Bard - they broke my job

[Entropic]

Buff Bards or Riot
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

[FateAudax]

Buff Bards or Riot
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

Worry not my dear brother in arms. Pitchforks have been raised and tables have been flipped over at the JP forums. Our Japanese brethren shares our frustrations.

[Warlyx]

Wanderer's Minuet:
1) Either a) allow battle voice to affect it, or b) increase it to 30%. Minuet itself isn't really the problem though.

Empyreal Arrow
This is the real problem. The move is mainly supposed to be offseting your auto attack loss, while the 20% on your abilities covers the remaining difference. But this is half the reason why Minuet is underwhelming as an ability -- reclaiming the lost AA damage is taking up way too much of your effort while using it.


So, buff Empyreal Arrow to about 450-475 potency. This way, as long as you're using it, you shouldnt really be worrying about your AA loss. 14 seconds worth of auto attacks is roughly 500 potency worth of damage a bard is losing in the stance. And every second you leave Empyreal Arrow up without casting it, you're wasting even more AA damage. Even considering optimal conditions for both stance and off-stance, there is no reason why using minuet as intended should provide only marginal DPs increases.

Sidewinder
Does it need to be 60 seconds? Can we make it like 30ish? With everyone else throwing out ridiculous combo attacks, and our best damage being tethered to Barrage, i dont feel like this is strong enough to be on a 60s cooldown. Plus, if we're intended to stay in Minuet during high-mobility fights, we need access to all the instant cast we can get.



OR:

While minuet is up, have every successful cast shave some seconds off Barrage's timer.

good ideas

i will keep saying that Blood River procs in WM need to put a buff (stackable ) on bard that boost next heavy shot/quick nock attack by 150 , since if Blood River procs while we are casting and then again before we finish casting.... we lost 150 potency right there.... and happens a lot if u have 2-3 mobs doted...is frustrating.

That or let me cast BL / ROD while casting , call it double shot trait.

Battle voice affecting WM would be nice

[Ticks]

Wanderer's Minuet killed the bard. Since this job is dead - please give us a replacement and don't mess it up. Lol

[Sessurea]

There's a "DPS check" in Bismarck EX that requires a high DPS to down the adds in time.

Hehe I always have agro for a few seconds on bismarks back <3 Bard burst still stronk as hell at least

[Gigantio]

IMO the problem is not the dps. I don't rly care about dps as long as i have utility.
For me the main problem is that the class isn't fun to play anymore.

[Edellis]

Minuet is a problem though. The fact that you have only a small window to weave in so many abilities (including an ability that resets randomly) is the problem. Increasing potency numbers isn't going to make the class fluid like it once was.

The problem with this is that this idea (Minuet as a concept being bad) is just a personal preference and not an actual issue. Me personally, the ONLY reason I even came back to bard is because Wanderer's Minuet was looking to alter its playstyle. Some people identify with Bard as a run-n-gun class, but the simplicity behind that is why i personally stopped using it a long time ago.

And honestly? I think trying to avoid slighting people who don't want to even use Minuet is why it's underwhelming in the first place. The design of the skills and such seem to suggest they didn't intend for it to be hands-down optimal to use over regular stance, but instead gain efficiency over time.


Either way, increasing potency will solve the real problem with the stance, which is that it doesn't provide nearly as much reward as it takes effort to use it correctly. The most efficient rotation will only ever do ever-so-much better than off-stance without cooldowns.

Meanwhile, everyone else is throwing off 500 potency strikes and getting stances that don't do anything other than offer more damage. But unlike any other stance in the game, Minuet actually takes more from Bard than it adds. Tweaking some numbers can easily make that irrelevant.

[lugiaXD]

The problem with this is that this idea (Minuet as a concept being bad) is just a personal preference and not an actual issue. Me personally, the ONLY reason I even came back to bard is because Wanderer's Minuet was looking to alter its playstyle. Some people identify with Bard as a run-n-gun class, but the simplicity behind that is why i personally stopped using it a long time ago.


Honestly? I think trying to avoid slighting people who don't want to even use Minuet is why it's underwhelming in the first place. The design of the skills and such seem to suggest they didn't intend for it to be hands-down optimal to use over regular stance, but instead gain efficiency over time.

i will say this. if we wanted to play a dps that had cast times, a lot of burst and not that much free movement potential with no auto attacks; i would have leveled black mage.


while i tried to play minuet only i ended up just using minuet for my openers and when barrage comes up as basically a toggle skill because honestly i hate that playstyle. i'm trying to make it work for me now but honestly i would rather they just replace minuet with another song that actually helps the party or better yet just replace warden's paean or fix the useless song because it honestly stops so little i don't even know why they didn't just specify what it prevents in the description.

for me it's about the damage as well but that's mostly because i'm finding the dps gap just a little too big for my liking. i also hate that i basically only have one skill i can use whenever i want that actually does something for me (sidewinder).

i'm not gonna lie it pisses me off that i payed for expansion and all i got out of it for my main class is basically 1 skill because the rest of it is locked behind a personal 90 second cooldown because there's honestly no point in keeping on WM for me since i absolutely despise the playstyle.
i would have liked a sort of you can play like this for pure dps or his way for the support dps we've always had, the skills are free for all but the damage and potencies depend on the stance you're in.

alas what we got was a marginal dps increase and a whole lot of walling off in an attempt to force people into a playstyle they don't play the class for.

[Edellis]

Again, "they dont want" is a very broad statement. I personally have no issue with standing and casting, but this is probably because i left Bard for Black Mage months ago. The issue with the old Bard playstyle is that Square is probably just opposed to Bard having competitive DPS with the other classes while being so safe and easy to use.

Look, there's really no way to screw up the 2.0 Bard style of gameplay. There's no risk involved to the class at all, and so by design it would make no sense to give them abilities like Empyreal/Sidewinder/Iron Jaws, so that they can just run and dump them all when they come up under buffs like you would in 2.0 bard. Minuet is supposed to add that risk/reward dynamic to Bard, which simply never had it before, which is probably where all the kneejerk reactions are coming from.

So I think the issue here isn't that they're making us adopt a caster style, it's that they're making us adopt a caster style without giving us anywhere close to caster damage.


It's currently viable (relative to other bards, at least) to just not even bother with Minuet outside opening. This probably isn't a mistake, i think it's cool that the class is possibly trying to be more dynamic and allow both stances to stay useful. But ATM, for both Stance and Off-Stance users, Minuet is just more trouble than its worth, even though it does increase DPS.

[Sindri_Myr]

The whine is strong in this thread.
Every job has it's problems this expansion, but from some reason, every job feels like their special and thus the qq begins.

I play BLM, and we're forced to deal with constant cast interupts, we're slow and lose dps on every encounter that requires movement.

Dragoons cry about their combo chain damage, and how easy it is to fuckup their hard rotation.

Monks cry about positioning.

Mechanist cry about extremely low dps.

Astrologists cry about their weak healing compared to other healer jobs.

Black Mages cry about fights involved alot of movement.

Ninjas cry about class being too easy to play.

FML!
I can keep going on if you like...
stfu and stop this pointless bitching, learn to play your class and adjust to the new updates. If you cant, reroll!