"Serious" Bard 6.0 predicted/suggested kit

[Dogempire]

I'd flip this around, and argue that the other ranged should be more like this. As physical ranged, we do not have cast times to worry about, nor do we have melee range or positional concerns.

It makes sense to make up for that lack of "built-in" difficulty somehow, and one way to do it is to have a somewhat higher level of randomness / tracking / juggling than would be allowed on a melee or caster.

A lot of people find Machinist to be dreadfully boring to play for more than a short while, because it has a kit that's tank-level in its simplicity. Without any of the other factors that make it so that tanks are still interesting to play, nor any casts or positionals to do so otherwise, it gets stale fast.

Gonna have to disagree there, not everyone wants to play whack a mole with rng procs, and there needs to be a healthy choice in ranged playstyles other than play the piano but with different weapons and different colored skills. I can agree with ranged being high APM but making all 3 jobs reskins of each other with proc heavy gameplay is basically copying the design mistakes SE made with tanks and healers, reducing their kits to basically reskins of each other with minor flavor variations, and basically taking the lazy approach to balancing.

They could easily make dancer more proc heavy like you suggested, took bard and tuned down its kit a bit so that it has cycling damage phases with their own separate but busy rotations like summoner (but better), and take machinist and get rid of the hypercharge ping nonsense and give it a rigid but busy rotation that requires you to keep everything aligned and not let your skill cooldowns drift out of your burst phase (Like Gunbreaker)

Of course, they could do something entirely different, but ranged jobs shouldn't all fit into the same mold of "Proc hell" otherwise it's 5.0 healers all over again.

[CKNovel]

Gonna have to disagree there, not everyone wants to play whack a mole with rng procs, and there needs to be a healthy choice in ranged playstyles other than play the piano but with different weapons and different colored skills. I can agree with ranged being high APM but making all 3 jobs reskins of each other with proc heavy gameplay is basically copying the design mistakes SE made with tanks and healers, reducing their kits to basically reskins of each other with minor flavor variations, and basically taking the lazy approach to balancing.

Same here, I disagree that all rangeds needs to be the same.

MCH is currently boring because of 3 major factors:
-Heatblast spam and its GR/Ricochets
-The way too automated Automaton Queen.
-1 2 3 with no savor.

Heatblast talks for itself, no ones likes to press the same 5 GCDs in a row, Warriors was fun in SB but it quickly became tiring and SQEX decided to apply the same formula to DRK and MCH. Then you have Wildfire, an "empowered Hypercharge". The only interaction you have with the AQ is summoning it and the button if you goofed the summoning timing. And the 123 combo is simply not right, it's a "wait until you have something" combo, which was the same thing but with procs during SB/HW, except there was ammos back then.

In my opinion, BRD and DNC should be on equal support. SQEX doesn't wants both job to be the same, just makes DNC focus on one team member and BRD on the whole party (Including themselves). DNC support needs to be yeeted, at least remove Devilment but keeps the dancer partner dynamic. Not just "Hey, here's buffs and do the job for me", that keeps me very far from the job.

While charges Bloodletter/RoD is as predictable as a rainbow after the rain, one thing I missed was the "magic support" role. Now it's completely gone, but sometimes I wonder if BRD would work well with Spellspeed bonuses, I know for sure Black Mage would enjoy it and doubt RDM/SMN would be against it. I'm not a huge fan of BRD procs and the job is a reverse of SB/HW MCH, spam 1 while waiting for procs.
I barely play BRD, but it hurts a lot to see the song buff nerfed that much after all BRD would bring during SB.

[Cetonis]

Gonna have to disagree there, not everyone wants to play whack a mole with rng procs, and there needs to be a healthy choice in ranged playstyles other than play the piano but with different weapons and different colored skills.

Of course. I didn't mean to say 'more like Bard' in terms of exactly having lots of random oGCDs lighting up.

The comment was originally replying someone who said Bard had too much to pay attention to. But I think all the ranged should have attention-demanding rotations, since we don't have the natural concerns that other jobs have. There are plenty of ways to do that besides randomly timed procs.

Yet instead, Machinist is about as complex as a tank kit, if even - and comparing it to any melee is just laughable. MCH's gauge and GCD management should be *at least* as complex as Samurai's, for instance, if it's going to have that sort of kit. There's no justification for it not to be. And Dancer is not much better.

Note, while I wouldn't change core elements of Bard that lead to "lots to track", I am advocating for addressing some of the higher-pressure elements (BL proc overwrites, PP expiration, EA, Muse stuff). And I think/hope that in turn they can add a little complexity back, so long as it takes a more "fair" form than some of the aforementioned.