Bard and how to fix it.

[Dante_V]

Hi,

If you are a Bard try to join the Raid on Bismark. You are useless DPS compared to Dragoons and Monks. No one needs your songs, and you feel petty for yourself and the Raid leader kicks you out.
The reason is simple the Bard is slow and can't deliver many powerful hits in short time. In high end game the challenge is DPS challenge and Bards

I suffered in Bismark the humiliation and now I have to dumb this Bard job and start all over making a Dragoon. The solution by the way is simple. return to the Bard his dignity, no one wants his songs. Give him mobility and reduce or eliminate the skill time but keep the 30% damage increase.

I am sure that FF14 knows this and wants to save the BArd job, but they are too slow to respond. how disappointing

I got my clear with a bard in the group and know many bards personally who have cleared this fight even before the WM buff. Bards are not bad dps classes.

[Greywolfamakir]

Bards are not bad dps classes.

BRD and MCH are the lowest DPS jobs, at the same lvl of skill ofc...
Do You need support?
Yes: Fine, take a BRD or a MCH.
No: Fine, take real DPS jobs or take a BRD or MCH and carry him.

[lugiaXD]

I got my clear with a bard in the group and know many bards personally who have cleared this fight even before the WM buff. Bards are not bad dps classes.

indeed good sir indeed honestly the only issue i really have with WM is the playstyle shift and overall clunkiness.

[Orangekun]

Also maybe an inherent barrage+EA skill since any bard worth his salt is going to be pairing those 2 up anyways; Why not cut the clicking down some and have every EA every 90 seconds to 3x damage?

I worry that the devs will never take approaches like this (not necessarily identical to this, but consolidating skills in general) simply because they've designed classes so rigidly. Every class in the game gets a trait or a skill every 2 levels - with of course the exception of skills gained via quests. What this means is everyone has the exact same number of skills, so if they were to do something like bake Barrage into Empyreal Arrow, Bard would have 1 fewer skills than every other class.

Obviously not all classes in a game need the same number of skills - that's a ridiculous mould to cram every class into and it's severely limiting. They had an opportunity to introduce meaningful changes to the game when they released an expansion, and they didn't jump on that. I like Heavensward plenty, but it really didn't introduce change or improvements like an expansion typically does for a game. It's essentially 100% more of the same old FFXIV, and that's not necessarily bad, but for me it's a little bit disappointing.

[Dante_V]

BRD and MCH are the lowest DPS jobs, at the same lvl of skill ofc...
Do You need support?
Yes: Fine, take a BRD or a MCH.
No: Fine, take real DPS jobs or take a BRD or MCH and carry him.

There is no fight in this game that is so dps dependent that bringing a bard will impair the group and similar logic can be used to not bring a pally. But regardless of hyperbole and rhetoric if your teams dps is so low that bringing a bard is what is going to make it or break it then that's not the bards fault. Beyond that certain mechanics such as red/blue fire in t12 posit a situation where bard becomes the most efficient dps to handle them as they can move and attack. The party wide support bard brings was almost mandatory in final coil and once the echo was added any dps disparity became irrelevant so the nonsense of "once progression is done bard is useless" is simply nonsense.

[Neyka]

Honestly, Bismark Ex is a terrible fight to compare dps classes with. It's probably most friendly to summoners and ninjas, much less friendly to any class that needs to sustain a buff (nothing like killing everything fast, and then watching your buff tick off while the dragon killers reel in Bismark).

That said, the Bismark Ex run I was in the other day, the top dps was a bard.

Alex 1 or Alex 4 is probably a better fight to judge dps.

But back to topic, it sounds like Bards feel like their current skills are clunky, and don't flow well together, and the fixes are more about adding fun to the class without adding power.

[RiceisNice]

Just a thought. Ignoring the problems from river of blood, how would bloodletter/misery's end work if it also had a cast time with empyrean arrow? I think the latter flows really well inbetween your weaponskills since its not on GCD. It'd get rid of the 1 second of pause inbetween each GCD ability and make bard gameplay flow smoother. Although this also means that you're much more restricted by mobility and would heavily emphasize on staying still and moving/toggling when nessescary. Though I'd think this would definitely go a long way to differentiating the gameplay flow of BRD and MCH (and the concept could also be applied to MCH instead of BRD)

[Snowaeth]

But back to topic, it sounds like Bards feel like their current skills are clunky, and don't flow well together, and the fixes are more about adding fun to the class without adding power.

These are pretty much the main issues when playing in WM yes.

The other issues that players have are more vague and concern playstyle change, mobility, lack of old rotation security, etc.
Those are not things we can come up with solutions for, unless SE suddenly lets us know that they will be redesigning/removing WM or something like that, which is not likely to happen.

Thus yea despite not really liking it, sucking it up and trying to improve on what we have might be the best course.
The other complaints shouldn't be just ignored though and absolutely looked at, I just don't think we can do much about them without SE going as far as dropping the current WM idea.

As for people that don't play bard and are commenting without putting the effort in of understanding where bards are coming from.
If you watch South Park, this is basically what it comes down to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvD9TawMqCY

[GabaranRickshaw]

As for people that don't play bard and are commenting without putting the effort in of understanding where bards are coming from.
If you watch South Park, this is basically what it comes down to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvD9TawMqCY

This, Just, THIS!

[Blaste]

Seriously I don't like being some kind of turret whenever I play BRD, to the point where I pretty much abandoned the class, We no longer have the freedom and movement in combat, and Im damn well sick of people telling me its ok cause we are a support class, EVERY god damn raid will KICK you out if you don't pull your weight, so that means using WM....and before you say anything yes this does happen, Ive seen it repeatedly with the new Raid content and EX primals, it boils down to us playing the way the developers want us to or not progressing any further with the content, Of course there are some nice groups that will take pity on a BRD and let them remain in the party despite pulling the lowest DPS ranks cause we can sing for our supper...like a good little support turret should.