BRD Charged Actions and update work

[Beddict]

- Completely rework the proc system: As it stands, a lot of the damage issues with Bard revolves around its proc system. Is it currently better than the system where you had to pray for a critical hit? Yes. But it's still not that great.

The Crit system was actually better. Stormblood Crit Chance ranged from around 35% up to 40% by the end of the expansion which is pretty close to where we are now at 40%. However, Chain Stratagem and Battle Litany meant that every now and then we could spike our Crit Chance for a bigger burst phase, and it encouraged intelligent snapshotting of our DoTs on buffs. The flat rate works fine, just makes things boring since we are unable to influence it. Nothing was more entertaining than a big opener with tons of Crit Chance.

How would this work? While your songs are up, each auto-attack you land will increase the Soul Gauge by 5. Or maybe have it work like other classes where they have a gauge that increases if you land certain attacks. This gauge can then be used on Song Skills that can do Damage, increase damage the enemy takes, etc. Under this system, Pitch Perfect would cost 20 gauge and do flat damage, for example. Empyreal Arrow would add a flat amount to the gauge, much like how Samurai's Ikishoten increases its Kenki Gauge by 50 (Do note that Empyreal Arrow should add a smaller amount, such as 10-15 for the sake of balance).

This is already similar to how the Soul Gauge functions in PvP. If under the effect of Wanderer's Minuet or Army's Paeon, each Burst Shot, Empyreal Arrow, or Quick Nock increases the Soul Gauge by 10 allowing for incredibly consistent Apex Arrows. I wouldn't mind poaching the Soul Gauge from PvP, but at a lower rate of 4 Soul per GCD since that would give us a maxed out Apex Arrow every minute which lines up well with raid buffs like Trick Attack. Hell, give it a vuln debuff too and let it stack with Trick Attack, who cares. We used to stack Foe Requiem and Trick, why not Apex and Trick.

I am less interested in your ideas for the song changes though. The current system has problems, no argument there, but I'd rather not see another massive overhaul of the way the songs function. They changed the way things worked from ARR to HW when they created Bow Mage, and they changed thing again from HW to SB where we got the current system. I would prefer to just see charged actions get added to help alleviate the issue of bleeding DPS through lost procs, as well as other fixes mentioned by Cetonis in this thread. I don't think your ideas are bad, just don't want to see another massive, Job changing overhaul.

[Grimoire-M]

The Crit system was actually better. Stormblood Crit Chance ranged from around 35% up to 40% by the end of the expansion which is pretty close to where we are now at 40%. However, Chain Stratagem and Battle Litany meant that every now and then we could spike our Crit Chance for a bigger burst phase, and it encouraged intelligent snapshotting of our DoTs on buffs. The flat rate works fine, just makes things boring since we are unable to influence it. Nothing was more entertaining than a big opener with tons of Crit Chance.

I have to disagree with this vehemently. The problem with SB Bard was precisely its reliance on crit chance. It made the class extremely dependent on specific raid compositions to shine. It’s not that it doesn’t feel good, but the fact it could shoot from top to bottom DPS based on whether a DRG was present (Piercing wasn’t the ONLY reason DRG/BRD was busted) was extremely annoying. That’s why I said Raging Strikes should buff Repertoire’s proc rate if we got a static proc rate from ShB's changes (which, we did). Any numbers SE went with would eventually feel unimpressive because we didn’t have that burst window to work with like before.

EDIT: Other than that, I think we agree though, including Bard needing charges and not much else. I'm happy with how they play, though I would add that using Ballad would still leak damage unless you adjusted the proc to reduce Bloodletter's cooldown by around 10-12s instead of granting a charge outright. The slight loss of potential prevents the ugly situation where you get back to back double procs and lose a charge. And erring lower on the cooldown reduction would also account for the fact it would happen more frequently with the Raging Strikes change I've mentioned above. This goes double for Quick Nock's proc, which contributes to a ton of leaked damage with AoE otherwise.