HW Bard was fun

[MPNZ]

Call me mad or crazy, but I enjoyed the old traditional heavansward long cast time bard playstyle. reminded me of a traditional archer who had to take time lining up their shots, current bard you're just whack-a-mole-ing your buttons and flinging out arrows without any care to precision or nuance. I wanna go back to having cast times and making each of my arrow attacks feel like they had real potency behind them.

IMO, it was a very offensive build that just didn't work with the Rivers of Blood trait, ignored it's lore as bard in almost total favor of new abilities towards Archer, and was really jarring when switching from the lv50 to lv60 content, which totally just feels like a minor deja vu in 5.0 to me. It's viable for a pure ranger role with an aggressive cqc shift and counter/stun/bind once they're up close (keep away, rush-downs, and distance control are all really fun). But, for like "Bard" conceptually in FF14? Just, no. The whole rhythm game feel just flows better, but support is still in R&D, and moving it back further into the pure dps territory just feels weird and way out of touch, immediately. The Bowmage is definitely something that the dev team could create into it's own job easily though

[Jirah]

Call me mad or crazy, but I enjoyed the old traditional heavansward long cast time bard playstyle. reminded me of a traditional archer who had to take time lining up their shots, current bard you're just whack-a-mole-ing your buttons and flinging out arrows without any care to precision or nuance. I wanna go back to having cast times and making each of my arrow attacks feel like they had real potency behind them.

If im being honest you can describe most jobs like this and i feel besides some potency issues and lack of true support skills, Bard is a great job

[Akiudo]

IMO, it was a very offensive build that just didn't work with the Rivers of Blood trait, ignored it's lore as bard in almost total favor of new abilities towards Archer, and was really jarring when switching from the lv50 to lv60 content, which totally just feels like a minor deja vu in 5.0 to me. It's viable for a pure ranger role with an aggressive cqc shift and counter/stun/bind once they're up close (keep away, rush-downs, and distance control are all really fun). But, for like "Bard" conceptually in FF14? Just, no. The whole rhythm game feel just flows better, but support is still in R&D, and moving it back further into the pure dps territory just feels weird and way out of touch, immediately. The Bowmage is definitely something that the dev team could create into it's own job easily though

it was more than just rivers of blood that was a problem though, while that was easily the worst offender , from the top of my head there where
1-rivers of blood, big time.
2-the weird pseudo ogcd of empyrial arrow
3-the fact that repelling shot did damage, which was a pain to time even without menuet.

4a-the total lack of "more free movement" phases aside from simply turning menuet off. yes you could feint? but please no one tell me that was squares intention...
4b-a general lack of instants outside of turning menuet off, bard had about the most ogcd skills of any class at this point (not just numbers wise but also because of small cooldown) yet couldn't double weave worth shit.
4c-in a way the worst of all, LACK OF CONTROL over it. SMN has a decent amount of control of when to use its instants, redmage even though it has longer cast windows also has longer movement windows in exchange and still some control at least with enchanted reprise and swiftcasts , also less ogcd's, let alone randomly resetting ones. bard on the other hand ? had a single skill actually designed for it it could use instantly without turning menuet of, at a terrible procc rate and without stacks so you couldn't even save it for the right moment

compare this with mch which with a bit of setup could easily get out 3 instants in a row, 7? i believe if paired with the "your next 3? gcd's are instant" skill, its been a while, but i know you could get out more than 5 instant skills in a row with the right cooldowns and setup.

even without any kind of real setup you could at least force an instant cast every 15 seconds, and do to the way the 1-2-3 combo worked you could even save it for a while, all while not having to worry about randomly resetting proccs, no "weird empyrial arrow pseudo ogcd", its own "repelling shot" actually knocking back the enemy, or in other words doing nothing on bosses so as long as you where close enough you didn't have to reposition all the time and simply all around having way more instant casts than bard, feeling closer to what current smn does rather than "holy fuck i got an instant at an usefull moment" that bard had going for it during heavensward.

[Aeliott]

On the one hand, I liked ranged in HW because there was what felt like a fair personal difficulty/effort:reward ratio that was quite satisfying. Especially with Machinist which was designed with the short cast bar system in mind. That said, while it was the least played role in 3.X, it was too strong in the right hands. Since the jobs felt like a lot of effort at the time, the numbers were buffed, but those who were able to consistently play these 2 classes would often run rings around any other DPS except an exceptional monk or dragoon. As for Bard itself, empyreal Arrow being a weapon skill made for a very strange job rhythm of doing two 1.5s cast bars back to back immediately. Not to mention Repelling Shot having damage, and having to throw that in where you can too, mandatory displacement. Which could also sometimes interrupt your next cast if your timing wasn't great. Though there as also the problem of only being able to single weave, when you had a multitude of buffs you wanted to sync like Hawks Eye, Blood for Blood AND raging strikes. Stance dancing was a thing, but not a thing many people enjoyed except the most hardcore bards.

I think Bard was easily more fun in Stormblood. I know the "aiming / drawing" thing was a complaint, but the animations for heavy/burst shot are long and show you drawing the bow before firing. Same with refulgent and apex, even bloodletter and pitch perfect I think. I think that's fine, and even if other animations are less realistic...well, we're a superhero :P

I miss HW machinist more. Don't get me wrong, I know it was perceived as a rather inaccessible job to just pick up for 2 expansions in a row. And its original incarnation was far from perfect. But unlike Bard at the time, it worked with the cast bar thing in a satisfying way. Only Hot Shot, Lead Shot and Split Shot had casts, so you could play around anticipated movement by holding Slug and Clean procs, making stance toggling more situational, and also allowing more weave freedom, including Blank which required melee range but didn't have the forced displacement (except on dungeon trash :P) the 5 ammo stack system also assisted with this. While turning the turrets into resource bots was an interesting twist on bards songs. Just annoying that you had to use a specific turret for a specific resource. While bard and dancer are historically supports in the series, so is machinist really, so I was pretty disappointed to see that stripped away to make us raw DPS. I guess they needed more ways to differentiate after adding a third ranged, but still...

[HyoMinPark]

Heavensward bard was the most fun Bard has ever been in this game and its a tragedy that we can't go back. Nearly everyone I know who played ranged back then misses it, it's not a niche opinion

Yeah, no. Bowmage being enjoyable is a very niche opinion. The outcry over its added cast times—which were just shoved onto the job because MCH was designed around them and the developers wanted BRD and MCH to play somewhat similarly—was astounding. Personally, the funnest BRD has ever been was Stormblood BRD. Shadowbringers BRD is just a pale shadow of that. Granted, I did like the buff alignment that HW BRD had, what with us juggling Raging, Internal Release, Blood for Blood, and Hawk’s Eye (RIP)—I did like how we had to manage and align all the different buffs, and all that. But bowmage was widely unpopular with the playerbase. You need to look no further than old forum and Reddit threads about it. Not a lot of people miss it—and I wouldn’t have traded SB BRD for it.

And this is coming from someone who actually liked bowmage.

[AncientPowerfulCurse]

I definitely do miss gun wizard. But what we have now is... Uh, well dancer is fun.

[KDSilver]

I too, liked bow mage a lot. I still play bard times to times, but I had more fun with its design in HW.

However, I totally understand why they obviously reverted this change back.
They had to.

(but still, I prefered it indeed)

[ReiMakoto]

I never played brd back in HW to pass an opinion on it, but I know that cast bar mch was the most fun ive had with a dps in this game.

[Akiudo]

in all honesty, for me mch in heavensward was really fun, i know it was not liked all that much but that had hardly anything to do with castbars, in fact from what i remember it mostly came from performance issues early on followed up by people simply being unwilling to give it another chance, a class launching competitively underpowered really hurts its future prospects it seems.

with that being said i'm actually kinda sad they did away with the castbars. they absolutely did not work with bard, so in that regard i'm glad they are gone. however in my personal opinion it would have been better if instead of just taking them away they would have actually redesigned bard as to better work with them. its not like that would require a completly different bard alltogether either.

just to give an idea how this could currently look like

2,5 second cast time
2 (or maybe 3) stacks on refulgant arrow, refulgant being allways instant (with current procc rate, not the 20% procc on bs during heavensward)
2 stacks on bloodletter (restrict it to no double proccs with a token cd of 0,5 during mages ballad or something like that)
a skill that gives you 2 instants (or refulgant arrow stacks) for free every minute or so.
maybe have iron jaws instant, its weak enough potency wise that it would still be a terrible idea to just spam it for "free movement", however it may make it viable to use it with say 10 seconds left on dots if in exchange you can get the extra movement on demand.
make it so during armys paeon you actually have all instants, this way armys would still be the mathematically worst song, their would however be practical situations where you would let it run longer to profit from the movement giving it its own niche compared to the other songs

together with all the other changes we had up to now (less cooldowns in general, bloodletter reset only during mages ballad, no damage on repelling shot, whatever i forgot here) this should put it around current smn levels of free movement, which given current trends of giving casters more mobility and melees better tools for downtime/missed positionals i actually assume will be the end goal for casters by 6.0 either way.