Yoshi-P Sanpo comments re: Bard

[Rika007]

*snip*

So true it hurts Liam. I was part of the Ranged DPS should be lower crowd back when all I played in a Savage setting was Bard. Then they stripped away so much of what I liked about Bard and made me just find the job overall boring so I decided to branch out in Shadowbringers. Played some Summoner throughout all of Progression, black mage during re-clears. Played some Samurai helping another static prog the fights. Even did some white mage for a bit.

I found out that the ranged tax is a freaking joke. I felt no more taxed and any more sort of difficulty playing Summoner, supposedly the most complex DPS rotation in the game with the most optimization, then I ever did on Bard. Heck what I found was it was actually far easier, because suddenly, my raid's are giving me all the priority and shields to stay still and ignore some mechanics, and focusing things on me. When I'm playing Samurai and spread out mechanics I'm suddenly allowed to barely have to move an inch and even tanks will give me priority of staying still. I'm getting healers telling me to tank the AOE and keep casting in my Ley lines and putting crit shields over me and just tank the mechanic. Suddenly half of the things I always felt were just normal parts of raiding (handling all ranged mechanics, baiting distance foe's, etc) are just something I never have to deal with. The trade off of having to time some instant casts or when to use true north is so much more simpler.

All that and I get to deal far more effective damage then the ranged even if you count their party utility, and heck if I'm on Summoner, I get to bring MORE party utility then two of them. Please for the love of god give ranged some more love. I probably won't ever go back to Bard unless they reverse their decision of it being the 'middle ground' between greed and utility of Dancer and Machinist, but outside of maybe a few 100 dps below other DPS roles, their is no reason for it to be anywhere close to as low as they are. Machinist should not be getting out DPS'ed by jobs that provide actual utility. Bard should be in the middle ground with Red Mage and other mid range utility jobs like Dragoon. Dancer should be the lowest but should only be a 100 points off of the other jobs at most.

[Akiudo]

One might say that's just the top end players and not the majority and that's correct, but balance must always come down from the top end.

your "balance coming from the top end" left us with mch outperforming not just bard but dancer aswell up to the 90% percentile to a quite ridiculous degree as not even curing waltz is worth nearly the dps a dancer at that level does less than a mch making it just go even worse for bard, and it only gets worse from there going down, and what for ?

100% of the top 50 speedruns on ramuh and ifrit/garuda include dancer, 88% and 84% for idol and shiva respectively,lets not even talk about the near non existence of warrior and scholar at top speedrun level. monk you could potentially handwave with simply being a not very liked class right now, but other classes? you are quite literally fucking over 90%+ of the raiding playerbase (yes, i included the groups that have to drag their sorry ass bard with them instead of the vastly superior mch) to have "balance" at the top, except you still don't have any balance there because at this point even being just 1% better is enough to make you unquestionably the best.



if we actually do balance around the top, why is dancer allowed to be so much stronger than mch ? clearly superior utility and a very clear damage lead can't be balanced at once. oh wait, its because dancer damage is more up to rng, funny how if we look at "max" its suddenly fine to be clearly better, i thought we balance around the top ? or is it suddenly the top 1% that counts ? maybe top 2% would be better? or do we prefer top 0,5%?

keeping down a class for literally everyone so the top 1% of groups can't find a way to abuse a class to an overpowered degree is absolutely pointless, these groups will clear the content either way, these groups will use what is best either way, so fucking over literally everyone else, so that people that for all intents and purposes are looking for every little way to positively break the game and split it in 2 accomplishes absolutely nothing. no normal person would exclude a 90% mch when it would only do 200 dps more than a 90% dancer because a 99% dancer was suddenly 600 dps ahead instead of 400. the ones that actually do that are the ones that (surprise) allready exclude both bard and mch for dancer because if you are going for world record you go for the god run either way.

Not being glued to melee range is a tremendous advantage. Of course you don't have to be in Narnia, but being able to resolve any mechanic with 100% uptime is not something you can dismiss. Ranged tax is a thing for good reason. Groups are able to leverage mobility with bad, easy strats to get through mechanics but still have enough DPS to meet checks.

yes, you can use easier tactics with more ranged, have fun losing out on the 1% stat buff if you go all ranged aswell fucking over your tanks completly if you just go for "easy"... (and if you do take a melee than whatever tactic you use allready includes 2 tanks+1melee, so it will at worst be "mostly identical", because funnily enough, the people that go for some crazy "if we do it like this and than we can do that and that, but only with exactly 1 melee...." tactic are again the very very top of the very top).

an average group (that would by definition of the word mean 50% percentile, and thats actually allready being nice because it excludes all the groups are simply unable to handle any given fight) will totally have room to spare if they lose 1000 dps do to no melee 1%, another 1000 do to having to use a multi target lb on a single target and say 500 because their new "easier tactic" bends over their tanks uptime so bad at least this much loss is inevitable. or wait no, they won't. maybe they would make it, but thats a big maybe

As for the Bard example, look at the 95th/99th (where parties can utilize BRDs buff the most). At max BRD gets edged out by dancer but we all know dancer has the highest max potential thanks to RNG so all it takes is to get a good run a long with your team/partner to do that.

looking at the 95th percentile bard is BARELY above mch while offering utility on a level that could best be described as "sick joke" , surely if bard would actually outperform mch , like really outperform on a single fight while being say 200 below on average (so across percentiles) on the other fights instead of the current "hey, if you are in a top group your bard is only 300 dps worse instead of 700" situation would make the sky fall and lead to mass deletion of mch

90% of groups are in no position to change their lineup for every single fight, so a certain class (or to come back to "but melees...." a certain role,)being clearly superior in fight a) while being slightly worse in fights b),c),d) would be perfetly balanced, and when it comes to people going for world first/top speedrun times ?

Stop acting like the top 1% of raiders would suddenly all ditch both melees to go for "easy mode strats", there is need for an incentive to use harder strats, yes, but that need is not nearly as big as the current dps gap, if it where people would allready ditch melees completly for casters.

[gumas]

I think people are unhappy with BRD because of its low damage contribution. BRD would be in a better spot if it was a selfish dps like MCH and had its songs changed from party-wide to self-buffs.

my wish take on brd is to have selfish DPS like MCH BUT....

when they start tuning their song, their potency DPS will drop by xx% because now they are in "support" mode. so basically you can be a selfish DPS like MCH or you can be a supportive BRD by keep applying song buff to your party.

this way everyone happy with archer class, you want pure dps? just go full ham dont use song buff, you want the usual supportive brd? just keep rotating your song, easy.

[Rika007]

my wish take on brd is to have selfish DPS like MCH BUT....

when they start tuning their song, their potency DPS will drop by xx% because now they are in "support" mode. so basically you can be a selfish DPS like MCH or you can be a supportive BRD by keep applying song buff to your party.

this way everyone happy with archer class, you want pure dps? just go full ham dont use song buff, you want the usual supportive brd? just keep rotating your song, easy.

That was literally how Bard was used in A Realm Reborn, didn't go over well with the player base.

[ItMe]

you want pure dps? just go full ham dont use song buff, you want the usual supportive brd? just keep rotating your song, easy.

But this only gives the illusion of choice.
Based on party comp and the duty you're doing one mode will be better than the other.
Sure, you could just do what you want, but people hate BLMs that roleplay and only use ice spells, and they hate th for legit reasons.

[gumas]

That was literally how Bard was used in A Realm Reborn, didn't go over well with the player base.

i though people hate brd backthen because the "stationary" mode? yeah the skill increase your dps but it literally make you more turret than BLM backthen so people really hate that.

[Cetonis]

i though people hate brd backthen because the "stationary" mode? yeah the skill increase your dps but it literally make you more turret than BLM backthen so people really hate that.

No, that was HW. In ARR, Mage's Ballad and Army's Paeon were persistent songs that drained your MP while active, in order to provide MP/TP restoration to your party. The thing was, you dealt 20% less damage while they were active. Classes were designed to make people's MP/TP run out after a while, which is how they forced groups to bring a Bard even though its overall damage was lower (after 2.1) even before the -20%.

This continued into HW, with MCH getting a similar treatment, but over time they reduced the penalty down to -10%, and eventually just eliminated it. Honestly it was interesting to optimize for high end groups, but for the average player it just kind of felt bad, nobody wanted to use the skills, healers would yell at their DF ranged to stop being selfish and sing, and so on.

So these skills became Refresh and Tactician in 4.0, just straight 3m cooldowns with no strings attached. Once again, overall the ranged still brought less damage than the fourth-best other dps, but because it was difficult to impossible for healers to maximize their dps without Refresh, you had to bring one (and subsequently a Dragoon).

In ShB, they've decided to stop this frankly-dumb design of forcing people to bring a weaker role just to be able to operate resource-wise. Instead they've changed the party bonus to this 1% per role, which is kind of just as dumb but at least it's transparent, and doesn't open the door to healers getting screwed by bad ranged who don't press Refresh.

[Rai_Takara]

...

Honestly I'm not sure what you're trying to get at. If you want BRD to do more damage (which it should) then it needs to also be homogenized further and avoid situations where they are superior due to multi-dotting and be more in line with the other ranged. I just hope SE considers this otherwise they won't be able to buff BRD like how they can't really buff RDM because it has insane raise potential.

In ShB, they've decided to stop this frankly-dumb design of forcing people to bring a weaker role just to be able to operate resource-wise. Instead they've changed the party bonus to this 1% per role, which is kind of just as dumb but at least it's transparent, and doesn't open the door to healers getting screwed by bad ranged who don't press Refresh.

To be fair that's be design as nobody wants to go back to the time when double ranged was meta. Even the double caster meta is dumb, but hopefully SE will bring the nerf hammer for SMN.

[Akiudo]

snip

why is bard being superior in multi target situations a problem ? it would be a problem if bard was perfectly equal single target compared to the competition and clearly better at multi target situations i'll give you that, but theres zero reason why bard only falling half as far behind compared to mch as it does now while in fact being clearly superior in a fight with more multi target chances would be gamebreaking unless you want to imply groups will just change their physical ranged on a per fight basis, which is completly unrealistic for most groups, and for the groups that would do that ? lets be honest here, more power to them.

there'll allways be a best class/composition, if say on e7 bard had another 500 dps so what ?.

also about no one wanting back double ranged, and double caster being just as dumb, you made clear what you want, and of course you are free to do so and entitled to your opinion, but don't speak for everyone.no, i dont WANT a double ranged/caster meta, i also don't give a flying .... for a double melee meta, meta in the purest sense of the word will allways exist, therefore i can honestly say whatever. preventing a certain kind of meta for whatever reason<fucking over classes for the general (90% or more) of the playerbase.

just look at tanks and healers, there are clearly superior choices at the absolute top, the tank/healer distribution at the top end is no more equal than the dps distribution, in a lot of ways i would argue its worse, and i couldn't care one bit about that, as a group going for world records, be that fastest run or world firsts will use what suits their needs best either way, doesn't matter what exactly these class(es) is/are, they take what works best, and something will allways be best, its impossible for there not to be. so making sure everything else works about equally well for the general player base has actual use, namely enabling people to play what they want without overly punishing groups, whereas aiming for "perfect balance" at the absolute top 1% level no matter how much that hurts everybody else in practice has no balancing effect at all, 1/3->1/2 the classes will get left in the dust either way, something one can clearly see looking at the class distributions for top 50 speedruns.

[Wyakin]

Honestly I'm not sure what you're trying to get at. If you want BRD to do more damage (which it should) then it needs to also be homogenized further and avoid situations where they are superior due to multi-dotting and be more in line with the other ranged. I just hope SE considers this otherwise they won't be able to buff BRD like how they can't really buff RDM because it has insane raise potential.



To be fair that's be design as nobody wants to go back to the time when double ranged was meta. Even the double caster meta is dumb, but hopefully SE will bring the nerf hammer for SMN.

Why is double melee ok but double caster or double ranged not ok? As long as you bring 1 of each role you will always have a double.