Bards viability now?

[Sessurea]

Guys, Brd is dead and MCH is a still birth. They can't even put up numbers as good as a WAR. When your DPS class is out damaged by the off tank, there is something wrong. SE's official response indicates that they may make some adjustments such as make WM quicker to apply. Great, now we will stance dance, putting WM on only to use abilities that require it only to take it off immediately thereafter. However, they also say that they will NOT make changes to increase the DPS of brd.

It's dead.

And who do u think will give tp to melee when they zero out ( or that tp drinking maniac warrior with high dps? ) or mp to healers? Or u planning to wait till alex savage has echo and u are ilvl 220 from lol hunts? Also keep in mind bards can handle mechanics with less impact to their dps.t7,8,12 all say hi.

[Lemuria]

And who do u think will give tp to melee when they zero out

Ninjas! Goad ftw!

mp to healers?

Ballad is great, but all good healers know not to expect or rely on it for the simple fact that there's no guarantee there will even be a bard in the party. This goes double now that we have multiple ways to recover MP.

[Lewtskie]

Ninjas! Goad ftw!Ballad is great, but all good healers know not to expect or rely on it for the simple fact that there's no guarantee there will even be a bard in the party. This goes double now that we have multiple ways to recover MP.

Funny enough, the perfect way to put it is Bard's are insurance. You fuck up and they can help bail you out, but you gotta pay to keep that insurance going. In this case, it's at the cost of less overall DMG through-out the fight. We can help a little with Requiem come DPS checks, but we have to keep in mind come shit-storms and someone kicks the bucket or Healer's get fucking tunnel vision on covering even that magic pixel on that one tank and we haven't the MP for a Ballad we've fucked over our insurer, lol.

[Sessurea]

Ninjas! Goad ftw!Ballad is great, but all good healers know not to expect or rely on it for the simple fact that there's no guarantee there will even be a bard in the party. This goes double now that we have multiple ways to recover MP.

Coz "all good healers" will never die to content during progression. Sure we can wipe everytime a healer dies, or we can get the bard to battle voice ballad, and continue with learning the fight.

And did u srsly state nin for tp efficiency? Nins are the biggest culprits for tp drinking. Goad is ok to throw on the tank or the monk, but "all good" nins will need paeon.

[Catwho]

Bard is still king in fights where dodging is the #1 mechanic, but that assumes the bard is running and shooting at the same time, and it seems a lot of them... don't.

[SpiritMuse]

I don't really mind that bard and machinist do less damage than the other "pure" dps classes. It's a trade off since they can enable other classes to go longer and hit harder. But they still need to be able to pull their weight as a dps class, which currently they do not. So a 4-man party with only bard/machinist as dps can really struggle. And at levels below 40 machinists have it particularly bad because they're lacking their turret which makes up a significant percentage of their total dps.

[Garan]

I don't really mind that bard and machinist do less damage than the other "pure" dps classes. It's a trade off since they can enable other classes to go longer and hit harder. But they still need to be able to pull their weight as a dps class, which currently they do not. So a 4-man party with only bard/machinist as dps can really struggle. And at levels below 40 machinists have it particularly bad because they're lacking their turret which makes up a significant percentage of their total dps.

I keep seeing this reasoning come up for why Bards do less damage. Does everyone not know that any time a Bard sings paeon or ballad we ALREADY receive a 15% DPS loss? Our penalty for supporting the party is already built in. There is absolutely no reason for Bards to have significantly lower DPS when not supporting the party with songs.

[JayCommon]

I keep seeing this reasoning come up for why Bards do less damage. Does everyone not know that any time a Bard sings paeon or ballad we ALREADY receive a 15% DPS loss? Our penalty for supporting the party is already built in. There is absolutely no reason for Bards to have significantly lower DPS when not supporting the party with songs.

Yes there is, because Bard's songs are not necessary to beat anything. All they do is help you win when you're not good at the fight yet. For the last 3 months all I sang in every single turn of FCoB was Foe. Healers never need mana when they know how to stop over-healing the fights, and no one ever needs TP when they know how to manage their Invigs. So if BRD damage wasn't lower than everything else, you would see the same thing that happened in 2.0. Full BRD parties in Titan HM. DRG/MNKs getting kicked out of parties for dungeon runs if they couldn't switch to BRD.

We aren't going to be singing 100% of the time ever. To hit like a Monk and have free mobility is absolutely absurd on every level. No one would play anything else. Again, this happened. This was a reality. It would be again if our WD was returned.

It obviously wouldn't help everyone be better though...not when 2yrs later there are still people out there that think BRD's songs don't affect themselves? SMH

[Waeksyn]

The problem is probably this perception that Brd is a "DPS+Support" class. There is no such class in the game. There is: Tank, DPS, Heal. That's it!

Maybe the solution is to give the other DPS jobs some additional "support" abilities so that they are perceived the same as bard in that area (many believe they already are but perception is reality to most). Then, increase the dmg from BRD to be on par with the other DPS jobs and there will be complete parity.

As far as the loss of mobility is concerned, that's not a big issue IMO (as long as the dmg is balanced, which it currently isn't), except that you are forcing players to change their fundamental play style when they hit the level at which they get WM. No other job has such a dramatic shift.

[JayCommon]

As far as the loss of mobility is concerned, that's not a big issue IMO (as long as the dmg is balanced, which it currently isn't), except that you are forcing players to change their fundamental play style when they hit the level at which they get WM. No other job has such a dramatic shift.

That's exactly what I told my friends. I was BRD Main all of 2.0. I switched to DRK for expansion but had to at least level my bard...

With knowing how DRK progresses, and in talking to my friends as how their characters progress...BRD is the only job who got such a fundamental change to their job role that it doesn't even feel like the same job anymore. This is basically a paraphrase of what I told my raid:

"When a job is "expanded" in an "expansion", it should take the skills you already have and know well, and bolster them. When leveling DRK from 30-50, you get a large portion of the CD's and tank-y type moves that are necessary to a tank job. Level 50-60, favored bolstering your DPS abilities by giving you some oGCD's and a very hig potency move. This isn't a shift, it's taking the skills you already have and adding to them as compliments to a larger, but more complete skillset.

When I read the changes to Barrage and our AoE moves I thought, "Why?..." Then when you get to level 52 and get WM, you start to see why. When you get to 56 and get Iron Jaws, you know why.

Wanderer's Minuet is the only skill/song/anything in the game that I can currently think of that completely changes the fundamentals of the job. And instead of it being a skill that you can decide when and when not to use, SE integrated being in this stance to almost everything you get post-50. So instead of expanding upon an existing Bard's skillset, they completely revamped the job, including old skills, to work under the influence of one single new ability."

In essence, you could have changed the name of the Job itself and noone would complain because what we have in the game right now isn't a Bard. It's an extremely weak caster if we are intended to play it with SE's re-design in mind. It left a very foul taste in my mouth, and even though DRK has some pretty glaring balance issues of its own at the moment, at least I have fun when I play DRK. Playing BRD currently in 3.0 is excruciating if you stay in WM.