Yoshi-P Sanpo comments re: Bard

[Akiudo]

Numbers are and will allways be an issue, about the job satisfaction though i think its more complex. at this point the biggest problem people have with bard indeed is numbers, but i would say "place in the meta" is to simple a thought here, don't get me wrong but saying "people are bothered by place (or lack thereof) in the meta makes it seem like "we aren't the best, therefore we are unhappy". i don't think that was the point you were trying to make here speckledBurd, i truly don't, but especially for people that may not really be into classes other than their own it can sound like bards are just unhappy cause they aren't top dog so to speak.

Reality is, and thats why most bards cite numbers as reason to be unhappy that bard numbers right now aren't simply "bad".
physical ranged numbers are "bad" as they get overtly taxed for free mobility that in practice simply doesn't get utilized, but bard numbers are doubly bad as they are bad even for the standarts of the role thats bad to begin with.

Honestly dancer isn't even that much better off, high end speedrun setting aside, and i'm not to sure that should be taken into account too much for general balance, but at least there actually is a point where it pulls equal numbers to mch while offering better support, so the fact that it falls behind (in a "lacks way more damage than the support is worth" way) at least culmilates in being at the top of the bottom role at the highest level, while at lower levels being equal to bard in damage while offering better utility support.

Bard on the other hand simply falls behind completly, even at the bottom end damage is pretty much equal to dancer (while offering worse support) and at the top end they get left in the dust completly, meanwhile mch has a damage cushion of 500-700 dps on bard on all percentile levels. bard is about as "good" in the physical ranged role as redmage was to summoner before the last smn nerf/redmage buff, difference being that at least redmage is part of a generally desirable group (and still got buffed while smn got nerfed) ,whereas bard is allready competing in the special olympics and still failing miserably and gets ignored for months now in spite of that.



the other thing though, and thats what i think this thread was trying to address is that numbers aside their are still a lot of things that could simply be "better" , and instead of just upping potency fixing these things would actually be more usefull as they would tackle underlying gameplay issues while still having a positive effect on numbers.

at the end of the day if you just buff potency any issues with class design will still remain, if however you fix issues with class design that actively hinder a class to reach their full potential you can still raise damage output without changing potency, just that now the thing that may have felt clunky or just plain bad got fixed at the same time.

imagine a world where 60% of bards were unhappy because of their damage output, 10% of people were unhappy with bard because "sidewinder felt to weak", another 10% were unhappy because EA/BL at points really could use stacks. if you now just for example buff the potency of the dots back up you solved the worst damage problems, but nothing else. if however you buffed sidewinder and gave stacks to ea and bl you now raised dps and made the people that actively disliked sidewinder being to weak or EA/BL interactions happy at the same time.