Bard in the party... thoughts?

[Slyqc]

MCH is not dead at all, from what I'm seeing the class should be pretty much equal now, except that going for Bard + SMN + BLM is really worth now (180 seconds CD Battle Voice)
I showed earlier on that post that MCH with same team comp usually have around 10% more DPS than bards, the buff bards had is approximatively going to fix that 10% DPS difference.
On the other hand though MCH still have a stun and a slow that Bards don't have. Mechanics wise both classes have their advantages now but at least in term of DPS they should be closer to each other.
I'm glad to see the Ninja buff too, this class needed more help than bard and seeing that 70 potency up on Katon is going to make a huge difference, shadow fang is also going to make them usefull in PvP once again.

[Shurrikhan]

MCH is not dead at all, from what I'm seeing the class should be pretty much equal now, except that going for Bard + SMN + BLM is really worth now (180 seconds CD Battle Voice)
I showed earlier on that post that MCH with same team comp usually have around 10% more DPS than bards, the buff bards had is approximately going to fix that 10% DPS difference.

But shouldn't any changes made with particular compositions in mind aim to buff the raid DPS contribution to the other members of the composition, not the ranged dps's own output? The easiest way to do that would be to simply not have so overbuffed Hypercharge as it applies to all-melee compositions in the first place. (Heck, Army, Ballad, Foe, and Hypercharge together all give significant advantages to near-pure caster or pure-physical compositions, which may just be an inherent design flaw. I'm not sure what the alternative would be—say, Ballad and Army as one, or Hypercharge affecting both physical and magic damage with the same turret at some duration loss—but there are certainly other ways to go about designing these things that wouldn't be obviously centered on trying to remove an entire song or Hypercharge type from your playlist so you can focus on the other.)

Short of that, if they wanted to bring the compositions closer, all they really needed were near-QoL changes -- the songs' cast duration decrease, to be more on par with instant oGCD placement and Promotion, and reductions to the lock-in time for Wanderer's Minuet and Gauss Barrel both (say, to 8 or 10 seconds, scaling with skill speed), the former seeming more important simply because Bard has only 2 mobile weaponskills, down from 3. Or they could allow up to two stacks of Straighter Shot (too homogenized, imo, but a totally fair solution). Decrease the song penalty to 12-14% to be in line with turret loss outside of Hypercharge. Have Foe apply to Flaming Arrow, Windbite, and perhaps even a couple more among Venomous Bite, Sidewinder, Empyreal Arrow, Bloodletter, or Iron Jaws' direct damage, to give it a similar self-boost to Hypercharge. But by no means did Bard need more pure damage. It just needed certain factors leveled out.