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

[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.

[Shurrikhan]

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

If EA is needed just to break even, that's a seriously underpowered stance. Luckily since the buff from 20% to 30%, it hasn't been. (Also, IJ is a 140 potency bonus over HS per 18s, whereas EA is only 70 over HS per at least 15s... pretty sure that'd make it the bigger change and main dependency of early WM.)

It's not the same. WAR's DPS stance doesn't change much of anything for them. What it does is enhance what used to be them dropping defiance to DPS when off-tanking. It's a QoL change more than anything (chain Fell Cleaves notwithstanding).

This. Though not likely the reason for the addition, consider how a few warriors complained about the increased TP costs and reduced job-ness of off-tanking (almost everything that makes a Warrior a Warrior being limited to tank stance). Now you simply get to play like a Warrior in both stances, instead of spending OT time as a Marauder. That's a far cry from, say, if your animation times had tripled, making it so you can't 9-hit berserk with the same skill speed that you used to if you even think of oGCDing, which would be a bit more on par with the WM change.

[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.