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

[Shurrikhan]

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.

Across DnD lore, across their irl historical part as a pseudo-political means of power that has sometimes done as much for a given faction as military presence (including as spies, propagandists, social surveyors, much like 1.x Thancred, etc.), and in XIV.

In a turn-based and permanently party-based game, one can have more absurd things like original Relm actually painting pictures, but look at PIC in XIV, where we have real-time combat as, per player, a single job at a time: PIC here is a pretty generic mage, just by a different skin and with a fun bonus mechanic.

This has left Bard with either of two choices: to be, in essence, a mage by a different skin (Sonic Mage), or to have a weapon befitting the position of someone with the social/cognitive skillset of a bard and provide its filler and soloing-capable direct contribution in that way.

XIV chose the latter, and while I think it needs more music-based stuff than it presently has in its gameplay --a lot more-- I think that has fit it better than going the mage route (hit them with the musical note blasts/ruins) would have.

I disagree that Bard needs the bow.

I did not mean to suggest that Bard needs its weapon to be a bow per se, only that between having a befitting weapon and sound magic, I'd prefer the weapon, as it better fits what it has meant --both historically and across the greater scope of RPG franchises-- to be Bard.

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.

I disagree. The bulk of gameplay comes from undermechanics, not simply base actions. Having Ruin and Bane on both SMN and SCH was never what made either feel half-assed -- only the lack of leveraging the unique powers of the summons once we decided that any and all things cross-role should be buried, which was far from a problem unique to SMN (see pre 2.1 WAR, 1.x PGL, early MNK, original LNC, DRG defense, original WHM AoE power, etc.).

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)

I just want back the choice. Tax us for the support only when we use said support, allowing it to be strong even while allowing us to dish out decent damage otherwise. And ideally, do so in ways wholly palpable to gameplay, such as uptime-spending options, instead of just damage penalties for while singing. Hell, maybe reintroduce uses for MP; in that way, we'd start with considerable burst, have the bankability fitting both a choiceful burster and a point-support, and have greater versatility (greater swing between maximal support and maximal DPS) precisely for our utility coming at DPS cost. By all means, for flavor, soften costs conditionally (e.g., costs increasing with further use and being tuned around that so that initial, infrequent use is nearly free) just enough to at least, if everyone else in one's party is too terrible to meet the thresholds for rDPS over personal direct DPS, to at least be worth using some buffs on oneself pre-burst, but make for some real choices without so much pre-tax.

That said, I'll be the first to admit that support in this game is hard to incentivize or make space for precisely because everything is so lockstep and/or quantized. No one wants Attack Speed because there's no margin for adjustment (e.g., from a Stamina Gauge, whereby one could overclock up to 20% and then slow down in turn later). There are no conditions by which one form of damage buff (say, Crit) would temporarily exceed another to any significant degree. There are no undermechanics for sapping enemy defenses outside of fixed damage-/crit-chance-taken debuffs or the like nor for sapping offenses outside of Reprisal and Arm's Length. One generally either has movement speed enough to dodge baseline or not enough speed even under sprint to get out in time if mis-positioned, since there are so few proximity-based forms of damage and such little allowance for uptime losses/costs in modern fights. Cleansibles are few and far between. CC is nigh dead.

Now, that space could be made, to be clear, but it would require some pretty foundational reworks. And short of that... I suspect what would be Bard-ish-ly available for Bard's music would be pretty slim and shallow. Better that than nothing, though.