Bard and how to fix it.

[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.