I've permanently solved The Wanderer's Minuet problem...

[SonTensei]

It kills me how people who dont play a job critique people that do play a job simply by reading tool tips and theory crafting.

They ruined the job. The dps output being higher does not mean it wasn't ruined.

and you "git good" ppl give it a rest on my bard i consistently do great dps on a1s or a2s. but i recently quit bard since i dont like it much any more and changed to whm main.

so heres the thing, when people who play the job well and adjusted to the changes just dont like it as much as before and pick up a new job, whats that? to me its failure on SE's behalf.

[Gilthas]

WM increases the damage of the old weapon skills, don't pretend that it doesn't do anything to the old abilities.

[tgoodner]

WM increases the damage of the old weapon skills, don't pretend that it doesn't do anything to the old abilities.

That's lovely insight from a player that can't even use Wanderer's Minuet.

The issue many bards have brought to the table is that Straighter shot procs are practically identical to how firestarter procs were in 2.X. You get the proc later then when your next GCD comes up, so it's impossible to maximize damage. Plus, the cast time for abilities is just barely too long to safely double weave, causing even more issues with managing their plethora of cooldowns.

In addition, SE took a completely new route for Job design with the limiting of mobility for "increased" damage. While WM does give a flat 30% DPS gain, it negates Auto-Attacks which was a large portion of Bard dps to begin with (I'd bring up specific examples but using tools such as ACT to give examples is against the Terms of Service).

[Noira]

They gave you EA to make up for the auto attack lost.

[Garan]

They gave you EA to make up for the auto attack lost.

HUH?!

I'm not one for sitting around and doing a bunch of math to disprove this, but how are you coming up with ONE skill offsetting our auto attack loss? Nope. Sorry. Didn't happen.

We got a 30% damage boost under WM just so we could stay in the exact same position we were prior to expansion. Slightly behind everyone else. Except this time we don't have crazy mobility and our support skills are identical to 2.xx.

I'd rather see:
Wanderer's Minuet go by-by
Base weapon damage get slightly boosted
Keep all new weapon skills
Get a new support song in place of WM (50% MP cost, party wide 10% dmg boost for 30s with 5 minute cooldown) OR anything useful with party wide support. Switch this with the other song so it's not available until 58.

BUT, this will never happen. Hopefully the clunkiness on bard will be solved sometime. I leveled to 60 only because BRD has always been my main. But I'll be leaving it soon to get my WAR to 60 and who knows if I'll be back?

[RiceisNice]

..
BUT, this will never happen. Hopefully the clunkiness on bard will be solved sometime. I leveled to 60 only because BRD has always been my main. But I'll be leaving it soon to get my WAR to 60 and who knows if I'll be back?

They apparently fixed the problem with BLMs hardcasting fire III even with firestarter active (although I cannot for the life of me come up with a situation where this would ever happen cause you'd never hard cast fire III in astral... maybe sharpcast to guaranteed yourself the proc) Which is more or less the same problem bards have with straight shot (except SS being a regular part of their rotation). I haven't tried it out yet to see if they have this fix for bard, if they do, wewt.

Edit : Nope, they did not. It still won't register fast enough even if I use an oGCD right after heavy shot/

[Lickintoad]

Hopefully the clunkiness on bard will be solved sometime. I leveled to 60 only because BRD has always been my main. But I'll be leaving it soon to get my WAR to 60 and who knows if I'll be back?

This is what I'll be doing. Yes, I'm playing my Bard now, but I'm doing it in order to get tomestones and seals to buy warrior gear, then I'm leveling warrior in the time I have left. My bard job makes do with whatever drops I get from expert roulette, though I did buy some accessories with law to get my ilevel up to actually finish the MSQ. Truthfully, I had already wanted to change over to tanking anyway. I had leveled Warrior to 50 and was working on paladin when the expansion dropped. But Minuet actively makes me hate the Bard.

I didn't want extra damage. What I wanted was a real support class. That doesn't exist in this game. My Dirge in EQ2 provided way more support to her group than the Bard does here, and that stuff was on pretty much all the time. It didn't drop her DPS to help the group, because she was helping the group 100% of the time just by being there with buffs up. That's more of a support class than this Bard could ever hope to be.

Besides, Minuet isn't that much of a damage boost--definitely not 30%. It buffs weaponskill damage by 30%, but it removes auto-attack damage, which was a not-insignificant contribution to overall damage. More than the mobility issue, WM completely changes the feel of the gameplay, and the gameplay is what kept me playing the bard after I realized its group support was greatly lacking. The weaving of off-GCD abilities between GCD abilities made it more comfortable to me, as I'm used to 1- to 1.5-second GCDs (in games that use GCDs; some do not). The current Bard gameplay makes me feel like I'm swimming in molasses.

Minuet feels like a half-ass hack job. I was all for it before the expansion released. But I was not prepared for it to completely change the core gameplay of the class, which is what I object to.

So, sure, there are still a bunch of bards out there in expert roulette and such. But a few of us are only playing it until we can get other jobs that we now like better up to a level where we can do stuff again.

[Icepick823]

I solved the WM problem: Get good.

[Natashio]

I'm going to conclude that all these people complaining here, all they did was spam straight shot all day long. You players that "played" bard, you do know that prior to Wanderer's Minuet there were 4 abilities that where charged abilities. You know that right...

[Garan]

I'm going to conclude that all these people complaining here, all they did was spam straight shot all day long. You players that "played" bard, you do know that prior to Wanderer's Minuet there were 4 abilities that where charged abilities. You know that right...

I fail to see your point here.

So, because some people have an issue with how clunky and thrown together Bard feels with WM, those people automatically don't know how to play the job?!

I don't parse myself so I have no idea where I stand, but I don't ever get any complaints when I'm in dungeons and I feel I DPS fine. Unfortunately, I just don't really like playing Bard that much anymore. For me, they took away the fun and smooth fast pace that made the job enjoyable. FOR ME. There happen to be some others that feel the same way and maybe, JUST MAYBE, if there are frequent posts the devs could go about fixing some of the oGCD and straighter shot issues. I know it's a long shot but it's all we have.