Quote Originally Posted by mallleable View Post
They really aren't. Let's take the current alliance raid, the Ark Angels fight can end towards the end of Mage's Ballad with not enough time to use Army's Paean early which means a BRD will be down gauge, Army's Muse buff and coda going into the Shadow Lord fight. BRD can't use Army's Paean out of combat either. And unlike every other job, BRD did not receive buffs to get a free damage during burst at the start of the expansion. Doing something like Barrage grants a free Apex/Blast Arrow, and deleting coda while making Radiant Finale, and Encore flat buff/potency, and making Muse a passive trait would actually make BRD a lot more flexible.
In my experience it’s more ‘when things go wrong’ that Bard can be heavily punished with cool-down misalignment - namely dying lol. Like if you just hit Ballad then somehow die so now it’s on cool-down but the remaining song cycle is 90 seconds, so there’s like 30 seconds of potentially having to wait for Ballad with no song up.

Or if you mistakenly hit (or don’t hit in some cases lol) the song before the enemy disappears so you’re stuck having to wait for them to come back to get the rotation ‘back on track’ lol.

Summoner has a similar issue with Egi / Demi cooldowns; dying or whatever can have a really big impact on your how you cycle through the overall rotation.

I guess many people would argue it’s a skill issue so it shouldn’t be changed, but it does feel weird that they’re like ‘we want to make the game extremely forgiving and lenient especially towards new players’, then simultaneously make certain jobs that can completely fall apart entirely if ‘mishandled’. Though I can’t speak to the extent to which every job is like this (since I haven’t played them), so I guess maybe they’re all could be like that.

Maybe they could have both? Loosen the punishment Bards receive for dying without removing it? Like maybe it could have emergency cool-down that resets song cooldowns but on like a Hallowed Ground length cool-down? Makes things a bit easier if recovering but doesn’t completely remove ‘skill expression’ (cuz if you die again you’re still screwed lol)