Yoshi-P Sanpo comments re: Bard

[Rika007]

I don't know if either part of that is super true. For sure, the support profile was one of the reasons Bard was the most popular dps job in Stormblood. There are a lot of players that really like feeling like they're helping their party out. That just doesn't necessarily extend to wanting pure support jobs in the game or a full on bard-ranger job split or whatever. Most were happy enough with an archer that had a bunch of song-motif party support skills.

By extension, I don't know how much dps buffs will do to bolster the popularity. The core of the damage-dealing kit is still fun, at a basic level, but it still lacks dynamics that people enjoyed in SB, while QoL problems have been exacerbated. And there still wouldn't be a very good support paradigm. I'm sure the number of people playing it will go up, but it will likely remain as one of the less popular dps long-term.

This is where I am and why I don't see myself returning to the Job unless there is a massive about face going into 6.0 on what the dev team did. To me 4.X BRD was the peak of the jobs design for all of the things you said it has lost. It's damage utility was active, requiring me to use refresh at certain times to get the most out of Foe's Requiem, and then also choose the perfect time to activate Battle Voice since it didn't affect my own numbers. It's party support was engaging, Troubadour required fight knowledge and coordination to get the best usage out of it due to it's deferring effects based on song. Nature's Minne was up much more often, so it felt much more impactful even though technically it's stronger now in a different sense. Palisade allowed you to work with your tanks to assist in damage mitigation (in more then just a savage fight to, it really felt great to use on big pulls in dungeons).

All of that and most importantly, the job had that all important "Easy to learn hard to master" identity that all good jobs have. Anyone could grasp the song rotation, spam heavy shot, put on your dots and keep them up through iron jaws, while hitting your oGCD's when they light up. But a truly great Bard had the ability to set her or his self away from the pack through the double snapshotting of multiple buffs and always being cognizant of multiple timers and your dots proc'ing based off crits, or if you were really going for the crazy high skill cap trying to find a way to use a two stack of pitch perfect instead of three near the end of the window to get more raw potency out. It was a skill that would let you go from that mid tier party damage dealer to one of the strongest burst jobs in the game. That's gone now, and because of it the difference between a chart topping Bard and an average Bard on that site we won't talk about is miniscule. The rotation has become the sort of low skill thing that other job's players thought Bard was and now they use it to justify it and other ranged lower damage.

So to me the flat potency means absolutely nothing and won't bring me back, because it only really addresses one piece of the pie that is my current issues with the job. I liken it to the body of Bard is still there, but the soul of the job is gone (Ironic when you consider the Soul gauge was it's big new feature). It still does a bit of support, still boosts a bit of it's parties damage, still has it's core rotation there, but that all just makes up the shell of the job, and the rest of it is quite hollow. I can play it for 30 minutes and have some fun, but the moment I try to go into a raid environment and prog on it for more then an hour, I'm reminded why I dropped it.

[Connor]

It’s definitely a fair point that the job’s popularity can’t solely be from a single aspect (archer or bard). A job that’s an amalgamation of several ‘job identities’ probably wouldn’t seem appealing to most people if they saw it as a one-sided affair towards either side of the combo. And Bard has been the most ‘support’ oriented dps until Shadowbringers, so it would be strange for people to gravitate towards the job then be like ‘wait since when did Bards support the party?!’

I think (hope) I’ve said before that I think Bard is one of the jobs most restricted by current game design, along with all three healers. They’re presented as these ‘supportive’ jobs with a role beyond purely dealing damage, whether it be through healing, buffs, debuffs, and whatever else to supplement their standard damage dealing capabilities.
But then since the game is designed with very little healing requirements, buffs and debuffs being largely ancillary to damage dealing (hence long cool downs and short durations, so uptime doesn’t impinge upon dealing damage), and not enough real ‘danger’ in the game’s battle system to warrant the existence of defensive support like Minne and Paean.

With that in mind, the only way they can ever really go for Bard’s ‘utility’ is to make it a pure damage increase for the party. But as DPS is so heavily tied to success in the current battle system, party wide damage increases are extremely valuable and difficult to balance (e.g higher dps gains when the party is already at higher dps, meaning the value scales with party performance, both positively and negatively).

Ultimately we’re left with the question ‘well what can they do for Bard?’, which sadly doesn’t have any good answer beyond just increasing its attack potencies. Which is unfortunate, but yet another symptom of the battle system‘s design not favouring the types of jobs the devs want to have (another more prominent symptom is healers having a ton of high potency oGCD heals, in a battle system where very little healing is actually needed)

[Cetonis]

All told, I think this is what I'd ideally want to see Monday morning, assuming literally only potency is on the table:

Bite Mastery II Now also increases the potency of Stormbite, Caustic Bite, and Iron Jaws by 50.
Sidewinder Potency for one effect has been increased from 200 to 300. // Potency for two effects has been increased from 300 to 500.
Refulgent Arrow Potency has been increased from 330 to 360.
Straight Shot Potency has been increased from 200 to 240.

Should be around a 3.5% buff, which seems aboouuut right for a target? Maybe 3% (make RA 350p) instead.

[A_moth_called_rose]

unironically bring back bow mage

[Risvertasashi]

unironically bring back bow mage

The current population of bards is pretty low as is, no need to multiply the decimation with heavensward design philosophies.

[Connor]

unironically bring back bow mage

I liked bow mage too, but at this point I think it’d be better taking that system and putting it on a job that’s designed for it. The developers seem to want Bard to revolve solely around fast-paced proc-based gameplay, so it’d go completely against that design for them to add any kind of cast times to the job, whether it’s on weapon skills or songs. And they won’t do a fundamental redesign of the job because it’s easily one of the most popular jobs of them all (or it would be if not for the current balancing)

In terms of the upcoming changes I agree that they’ll likely be focused on DoTs and related aspects (e.g Sidewinder). Possibly a small potency boost to Burst Shot as well; it’s the most used skill as a Bard, so I imagine the easiest way to increase its damage overall would be a small potency increase on that. Though that’d maybe put it too far ahead of Dancer

[Morningstar1337]

I liked bow mage too, but at this point I think it’d be better taking that system and putting it on a job that’s designed for it.

Like Machinest?

[Jirah]

Like Machinest?

woah woah I say leave casters to actual casters, besides idk foes Requiem, MCh has a host of issues they need ironed out before more experimenting needs to be done wihout going too off topic bowcaster is dead and gone i rather they do somthing new and bards current job philosophy would struggle to comprehend it

Id like to add increase the proc of refulgent arrow, 10 seconds is laughable

[Akiudo]

woah woah I say leave casters to actual casters, besides idk foes Requiem, MCh has a host of issues they need ironed out before more experimenting needs to be done wihout going too off topic bowcaster is dead and gone i rather they do somthing new and bards current job philosophy would struggle to comprehend it

Id like to add increase the proc of refulgent arrow, 10 seconds is laughable

while i do believe this was mostly tongue in cheek you are aware that mch originally was designed with cast bars ? they ditched this during stormblood, but really that was mostly on bard. heavensward mch was disliked for a number of reasons, but i hardly remember anyone complaining about the cast bars, it actually flowed quite well, unlike bowmage which sucked. comparing bard with mch during heavensward was night and day. like if one actually played both classes you could just see how someone at square designed mch, and than last minute someone said "so mch has castbars and bard has not ? we can't have that" and than hastily slapped on menuet 5 minutes before showing off the new bard design to the higher ups. the big point here is mainly that you can't simply slap on restrictions on a class, the actuall class design has to work with these restrictions.

[Kabooa]

the actuall class design has to work with these restrictions.

TFW Red Mage is just the HW Ranged DPS refined.