Yoshi-P Sanpo comments re: Bard

[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.