Anyone have bard as main?

[ShaneDawn]

Oh I totally agree!
My claim was just an educated guess according to what we know and saw.


The poster hoped for a more simple rotation and I made 3 claims

1- Bard being one of the easiest, the odds it get simpler with the addition of new skills are slim.
Usually new skills makes everything more complicated. (Of course, "more" has a wide range, Bard got "slightly" more complicated, BLM got "annoyingly" too complicated)
Sometime it's the opposite, like the addition of the ninja Futon refresher which made mudra management much more simple.

Bard may have low skill floor, but is considered to be one of the hardest DPS jobs to optimize within the high-end raiding community.

Here is some statistical review of the case. While the author admits that it is by no means a perfect statistic, it does give nice insight within its subset.

I would argue that the major reason why people think Bard is "easy" due to not having a fundamental understanding how the multiplicative buffs and dot clipping work. Lining up your buffs in an efficient manner as a Bard and clipping your dots to get maintain extended duration of their buffs seems something the community is largely clueless about.

With the reduction/removal of damage modifiers Bard will inherently get a lot easier than is and closer to Bard as you describe it. Lining cooldowns, understanding how they stack and dot clipping for extended durations will probably be largely a relic of HW. Adding the removal of cast times, maintaining a solid CPM and managing your timers by default will get simpler as well.

If we only discuss rotational gameplay on a very base level of play and ignore any real attempts at optimization, then I tend to agree that Bard base rotation isn't exactly complex.


Here are two quotes from the subreddit. The first one is a representation from the statistical data, the second one is an individual subredditer's comment:
(1) If we take the poll data as a accurate representation of the community opinion on the subreddit (this is arguable), then we can see that the community significantly overrates the difficulty of NIN, MCH and SMN while significantly underrating the difficulty of BLM and BRD. The perception of MNK and DRG are fairly close to the parse data

(2) Ultimately it comes down to very different definitions/criteria for "difficulty."
When I think of job difficulty I think of how difficult it is to play a job perfectly, in a realistic situation such as a raid encounter. By that metric I would put BRD and BLM at the highest. But some other people might think of difficulty as just how hard it is to play in dungeons, or how hard it is to clear the A12S SSS dummy, in which case I'd put BLM very close to the bottom.
This method matches up closer with what I perceive "difficulty" to be (though in my personal list NIN would be around the middle, not at the bottom).

3- The removal of the casting time on most of the Bard skill can, technically, only result in a higher difficulty gap as explained above. If 100% of your skills are instant, there's virutally no reason for you to not dps as long as the boss is in range. Taking A12 for example, having no cast time definitely change the way you apprehend the fight.

This is something I heavily disagree with. The CPM difference between great Bards and average-to-bad Bards is abyssmal in a raid scenario. Good players will be able to maintain high CPM due to proper cast-cutting and utilizing Feint, while the weaker players often just run around without doing anything at all or just spamming their ogcds. The difference in CPM is largely the result of said cast times.

Having cast times means that you'll need to keep track of your timers ahead of time more than you would without cast times also. Especially in the scenario I described earlier, where you want to get the maximum benefit of your dot-clipped buffs.

While having no cast times definitely changes your mindset concerning certain fights, I'm absolutely confident that no cast times will even out the CPM disparity between high-end and mid-to-low-end players.


We'll have to see how the song system is going to change the Bard antics before going too in-depth into analysing whether things will be easier or harder than its Heavensward predecessor. But the removal of cast times and a large number of damage modifiers are making the Bard as we know it a lot more straight-forward and simple.

OP: it's too early to speculate whether or not the changes will affect Bard gameplay and meta-standings in a positive or a negative way. The maximum damage potential may receive a shave due to increased mobility, but we may also get ever stronger support options. If you are interested in the class thematics or ranged gameplay in general, you should probably give Bard a chance in SB.