Bard "buff"

[Daniolaut]

BUT BUT THE RANGED TAX!!!
not asking to be top dps asking for not such a gap between DNC/BRD/MCH and everything else

So let me ask you this then.

Imagine being a exemplary MNK or DRG or SAM who has animation locks, and positional requirements, yet this bard behind you is doing more damage and can be anywhere at any time. How do you think that is ok?

MNK/DRG/SAM have to time their attacks based on mechanics, they have to adjust their rotations to avoid killing themselves.

DNC/BRD/MCH never have to do this based on a mechanic. You almost never have to disengage, you dont have to change your rotation based on a mechanic, or do a certain action at a certain time because of said mechanic. The only time you adjust your rotation is for a phase change or a damage window, which every other job already does that.

Again, your jobs are more simple to play mechanically speaking, so because of this, your damage is lower. Its the fair thing. Again, you asked for more damage, Square-Enix gave it to you in the form of cast times, and you hated it.

Plus we're talking what, 1,000 dps at best? Thats not that big of a gap. In my opinion the difference between RDM and MCH is negligible.

[CKNovel]

Ranged arent supposed to be top dps.

We aren't asking to be top DPS, it's been said over and over since last year.
Ranged are asking to be more usefull to the party, rDPS wise and beyond DPS.

Also, """mobility""" when there is RDM and SMN up there is a joke.
Remind yourself that last tier was the most mobile tier yet ranged were still at the bottom.

As for picking our poisons, most rangeds are okay with casting back on ranged. Because there is SO many times when you can DPS while remaining idle, even in Ultimate content.
It's just that it simply did not worked with BRD back in HW.

Mobility has been proven again and again to be worthless. There is not a lot of mechanics that needs a continuous movement for more than 5 seconds.
And how can you think it's okay to be gutted simply because you can DPS from far away when you're required to be at melee range for healing/mitigation from a WHM/PLD?
Currently, a perfect ranged can never outdps an above average caster or Samurai, do you still think it's okay?

Plus we're talking what, 1,000 dps at best? Thats not that big of a gap. In my opinion the difference between RDM and MCH is negligible.

You are comparing side by side:
-A job that has half cast-time with Virus (90s CD) and Verraise.
-A job that has no cast-time with Tactician (120s CD) and its power is to run around.

Then claiming that 1k DPS is negligible?

[ADVSS]

Probably still salty that no one wanted Bow Mage from 3.x, as well as the healer LB from 2.x.

[Liam_Harper]

Again, I have said this to ranged dps players before, you have no position requirements, such as casting times (as with the other ranged classes) or melee positionals, as with the melee class.

This means you can be literally anywhere at any time, meaning your job is easier to play mechanically speaking.

No you can't. You have to be in range of heals, buffs, Star/Asylum/Soil and make sure everyone is in song/Battle Voice range. There is nothing more annoying than a Bard off running around in Narnia trying to find Aslan and licking windows when your Star pops after a big raidwide.

Imagine being a exemplary MNK or DRG or SAM who has animation locks, and positional requirements, yet this bard behind you is doing more damage and can be anywhere at any time. How do you think that is ok?

Imagine being an amateur SAM who has barely touched the class in a year and mains healer, with the wrong SkS set, not using Hagakure, loops, Seigan and forgetting the DoT occasionally, being able to walk into Savage and do more rdps than a 95% percentile Bard. That's a true story. How is that ok?

The gap is ridiculous. Positionals and the 2-4 GCD's a melee might lose over a fight do not amount to 1000rdps.

[Gallus]

Tbh I'm more or less fine with BRD. The 10 potency buff should put it a little bit more on par with the other 2 ranged phys classes.

DNC/BRD/MCH never have to do this based on a mechanic. You almost never have to disengage, you dont have to change your rotation based on a mechanic, or do a certain action at a certain time because of said mechanic. The only time you adjust your rotation is for a phase change or a damage window, which every other job already does that.

This is false though. BRD has to adjust its rotation A LOT MORE than pretty much any melee. In fact, every melee has a static rotation, with the same amount of buttons being pressed in the same order every time, pretty much against every fight (with very slight variations). BRD's never the same due to the extreme RNG nature of the procs (both OGCD and GCD), DOT uptime management with downtimes and song alignment with boss phases.
It took me one single afternoon to start managing orange percentiles with SAM. Doing the same thing with BRD consistently took months.
The only thing melees have going for them in terms of difficulty is the uptime (and depending on the fight this isn't even an issue in the first place). Positionals do not pose any sort of challenge when you've automatized them.

[SweetPete]

Did you guys read the translated comment from Yoshi P on bard songs? Here is what he said.

吟遊詩人の歌を返して！という意見もありますが…
→全体が上がりすぎるので難しい
Players commenting on BRD adjustments, saying "Give us back our songs!"
-> If battle system team does it they'll end up making BRD too strong so it's hard to...sorry.

So let me get this straight. We have to have crappy songs for support because we will be to strong with our original songs? Yeah okay. I’m done with bard. I’ll come back once bard becomes an actual bard class.

[HyperiusUltima]

The 10 Potency buff on BRD wasn't enough. Yoshida, your battle team needs to fix BRD big time because right now it's nothing but the butt of jokes along with the rest of the Physical Ranged DPS. DNC I can say is in a good spot to be honest with how its interactions and utilities go, but it shouldn't be shoving MCH or BRD of all things down. MCH in particular should NEVER be that low. If the disparity between a Ranged DPS and a RDM was 500, I'd honestly be ok with it - but when it's 1,000+, there's a problem that your team needs to address.

Bard

- DoTs were neutered in exchange for Songs, because of your 'fear' of recreating the Ranged Meta in Stormblood.
- Lv 80 Capstone is...bad. It cycles usually circa every 60s as is, but honestly just put a CD and give it a base potency so BRD isn't having to mess with gauges so much. Remember all the information clutter you guys talked about on the Buff Bar in Heavensward? Yeah. That's part of the problem here.
- 10 potency on Burst Arrow.

MCH

- Remade for a THIRD TIME, coming into this expansion as a completely different job.
- Selfish DPS akin to BLM/SAM that wants to just do damage. Oh, and has Tactician - which is supposedly something to be overtaxed for on top of "mobility".
- Desperately needs to be bumped up above the 'raid damage buff' DPS. Essentially above NIN(or close to it), but below MNK/DRG.

DNC

- New Job. Got the buffs it needed earlier in this expansion to single target damage.
- Still needs fixes to Improvisation for QoL - please make it like Meditate! We've been asking for it for a while so we don't have whacky numbers like 69 or 99(where Saber Dance literally costs 50).
- Overall in a good spot for what it does, but still needs increases to close RDM DPS Gap.

Ranged Meta will NEVER come back given how you all have set up the Ranged - incompatible raid mitigation(Samba can't stack damage resistance with Tactician, Troubadour) already discourages this. When we get to this new tier, I want to bet that Ranged are going to be edged out in favor of Casters because of gear creep like what happened in Titan in the first tier. In fact, there was a mention about the "1% Buff" that Ranged bring with them a while back - but Caster DPS can theoretically out DPS that 1% coming into next tier with how far gearing has gone. We didn't run into it in Shiva's tier, thankfully, but most of that was merely due to them being high mobility.

[Renkei]

Tbh I'm more or less fine with BRD. The 10 potency buff should put it a little bit more on par with the other 2 ranged phys classes.



This is false though. BRD has to adjust its rotation A LOT MORE than pretty much any melee. In fact, every melee has a static rotation, with the same amount of buttons being pressed in the same order every time, pretty much against every fight (with very slight variations). BRD's never the same due to the extreme RNG nature of the procs (both OGCD and GCD), DOT uptime management with downtimes and song alignment with boss phases.
It took me one single afternoon to start managing orange percentiles with SAM. Doing the same thing with BRD consistently took months.
The only thing melees have going for them in terms of difficulty is the uptime (and depending on the fight this isn't even an issue in the first place). Positionals do not pose any sort of challenge when you've automatized them.

Positional damage bonus can be completely out of your control with the wrong tank, additionally i see no such data, Also, Samurai is the least positional heavy thus far out of the melee dps, at least with physical ranged you deal consistent damage no matter the set up, I feel like ranged has issues that do need to be fixed, Bard for example should be the median inbetween RDPS and ADPS while DNC should be RDPS, and MCH ADPS, I think adding casting back into Ranged jobs isn't a bad idea if they have some type of functionality like Swiftcast with charges, There hasn't been a kiting Mechanic for RNG implemented this entire expansion like in previous ones either.

[Gallus]

Positional damage bonus can be completely out of your control with the wrong tank, additionally i see no such data, Also, Samurai is the least positional heavy thus far out of the melee dps, at least with physical ranged you deal consistent damage no matter the set up, I feel like ranged has issues that do need to be fixed, Bard for example should be the median inbetween RDPS and ADPS while DNC should be RDPS, and MCH ADPS, I think adding casting back into Ranged jobs isn't a bad idea if they have some type of functionality like Swiftcast with charges, There hasn't been a kiting Mechanic for RNG implemented this entire expansion like in previous ones either.

Feel free to check my Deltascape Savage SB logs. I raided that tier with SAM.
As for adding cast times back I have the feeling it wouldn't be well received.

[SaitoHikari]

Ranged Meta will NEVER come back given how you all have set up the Ranged - incompatible raid mitigation(Samba can't stack damage resistance with Tactician, Troubadour) already discourages this. When we get to this new tier, I want to bet that Ranged are going to be edged out in favor of Casters because of gear creep like what happened in Titan in the first tier. In fact, there was a mention about the "1% Buff" that Ranged bring with them a while back - but Caster DPS can theoretically out DPS that 1% coming into next tier with how far gearing has gone. We didn't run into it in Shiva's tier, thankfully, but most of that was merely due to them being high mobility.

I would like to add to this, 'Ranged Meta' wasn't even the fault of ranged classes. It would be way more accurate to describe it as 'Piercing/Crit Meta'.

It wasn't Bard's fault that DRG had the only piercing damage up debuff in the game, a party critical hit rate buff, AND a targeted party member attack boost. It wasn't Bard's fault that SCH as a healer had a critical hit chance debuff. It wasn't Bard's fault that AST cards were the way they were in SB. It wasn't Bard's fault that MNK's Brotherhood used to scale off crit rate. It wasn't Bard's fault that Ninjas were... Well, Ninjas.

Yet from the way you hear people talk in these forums, the entire blame of the ranged meta was thrown at the feet of Bards everywhere. Granted, Bards did contribute to the meta too, but it was rather miniscule compared to the impact that the others had within their respective roles, which stigmatized the selfish melee and casters. It seems the absolute biggest sin in everyone's mind was Bard being an essential role during raid tiers where ranged bait mechanics were generally more frequent, and having an entire gameplay kit that took advantage of everyone else's party buffs, in a way no other class had. When all of the party utility was stripped down across all classes, Bard ended up getting indirectly hurt the most from a personal performance standpoint, and having their identity robbed from a party support standpoint.

The other classes mentioned received adjustments that made up for their losses somewhat (though that's putting it mildly, Healers in general have a right to riot but for entirely different reasons)... But Bard never really did in comparison, only because of 'lol ranged meta'. It's kind of telling that Bard's overall gameplay actually changed the least out of every DPS class between SB and ShB, and ended up getting hurt the most.

Although quite frankly, I wasn't even aware that there was even supposed to be a buff to Bard at all this patch, so I'll take what I can get. Bard's overall design is fundamentally disjointed (and always has been, really - the only reason no one noticed in Stormblood was because our procs being tied to crit rate and all the party crit buffs masked those problems big time), and it's obvious by now that it would take a new expansion to fix those problems. Considering the existence of the Soul Voice gauge that's literally only relevant at endgame (fun fact: Bard is the only DPS class to pull a completely new gauge out of their ass at level 80), I almost wonder if the current iteration of Bard had actually been already designed with level 90 in mind. That would explain why current Bard feels so incomplete at level 80, with us suddenly getting an Army's Paeon upgrade that spends 3 whole paragraphs explaining how we just get 12% haste for 10 seconds, and a gauge out of nowhere that only one skill takes advantage of that doesn't even flow with the rest of the kit and with no real way to control how it charges up.

Any of you guys play Genshin Impact? Have you pulled Zhongli? Bard's Apex Arrow feels like THAT right now.