I am joining the conversation as a bard player who had started playing this game in July during the last patch in ShB. In this time, I had gone from playing the msq, to clearing the last raid tier, to clearing past fights mine, to clearing TEA 1 week before EW's release. I had gone from knowing nothing to falling in love with the one I had started up with. I remember being upset with myself with little mistakes I made as I was tackling savages (with occasional dropping dots) and then learning how each actor had their own timer for when things would tick all at the same time. So I found this way the core of the job that is Bard in ShB is a job about planning out your 0GCDs. You have some information in the form of stacks, duration, cooldowns, any utility you need to use in the fight and you use that to make a plan for the next two weave windows you will be having. It took me a bit to feel I was comfortable enough before I started tracking my dot timing and getting refining things more and more but eventually I got the hang of it and by the last time I played, it had become second nature to me.

Then I started doing TEA. That core gets more nuanced there as the dots are offset during the first phase (2 targets that have spawned at different times). It might sound chaotic at first and to an extent, the cooldown of pitch perfect becomes a restriction to consider but sparing further details it all kind of fits together in a quite nice way. It felt rewarding to dot all available targets in this fight, manage my resources properly and trying to grab little edges.

I know this is just my perspective but I know that every bard player I have talked to that has cleared this fight revered the two target section of it over anything single target they have had with this job. However I am writing this to give my story on why I liked the core of bard in ShB.

Which is also why I feel alienated by how they moved procs away from dot ticks and into just a single proc from your song. Multi target fights, lose their nuance and single target ogcd planning,... well it just gets too predictable. All the planning in WM is now just an opener. The dot tracking in MB to maximise your BLs, is now irrelevant, granted the song is now almost as interesting and interractive as AP was in ShB.

As dungeons are brought up, it used to be you would be using quite often QN and 2 RoD's in your ogcd window while fighting trash, along with 1-3 apex arrows depending on the dungeon, add survival, luck. I think that the shadowbite proc combo for aoe they added helps control the chaos and manage your resources better,... but the loss of dot procs means there is nothing to manage to begin with.

The core is gone, MB is worse than AP, MB has lost part of what made the song distinct and if summoner had to lose his dots, why should bard have those 3 abilities if they serve no purpose?