The Atrocious Changes to Bard in Endwalker and the future

[Shurrikhan]

firstly; Sidewinder is no longer a Dot enhanced skill making it yet another souless GCD like say Fleche that doesnt contribute or interplay what so ever and are as boring and toothless as a 1-2-3 rotation, and dots no longer proc repertoire which transitions us into the atrocious changes

This one really takes the cake for effort-minimization. It's almost like one of the three job designers had to sit the other two down and bat them over the head any time a creative thought entered their mind: "No, think less. Dumber. Dumber. ....Pure potency, you say? Good. Now you're seeing the light."

Some easily imaginable alternatives:

• Deals 200 potency of damage, ignoring any positional shields, instantly inflicting or extends 6 seconds' duration of Venomous Bite and Windbite. (Obviously later upgrades to CB and Sb.)
• Deals 200 potency of damage, ignoring any positional shields, and consumes up to 15 seconds of Venomous Bite and Windbite to instantly deal up to 5 instances of their periodic damage. Does not consume the last 3 seconds.
• Fires a shot, dealing 200 potency of damage, that glances off your target before bouncing to up to 3 enemies in range, spreading instances of Venomous Bite and Windbite to nearby targets, decreasing by 3 seconds per jump. Sidewinder ignores any positional effects.
• Deals 200 potency of damage to your target, ignoring any positional shields, and additionally causing your Venomous Bite and Windbite skills to tick. Additional Effect: Sidewind. Sidewind causes your next Windbite to instead deal half its duration's worth of periodic damage instantly and create a wake of air into which your allies can move more quickly.
• (Some combination of the above two, wherein Sidewinder always consumes duration but deals that potency instantly if there are nearby enemies to spread the DoT to.)

And those took a whole lot longer to type (roughly a minute) than to think up....

[Shironeko_Narunyan]

I only ever see you whine on these forums: MCH bad, DNC bad, BRD bad, SE bad, YoshiP bad.
Maybe this game just isn't for you anymore?

[Rolder50]

I only ever see you whine on these forums: MCH bad, DNC bad, BRD bad, SE bad, YoshiP bad.
Maybe this game just isn't for you anymore?

Odd, I didn't see anyone complaining about Bard at all until they hamfisted in a few nonsense changes at the last minute.

[Tulzscha]

songs having zero interplay with dots now

Sidewinder is no longer a Dot enhanced skill

Seriously? DoT gameplay is the main reason I lvled Bard. SE really hates dots it seems.

[Easayia]

Honestly after trying new bard its not bad your dots are no longer the ticking procs and instead the songs it doesnt feel terrible it just feels simplified. The overall playstyle of bard remained in tact and extra goodies like litterally everything is lining up in our burst window as well as our Battle voice is up every single rotation which just feels very good. the dots are still proccing Straight shot ready for refulgent do still a reason to keep them up.

Mages ballad felt a little odd the whole multiple blood letter charges doesnt really feel like it did anything because you always have them spent and the proc chance to do burst shot > bloodletter seems to be every other shot now instead of basically every single one with occational bad RNG which Im not sure how I feel about it yet....

If anything all the charges to bloodletter did is give you them for your burst window but by the time you reach ballad your back to saying RNG gib me proc but now it feels less often to proc

[Jirah]

I think the worst part about the changes is they made the job incredibly automatic, the only thing they can do to worsen it is to remove EA trait, have the songs be a designated 120 combo instead of free will, and remove the dots due to “outdated resource” that they themselves made outdated

With DNC and MCH, and adding SMN and MNK to this merry band of sleeper jobs, being very on rails, BRD is very closely becoming just DNC. Another win for job homogenization, and a win to the delusional crowd of apologists that would rather watch particles than play a game

[HappyHubris]

I think the worst part about the changes is they made the job incredibly automatic, the only thing they can do to worsen it is to remove EA trait, have the songs be a designated 120 combo instead of free will, and remove the dots due to “outdated resource” that they themselves made outdated

With DNC and MCH, and adding SMN and MNK to this merry band of sleeper jobs, being very on rails, BRD is very closely becoming just DNC. Another win for job homogenization, and a win to the delusional crowd of apologists that would rather watch particles than play a game

Patch 6.1:
-Burst shot and Refulgent arrow now share a button, with burst shot converting into RA when up.
-BRD songs refresh Caustic Bite and Stormbite on application.
-Peloton has been converted to an out-of-combat trait for all classes.

[Kadhe]

Having been a Bard main since Stormblood I'm disappointed to say the least. I know a lot of people were unhappy with the transition from SB Bard to ShB Bard but I thought those changes were mostly positive. This time, however, they've really messed us up.

I'm glad we're finally on a 120s rotation instead of being the only job in the game with a weird 80s cycle, but the fact they chose to do this by extending our three existing songs rather than giving us a fourth means the whole song part of our identity feels like even less of an active process now than it did before. We just press a button once every 45s now instead of every 30s. Except it's even worse because from what I can tell our song tick rate is completely independent of server ticks and starts counting from 0 at the exact moment the song starts, meaning the first tick doesn't occur until 3s and the last tick occurs at 42s. As a result, if we don't want to waste potentially dozens of procs per fight, we have to switch immediately after the 42s tick. This makes song transitions clunky and awkward - a problem that has been persistent since I started playing the job and has only been made worse now.

What's more, our songs have changed from spells to abilities, meaning their cooldowns are no longer shortened by Army's Paeon and are instead fixed at 120s, leaving us with less room for optimisation around downtime.

Our new abilities add nothing of interest; Apex Arrow has always been disappointing and Blast Arrow does nothing to change that. Meanwhile, Radiant Finale had the potential to be at least somewhat interesting, but arrives to us in its final form as just another button to press once every 2 minutes and then forget about.

All that said, I find the biggest fun killer overall is the 80% proc rate. It is a flat 80% per song tick and is not affected by how many dots we have up at any time, meaning double procs are a thing of the past. Granted, this does also mean that looooong periods of having no procs at all are also less likely, so I can understand why some people might prefer this greater consistency. For me personally however, this is a dreadful change. They've taken away everything that made Bard fun to play - the frantic pace, the quick decision making, the buttons lighting up all over my screen - and they've turned it into a predictable, lethargic, linear job like Paladin or Dragoon. To say nothing of our new Army's Paeon window where we basically become White Mage and spam one single GCD for an entire 45 seconds.

I was going to say something about dots, but I forgot we even still have them, and it appears SE did too.

It's not all bad news of course. Three Bloodletter charges? Cool. Able to benefit from our own Battle Voice? Great. I'm not saying I don't appreciate some of the changes, but I am saying they don't make up for the butcher's knife SE applied to our toolkit and identity.

[dezzmont]

Patch 6.1:
-Burst shot and Refulgent arrow now share a button, with burst shot converting into RA when up.

To be honest I wouldn't mind this as having two buttons doesn't really add anything to these jobs as long as the job had a 'high focus' support playstyle. But seeing as they don't manage that for healers I doubt they would for bard.

The big thing for me is ladonsbite feels... so much dramatically worse than Quick Nock. Its just a bit too slow an animation and while it is a silly thing in some ways to care about and Bard's AOE had very well known problems, the AOE spam skill went from being one of the best feeling in the game to one of the worst.

[Easayia]

They didnt remove dots though they are still there for other things. Personally the only thing Im not a fan of is our weakest song is now played for far longer of a time the rest of the changes are very good. Our rotation didnt really change at all other then its just longer now and dots only need to be refreshed a few times instead of very often. The way Bard plays did not change my burst combo is the same just now I use Battle Voice before it since it now buffs me and I also have Battle voice every single burst window which feels super nice. On top of that we have a party buff with Codas on top of that we have a skill to use after Apex so even more damage.

Shadowbringers Bard to this one is almost identical the only thing they changes is how the dot ticks so AOEing mobs if anything can feel a bit wierd since not used to it yet but its getting better the more I do it and realize when to use the skills. The kit feels more complete even if they wouldve kept dots as he 2 arrows it wouldnt have played that much differently.

This job feels nothing like Dancer.