot of "pro player" considered brd being the most busted job of the expansion with scholar as a second job. Bard was just the most played job in the game and people dont like their job being nerfed, that's it

[HyoMinPark]

My opinion, if players are silent about a certain job, its balanced perfectly. In SB nobody complained about Bard being OP, nobody complained about Bard being weak either. If they are so keen on listening to their players, why they do not when its concerning initial job changes? It was a perfect job, yet they felt the need to change it for no reason and now they dont know what to do with it at all D:

There were BRD mains that acknowledged that the job had issues with powercreep and crit scaling back in SB. I agree that 4.0 BRD is my favorite iteration of the job, but something had to be done to address that. Unfortunately, their re-addition of our song utility cost us DoT potency, which hurt BRD’s total damage and raid contribution more than I think the developers realized. It’s not uncommon to see it below DNC now at higher percentiles.

I’m not sure if this was because they overcompensated for the song effects, or for another reason. I lean towards overcompensating, because I wonder to myself if they think BRDs follow a 30-30-30 song rotation; not acknowledging that the +3% D.Hit song gets consistently clipped by 10 seconds (barring a few situations where one would want to extend it) and not considering what that would do to the overall contribution of the songs seems plausible to me—especially considering that there seems to be disconnect between the development/battle teams and the playerbase with regards to how most players play the jobs in content. Even if +3% D.Hit is likely the weakest buff of the three songs.

[AxelDH]

I wonder if some of the changes were made with the new Ultimate in mind.

Bard seems to be really good in the first 2 phases, as far as I can tell. You can consistently have 4 Dots up at once, so if they had left them on their old potency, maybe it would have been too strong.

[Lastelli]

There were BRD mains that acknowledged that the job had issues with powercreep and crit scaling back in SB. I agree that 4.0 BRD is my favorite iteration of the job, but something had to be done to address that. Unfortunately, their re-addition of our song utility cost us DoT potency, which hurt BRD’s total damage and raid contribution more than I think the developers realized. It’s not uncommon to see it below DNC now at higher percentiles.

The problem is that the way brd procs work, it's still hard to balance. In Alex Ultimate it's an op abomination because of multidotting, and it's by far the highest ranged dps. How do you balance a job like this when any scenario with 2-3 targets directly results in brd doing more dps than melee jobs?

[Kallisto-Lumina]

But now in ultimate he looks in the First two phase really strong