So how would you buff bard? (Just like to hear peoples thoughts)

[Absurdity]

I mean I agree with you there.

But what do you mean by "snapshotting your DoTs with all the crit buffs"? You can still do that. DoTs get buffed by crit raid buffs.

You can, the difference however is that critical hits no longer interact with anything in your kit.
Snapshotting crit buffs before 5.0 meant more Repertoire procs whereas nowadays all you get is slightly more damage, not exactly all that exciting.

[Valence]

Refresh my memory, did crit buffs affect dots differently than they do today back in SB?

[Carighan]

Delete the dot, problem solved

How so? Or do you mean free up all 3 slots currently used for the 2 DoT appliers + Iron Jaws? Because hrm.. debatable, but yeah. If the potency of the other skills were buffed to compensate, sure. Feels a bit odd, but I can see that work, considering it's 3 buttons for effectively 1 upkeep skill every 45s, which is a supremely terrible button-to-gameplay ratio even for FFXIV.

[Absurdity]

Refresh my memory, did crit buffs affect dots differently than they do today back in SB?

Your Repertoire procs were tied to your DoT ticks being critical hits. So no, they didn't affect the DoTs themselves differently but your DoTs critting more often affected your songs.

[Shurrikhan]

Refresh my memory, did crit buffs affect dots differently than they do today back in SB?

No, but each crit additionally supplied a portion of a Bloodletter's damage regardless of the damage of said crit, so DoT crits were more valuable back then. On release, for instance, Bard had access to a 30% crit buff for 15s via Internal Release, which amounted to a pretty huge amount of damage via additional Bloodletter resets.

It's all still damage, ultimately, but the damage then was more variable (because a reset before we had multiple charges could amount to anywhere from 15 to <1 second of actual CDR) and channeled through a more gameplay-felt means (additional APM via additional Bloodletter --and later Rain of Death-- casts).

Naturally, it also meant that we could enter pulls' full-gather in Stormblood with some 8 DoTs up to average more than 1 Rain of Death reset per GCD.

[CalvinDescoles]

How so? Or do you mean free up all 3 slots currently used for the 2 DoT appliers + Iron Jaws? Because hrm.. debatable, but yeah. If the potency of the other skills were buffed to compensate, sure. Feels a bit odd, but I can see that work, considering it's 3 buttons for effectively 1 upkeep skill every 45s, which is a supremely terrible button-to-gameplay ratio even for FFXIV.

As long as they replace the 3 slots spell by at least 1 or 2 and that they require to be used more than once every 45 sec (or once in a single fight) i think this is ok.

[mallleable]

As long as they replace the 3 slots spell by at least 1 or 2 and that they require to be used more than once every 45 sec (or once in a single fight) i think this is ok.

They just have to make Caustic Bite the only dot and maybe shorten its duration to 30 seconds, rework Stormbite to not be a dot -- maybe some kind of multi hit thing like Harmonic Arrow from PVP, and replace Iron Jaws with something else -- maybe an AOE GCD that applies the Caustic Bite dot to all enemies hit.

[CalvinDescoles]

They just have to make Caustic Bite the only dot and maybe shorten its duration to 30 seconds, rework Stormbite to not be a dot -- maybe some kind of multi hit thing like Harmonic Arrow from PVP, and replace Iron Jaws with something else -- maybe an AOE GCD that applies the Caustic Bite dot to all enemies hit.

you do not really solve the problem that you have 3 button almost never used

[Shurrikhan]

Main Wants, whatever the means (assuming no glaring novel side-effects):

• No button or effect existing only to invalidate previous buttons.
  
  Iron Jaws invalidating both Bites' buttons is the obvious example here. It'd need to be revised or scrapped. Note that the suggestion made earlier to make the DoTs permanent would also, in effect, waste their buttons for all but the first couple GCDs of combat, just as Iron Jaws does, and is therefore also a no-go.
  
  
• More GCD rotational anchors (things we're encouraged to time to a specific frequency).
  
  At present we have effectively 3 per 120 seconds (as any other non-fillers cost less than 10 potency per 3 seconds by which they're off their ideal timing or give 10 to 20 seconds in which to use them without loss). I'd be looking for about triple that.
  
  
• Less (of a sense of) spending time just on filler (Refulgent > Burst Shot, reducible into a single key-swipe), which currently accounts for 87% of GCDs.
  
  This can be done by increasing the prevalence of other actions or by making that less filler more choiceful. If Refulgent was less able to be simply key-swiped over Burst Shot to prevent any need to track the action (such as DoTs sometimes being worth allowing to fall off instead of wasting the Hawk's Eye proc, or the proc being able to stack up to twice, etc.), that would help make the "filler" portion feel like just the ~60% of cpm spent on Burst Shot instead of the 81% of it and RA combined. Similarly, having different ways to spend those procs conditionally exceed Refulgent's value as spender would make RA feel less filler-ish in itself, as might a way to granularly set up mini-windows between Burst and some other spammable action with leads from but not entirely owed to procs in turn make Burst Shot feel less filler-esque.
  
  
• Greater song flexibility, and something that allows them to at least occasionally feel like actual songs / deliberate support actions instead of just a rotation between Haste, increased frequency of old oGCD, and a new-oGCD further enforced by a raid-buff (and now nuke) that would further punish breaking alignment.
  
  It's never quite made sense to me that we replaced these active raid support components with solely the likes of ~1% constant passive dps increases for the raid. Worse, it feels a waste to suborn them to an internal gameplay mechanism only to then provide so little variance from said internal gameplay mechanism or control over its use.

Working on ways to do that, but for starters I'm curious what other goals people have in mind beyond just "more damage" or "burn it all down and start from scratch".

[Carighan]

One thing that I don't know whether it'd go down well with many other players but would definitely help in their "feel" would be to make songs double GCDs.

To compensate, either apply plenty potency buff to other GCD actions or - IMO - make the unique effects of each song stronger.

But add an ~5s window in which we actually play, with a proper song that you can actually hear. Bonus points if it's a moving-cast where we're slow (but then further buff songs or other actions to compensate for time lost due to not being able to use it at a specific moment).