The Atrocious Changes to Bard in Endwalker and the future

[Easayia]

the more I play new bard the more I like it I agree on the dots being its identity thing a bit but its clear they are trying to remove that as an identity and just have it be damage if you have them at all. Bards new opener and burst window is simply better thanks to BV (buffing bard) , radiant finale, blast , and 3 bloodletter charges so you can keep it going it just feels super smooth now to go burst shot bloodletter and weaving in refulgents as you get them within the burst window. So Burst window compared to last expansion is just way way better. Mages ballad for the most part feels the same but now you have an aditional use of sidewinder and apex > blast in your rotation which is just amazing!. Ya the only area it feels a bit lacking is with AOEing mobs. I think their intent was good since now we have more skills to use there then just ROD but I think the fact barrage doesnt proc shadowbite, and sometimes you dont get that proc to use rain of death can feel a bit slow at times. However that said apex into blasting on the aoe rotation does make up for it in some spots. I appreciate no longer having to dot everything while I travel and just spamming aoe instead like the rest of the jobs. tabbing to each mob was not ideal cool it had some skill to it but there was no reason for it to ever be a thing. sidewinder ya that change I dont agree with Sidewinder was the big payoff for keeping up the dots to your burst window and now its just damage you pop off I would rather it be tied to the dots. Armies currently feels the worse out of all the songs because your saving your Bloodletter charges for that burst window so its basically 1 button spam with occasional refulgent and Empyreal. Bard feels the same in terms of single target other then the better more thought out opener and burst window. I have felt no difference in play even though the bloodletters are only decreasing the cooldown and not resetting it. its only armies that feels bad to me and the AOE rotation just needs small tweaks.

[Kitkat]

Just recently got Brd up to 90 after hanging it up for most of Shadowbringer in turn for Dnc or Rdm after rebalancing took place. Have to say I'm tripping over the amount of buffs at times when it comes to burst window, but that might just be how my bar is setup at the moment. However, that is one reason I am glad I don't have to worry about DoT cycling like in the past as it would make the job far too busy. Then again, tying it strictly to procing Refulgent Arrow is a bit infuriate even if you want to cycle it on to a few extra targets simply because you aren't going to stop AOE to use Refulgent arrow and would much rather see this go back to RoD/Bloodletter especially due to the potency and Repertoire changes, even if it was a low 5~10% proc increase it would be better for synergy compared to how it is right now given the fact they would rather have Repertoire doing a 7.5 second reduction instead of a full reset like it used to be. The changes to how DoT are on brd just makes it feel like we are one step closer to them removing them entirely due to the potency nerf and the Repertoire chance removal, and if that is their endgame....I'd rather they just remove them now entirely instead of rework them back into our kit more.

[Easayia]

Just recently got Brd up to 90 after hanging it up for most of Shadowbringer in turn for Dnc or Rdm after rebalancing took place. Have to say I'm tripping over the amount of buffs at times when it comes to burst window, but that might just be how my bar is setup at the moment. However, that is one reason I am glad I don't have to worry about DoT cycling like in the past as it would make the job far too busy. Then again, tying it strictly to procing Refulgent Arrow is a bit infuriate even if you want to cycle it on to a few extra targets simply because you aren't going to stop AOE to use Refulgent arrow and would much rather see this go back to RoD/Bloodletter especially due to the potency and Repertoire changes, even if it was a low 5~10% proc increase it would be better for synergy compared to how it is right now given the fact they would rather have Repertoire doing a 7.5 second reduction instead of a full reset like it used to be. The changes to how DoT are on brd just makes it feel like we are one step closer to them removing them entirely due to the potency nerf and the Repertoire chance removal, and if that is their endgame....I'd rather they just remove them now entirely instead of rework them back into our kit more.

Ya our burst window is nice and filled with skills now and the blood letter charges as well as radiant finale and blast arrow just make weaving skills feel so dang good!

[IchiExorz]

I dont think bard will lose the dots but the dots may be changed into 1 skill to reapply and open up 2 more slots for 2 more new skills just a hunch.

I mean look at what happened to SMN. They had 3 dots. Then they had 2. Reduced the amount of dot interactions they had & now the dots are removed.
I hope that's not the case with BRD but idk why SE seems to hate dots.

[Mapleine]

Wait, jobs were supposed to get more complex as levels increase?!

*Looks at the Heavensward kit.*
*Looks at Endwalker's.*

...Make this make sense, please.

Heavensward was pure, unadalterated clunk. It is exactly what MMOs have abandoned ship from and that is the right choice 100% of the time. It had negative complexity, what it had was clunk and punishment to cover it up, same as every other MMO using design from the aughts.

What they did was take away that clunk, make the jobs slow smooth and they moved the complexity onto encounter design. Exactly the right call for the game to survive and grow.

I mean look at what happened to SMN. They had 3 dots. Then they had 2. Reduced the amount of dot interactions they had & now the dots are removed.
I hope that's not the case with BRD but idk why SE seems to hate dots.

Prob coz under a snapshot system they're almost mindless. Little about them matter outside of weird personal hangups. I'd be cool with an inspired decay job in the futur but classical-styled DoTs don't really do anything other than giving you a chore and yeah, those of us who don't relate to the desire for that chore are usually confused.

[Rhais]

What they did was take away that clunk, make the jobs slow smooth and they moved the complexity onto encounter design.

I see this claim made occasionally, but where is the evidence of it? How has encounter design increased in complexity since HW?

[Shurrikhan]

Heavensward was pure, unadalterated clunk.

It had clunk, but it was far from limited thereto. None of it required that performance loss from Ranged utility turn from a player option into a role-based tax (upon that utility having been turned from damage-costing songs to free oGCDs) nor the eventual removal of Ranged support as anything but parse-complicators (DPS moved from one player to another and back again in accounting for rDPS).

It is exactly what MMOs have abandoned ship from and that is the right choice 100% of the time.

*Looks at WoW. And also at DRK, MCH, etc.*

It had negative complexity, what it had was clunk and punishment to cover it up, same as every other MMO using design from the aughts.

Negative complexity is when various small, obfuscating elements reduce the actual depth and breadth of decision-making available to a player.

For complexity to be "negative", the element's (whether that be a skill, an additional effect therein, or even an obscure interaction between skills) removal must result in increased decision-making available. Every version of every job has had some of this, but HW Bard was by no means limited to negative complexity.

What they did was take away that clunk, make the jobs slow smooth and they moved the complexity onto encounter design. Exactly the right call for the game to survive and grow.

At no point has encounter design increased in complexity as a result of decreased kit complexity. Nor has every job been made smoother as a result of those allegedly streamlining changes. See Anatman openers in Shadowbringers, for instance.
______________________

The rest of what you've quoted is not mine, so I will leave that to whomever you took that from.

[Satarn]

What they did was take away that clunk, make the jobs slow smooth and they moved the complexity onto encounter design.

This is a lie that's repeated every time to justify homogenization and watering down of the game, but it is only that - a lie or, at best, a delusion.

Since SHB we have seen:
- proportionally lower healing requirements in comparison to the growing healing/mitigation kits
- lower amount of tank busters and less decision making in regards to them (no more auto crits or damage type differences unless you're using Dark Mind), even when they do anything remotely interesting, like multiple hits, it can be mostly cheesed with invulns due to how rarely they happen
- bosses that teleport for most of their significant mechanics, which largely diminishes the positioning aspect of tanking as well as strat variety and melee uptime concerns
- next to no add spawns while the boss is still around, they've been mostly relegated to their own phases only
- constant recycling of a number of old, simple mechanics in just about every encounter, proteans being probably the worst offender

As evidence of encounter complexity people like to look at the "dance" mechanics, like Light Rampant and such, but the reality is - those aren't new. I can't talk of HW as I did not raid in that expansion, but StB had plenty of those and it also had more job complexity, more positioning (which also played greatly into those dance mechanics) and proportionally more damage.

Moreover, the idea of sacrificing job complexity in favor of encounter design is folly due to how the game works in the first place. Firstly, relying solely on encounter complexity makes casual content (which is majority of the game) incredibly boring, since there are no mechanics to carry it. More importantly however - even the difficult content is near completely scripted by design, which makes it very, very hard to make it feel actually complex and engaging on repetition.

The way the game works, it is crucial that job design and encounter design work in tandem to create engagement by interacting with each other (performing your job while doing the mechanics at the same time), as neither of those can really ever be good enough on their own. You screw one enough, the other will ultimately suffer also as result.

It is exactly what MMOs have abandoned ship from and that is the right choice 100% of the time.

Btw this line is rather amusing, given that the entire mmorpg genre has been on a decline for a good while now, so the notion that them all "abandoning the old ways" was a good thing, doesn't quite track.

[VentVanitas]

- constant recycling of a number of old, simple mechanics in just about every encounter, proteans being probably the worst offender

This tier especially for whatever reason has a massive obsession with limit cut.

[Kaedys]

This tier especially for whatever reason has a massive obsession with limit cut.

It sorta makes sense. It's a reasonably recently added mechanic, first seen in TEA afaik, which was 5.11, and then seen again at least in Cloud Deck Extreme (and possibly others), so they like to lean into it. In addition, it's a good mechanic from a coordination and raid awareness perspective. Each person has a different action they need to take (especially when it's a split limit cut, like Kampeos in P2S, where half the raid has to do one thing and the other half something different), and people need to precisely coordinate movement with their allies based on the timing sequence randomly applied by the mechanic.

Personally, I prefer mechanics like that compared to "follow the danger dorito" mechanics like literally every mechanic in Ex1 in EW. Even the "2 random people out of 8 have to move" mechanics, like the water drop debuff in E2S, are pretty "meh", imo, especially when it has a well known and obvious role-selection on it (1 tank and 1 DPS, for that one).