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

[Shurrikhan]

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).

If you just used a multi-charge general ability to enhance the effects of whichever song you're currently playing, you could still swap between the songs fluidly despite the extra thematic functionality/flair of being able to actually play the songs.

[Carighan]

If you just used a multi-charge general ability to enhance the effects of whichever song you're currently playing, you could still swap between the songs fluidly despite the extra thematic functionality/flair of being able to actually play the songs.

Hrm, good point. Would be more difficult to add sound to it without becoming annoying, but would work just as well mechanically of course!

[Rdkng]

Hello, I’m a noob to Bard and FF14 in general. Currently lvl 83 and find this a very squishy job to level, it would be nice if there were less PvP circus tricks (Foot Graze, Leg Graze) etc.) while in PvE and better options for mitigation and health management. I did get Troubadour around level 60, so there's that I guess.

I recently got Apex Arrow and was surprised it is on a GCD, and considering Bard’s other oGCD abilities it feels kind of clunky. Apex Arrow also has a somewhat lengthy build up and then a little drop comes out. I would also like to see the DoTs oGCD as well, or removed altogether, they add little to gameplay and there’s plenty of other things to keep track of. It takes fifteen seconds to dot up three mobs, so now I just dot the one that looks different and call it good, there should be an AoE option for this.

Despite Bard being a whack-a-mole type job, I’m currently enjoying it. I did level a Warrior to lvl 50 or so on another character and the gameplay felt really good. Pity there isn’t a Warrior DPS job available.

[Connor]

snip.

Bard has always been fairly squishy / low defense as a ranged dps, but it does have a few things to help. Paean can remove anything that can be removed with Esuna (not that you ever need Esuna lol), Second Wind will eventually get a potency buff and can be strengthened further by Nature’s Minne (by 15% so around 4400ish extra HP at level 100 / Ilvl 720ish lol). Troubadour also gets a cool-down reduction trait at some point to 90 seconds. With that in mind for basically anything solo you can just hit Minuet, unload your burst on the enemy (Barrage + Refulgent Arrow, Apex Arrow if it’s available), then they’re either dead or almost dead by the time Radiant Finale (lv 90) wears off. And if they’re not, using the above should be more than enough to keep you going the rest of the way, I guess it’s a bit like a traditional rpg ‘glass cannon’ - your best bet is to kill them before they kill you lol. There’s definitely an aspect of ‘this job is missing quite a lot of tools’ at lower levels, but that sadly applies to every job these days really lol. Also don’t forget you can use Super/Hyper Potions to restore HP too in solo situations! If you aren’t already

Apex Arrow being a GCD is one of those things that ‘makes sense when you hit level cap’ lol. If it was another oGCD, Bard would just run into the same / similar problem Dancers have of having billions of oGCDs stuffed into an extremely short window. With all our current oGCDs, the rotation would start to get a little ‘overstuffed’ if we also had to throw Apex and Blast Arrow in there.

As for DoTs they’re something that been part of Bard’s toolkit since its inception. Removing them would mean Bards losing another part of its own (FFXIV) identity, since it would lose yet another thing that differentiated it from other DPS jobs. Personally I’d rather see DoTs returning to actually interact with Bard’s toolkit the way they did before, in whatever form that takes (tying it to Repertoire for critical DoT ticks again might cause problems with crit scaling or whatever).

It’s also worth mentioning, Bard effectively only has like three GCDs it actually uses outside of specific situations like AoE’ing. Burst Shot, Refulgent Arrow and Iron Jaws (not including on-cool-down gcds like Apex and Radiant Encore). If we removed DoTs from the job entirely or made them oGCD, Bard would go down to effectively only having two GCD’s with Burst Shot and Refulgent - which in a sense are kind of just one gcd since Refulgent is a proc lol.

So Bards would ultimately just be spamming Burst / Refulgent for literally the entirety of a fight with nothing in between except oGCDs and stuff like Apex / Encore once every 60-120s. Iron Jaws isn’t exactly the pinnacle of exciting gameplay lol (though it does look cool poisoning someone by conducting magical-poison-aether and pointing at them angrily), but rather than removing it I think making the DoTs actually have a place in the toolkit would be the much better option.

That’s what I think anyway.

[Kahnha]

If I had my way bard would not be bard; just archer no songs no harp no music.

you just use bow and arrow and you do massive damage really fast you build up gauge for explosive or toxic arrows and your defensives are evasive based like you dodge physical attacks better but you have to worry about magic attacks to get best dmg you upkeep the toxic dot every 3 rotations and there is a reward for keeping it up maybe you have bns skill speed for keeping the dot up past 3 rotations. :3

numbers are nice but I'd say just make the classes fun.

[Connor]

If I had my way bard would not be bard; just archer no songs no harp no music.

you just use bow and arrow and you do massive damage really fast you build up gauge for explosive or toxic arrows and your defensives are evasive based like you dodge physical attacks better but you have to worry about magic attacks to get best dmg you upkeep the toxic dot every 3 rotations and there is a reward for keeping it up maybe you have bns skill speed for keeping the dot up past 3 rotations. :3

numbers are nice but I'd say just make the classes fun.

I mean, I’d like a ‘real FF Ranger (tm)’ just as much as I’d like a ‘real FF Bard’, especially if it incorporated the familiars from FFV (though maybe that’s too close to Beastmaster). Unfortunately though, we’re kinda stuck with the Bard we currently have because anything else is ‘Too Much Work’ lol, resulting in the scale between Archer/Bard hanging in a constantly precarious balance (either it’s ’too musical’ for some or ‘too archer-y for others and rarely ever ‘just right’).

Frankly I think it’s also why Bard has so much trouble with trying to balance out support vs personal damage. Traditional FF Bards almost exclusively support the party in some way, but Traditional FF Archers/Rangers are generally only really associated with dps (DPT? lol), usually with high accuracy rates and elemental arrows to hit weaknesses without magic.

So people who want it to be more a traditional Bard (it’s me I’m the problem) balk at the idea of overburdening the job with dps/archery stuff, while those favouring Archer/Ranger feel likewise about making the job even more of a weird pseudo magical musician who just happens to have a bow lol. And I guess there’s people who like the hybrid aspect too thinking ‘what is everyone complaining about’; from what I understand most point to Stormblood as the most successful version of the barcher ‘hybrid’.

Thats my view on the matter anyway. I think the job is ultimately held back by being a hybrid of two separate jobs with completely disparate identities, but it’s one of those things we just have to accept I guess unfortunately.

[Shurrikhan]

If I had my way bard would not be bard; just archer no songs no harp no music.

you just use bow and arrow and you do massive damage really fast you build up gauge for explosive or toxic arrows and your defensives are evasive based like you dodge physical attacks better but you have to worry about magic attacks to get best dmg you upkeep the toxic dot every 3 rotations and there is a reward for keeping it up maybe you have bns skill speed for keeping the dot up past 3 rotations. :3

numbers are nice but I'd say just make the classes fun.

Then why have it be called Bard at all?

I mean, I'm all for split jobs, since it reduces requisite grind and plays off of world lore a bit further, but if the job is to have zero instrumentation / musical element, it feel it probably ought to just be called Ranger or the like.

Granted, I also feels that even with that alternative's presence, a Bard should still have a solid core of archery skills, even if its kit ought then to be shifted at least a bit in favor of musically themed support, since removing a sensible weapon from it would just change Bard --historically eclectic and largely based on its way of using intersecting skills rather than its combat arts directly-- into a Sonic Mage.

[Connor]

since removing a sensible weapon from it would just change Bard --historically eclectic and largely based on its way of using intersecting skills rather than its combat arts directly-- into a Sonic Mage.

Is this based on Bard from other games or exclusively on Bard in XIV? That doesn’t really make any sense in the context of Final Fantasy because Bard has never been associated with bows outside of this specific game. In FFIII, IV and V it uses harps as its main weapon, one could maybe stretch Cait Sith’s megaphones as being ‘kinda like an instrument’ (calling out orders is kinda like singing lol?), Eiko in FFIX (she’s a Summoner but that’s the closest it gets lol) uses Flutes for a fair amount of her weapons. XI had instruments as a weird off-hand weapon but they were still so crucial to the job’s basic functions (i.e song amount / duration) that they practically did serve as its ‘main weapon’; the weapon slot was just for a dagger/staff to augment your songs/spells lol.

I think based on how Bard appeared in every iteration of FF besides this one, I’m not sure it can really be said that ‘Bard would stop being a Bard if it got a traditional Bard weapon like a Harp or Flute [instead of a Bow and Arrow] ’. It would be like saying ‘Black Mages shouldn’t use staves and if they do they’re not really Black Mages ’. Even if XIV had established Black Mages as fast-paced hand-to-hand martial artists, people would still be like ‘where the staves tho lol’ ‘black mage with no staff how can this be’ etc. I think previously established aesthetics / identity / design concepts should matter, because they do for every other job in this game.

I mean, the ‘practicality’ argument doesn’t make much sense either in a world where people go to war wielding literal books, floating representations of the cosmos and that one guy with the giant paintbrush. That’s before even mentioning the guy whose weapon is four floating glowing crystals they throw around to heal people. And again, if we’re looking at the context of Final Fantasy as a whole, practically every game is full of ‘people running into battle with wholly unpractical and unreasonable weaponry’ lol. Cait Sith fighting with the aforementioned Megaphone, Wakka’s Blitzball, Lulu’s Dolls (FFX really loved their weird weapons lol), Vanille’s fishing rod staff in XIII, Hope’s boomerang (which I swear looks like a toy lol). Edward bringing Harps into battle in FFIV, FFV’s Geomancers fighting with Bells. Not to mention the several guys running around with swords larger than their actual bodies lol.

I disagree that Bard needs the bow. I mean, if anything I’d rather see them pull something out their ass like ‘the weapon is a harp but it [inexplicably] shoots magical bolts of light so it can still do archer-y things’. Best of both worlds. Conceptually anyway. And again this is all with the belief that ‘Ranger’ should be a job that's allowed to exist on its own rather than at being under constant risk of being cannibalised by its evil parasitic twin lol. A job that can actually do justice to bow/arrow gameplay, aesthetics, lore etc without being constantly hampered by having to ‘balance’ it with the ‘musical / bard-like’ aspects. Rangers have/had their own identity within Final Fantasy too but there’s isn’t ever going to be enough space for them to properly explore that so long half of that space belongs to Bard.

And naturally as a disclaimer, I’m talking conceptually/opinion-wise and not in terms of literal implementation, since they (likely) won’t ever actually entertain the idea of changing a class anyway (*hides Summoner under carpet*). Probably

[mallleable]

So long as BRD uses a bow as a weapon, I think it needs to lean more into being a DPS support as opposed a support DPS if that makes sense. BRD's personal damage being as low as it is now is unacceptable -- epically for how busy, and relatively complex its rotation is for a job that uses a bow, and is supposed to be an evolution of the archer class. BRD really doesn't feel like it rewards the effort required to play it unlike other raid buff, and utility jobs like MNK, DRG, RDM, and PCT (if it were actually balanced).

[Connor]

So long as BRD uses a bow as a weapon, I think it needs to lean more into being a DPS support as opposed a support DPS if that makes sense. BRD's personal damage being as low as it is now is unacceptable -- epically for how busy, and relatively complex its rotation is for a job that uses a bow, and is supposed to be an evolution of the archer class. BRD really doesn't feel like it rewards the effort required to play it unlike other raid buff, and utility jobs like MNK, DRG, RDM, and PCT (if it were actually balanced).

I mean as much as I’d prefer ‘support dps’ than ‘dps support’, the even more major barrier to such a thing is encounter design itself, which simply does not allow for the existence of ‘support oriented jobs’ (everything’s a dps by both design and necessity lol). It’d take retooling the job and encounters both to make it even possible (but then, maybe they do need to make drastic changes lol)