Yoshi-P Sanpo comments re: Bard

[Ramura_Sono]

In the Yoshi-P sanpo the other day, he made a passing comment along the lines that they're getting a lot of requests to "fix Bard", but with a lack of concrete suggestions as to what/how.

That is what having a Team of Battle/Class Designers is for. There is a multitude of feedback for them to parse and discern a concrete direction to take the job in in an attempt to fix it. "Players haven't given us concrete suggestions" is just a way for the Devs to pass the buck. It has to stop. Monk players have routinely mentioned they enjoy the speed, dislike being overly punished by things outside of their control, hate all the niche skills; Bards have continually mentioned a desire for more support in their kit, more musical inspiration to their design, etc. Every single job has a set of core design principles that players enjoy about the job. And a multitude of issues they have too. It's not on the players to give exact specific suggestions. Especially when such suggestions are routinely ignored or misunderstood.

Their propensity to implement even the most simple and basic ideas in the most convoluted and asinine way also doesn't particularly make people want to provide feedback and ideas.

[BloodRubyXII]

That is what having a Team of Battle/Class Designers is for. There is a multitude of feedback for them to parse and discern a concrete direction to take the job in in an attempt to fix it. "Players haven't given us concrete suggestions" is just a way for the Devs to pass the buck. It has to stop.

Agreed. You will never find a more passionate group of players than ones on MMORPGs, especially optimisers. The amount of work people have put into sites like Bole and Akh Morning, and the Balance Discord all of those guides, google docs, spreadsheets like holy mother of god. Even WoW's top players don't go that deep, and this isn't even a game where optimizing is on the same level or as important. So I know without even researching it any Bard suggestions put forward were probably extremely deep with examples to back them up. I know it's the JP forums they run to first for backup but they're even more brutal than we are so I know they've probably gone into it too. BRD is just entirely centered around that stupid WM/RS window with not much interesting things to do or get more of outside of that, is this really the vision for the job they wanted? Bard does have it's place. Honestly in early prog I like Bard because I am not as reliant on RDPS to have an impact, but obviously the more comfortable the encounter becomes, the stronger dancer gets as I'm no longer using the higher personal DPS (which isn't even that much higher) as a crutch. Every pull has different decision making and different instances of small bursts on Dancer which means they are capable of making Bard as interesting as it once was and simply don't, almost like it's their design for the job to be training wheels for learning how a cycle and priority system works - and it's just sad.