Bard song buff on self

[Shaoyran]

The reworked bard for Stormblood feels very fun to play and the new abilities are quite nice, however there is something that bugs me about them, troubadour specifically.

The reworked songs (ballad, paeon, minuet), battle voice and troubadour - or their bonus effects to be precise - only apply their bonuses to the bard's party members, not the bard themselves. While I understand that this might in fact be the intended behaviour, I can't help but feel that it is a little bit counter-intuitive in troubadour's case - the bonuses that troubadour provides are defence ones, I suspect intended to be used during trials to help the party mitigate large magical/physical AoE damage or increase their health pool. However, as the effects of troubadour don't affect the bard casting it, they would need a form of mitigation from another party member - and while that might be how the fights are designed, again I just can't help but feel it's weird and not how it was intended to work.

[Shaoyran]

What are your thoughts or opinions? I think it would be great if the songs granted the bonuses to us - the bards - as well, and am curious to find out if this is in fact how they are supposed to behave.

[AncientCrystal]

I love BRD now omg it's sooo fun and interaction! (the hell with those cast times!) To your question tho, yea it would be nice to have the bonuses on the caster as well, I suspect they may change that in a future patch. I think it's one of those "sacrifice your self for the better of the party" things.

[AncientCrystal]

Not only that, I think physical 10% from Army's Paeon is the most useful tho for tanking reasons.

[Shaoyran]

I totally agree, it feels so awesome to be buffing everybody so much, and switching from song to song to do different stuff is really fun - think these new changes are great, and yes, I think it might be the case with the patching of it, but you could also be right that it's just how they want it to work!

[Yoruichi4478]

As the songs have no benefit to myself casting them from what I've been told by other bards further lvld along, I atm have this to say, it's subject to change as I lvl up so don't bite my head off. Of what good are they to me if I don't benefit from the buff also, considering that bard lost Internal Release, Blood for Blood, Hawke's Eye, Flaming Arrow and Repelling Shot no longer does any dmg? I atm, sorry atm I am in disagreement with bard being more fun. It just looks like more work w/o reward at this point in time.
As far as I'm concerned, until I can get confirmation either way on if brd does benefit or not, I'm just using wanderer's minuet so I can access Perfect Pitch, etc. SE can keep the other songs and shove them where the sun doesn't shine if they think they did a good thing if "no benefit to self" is confirmed.

[Furious]

It's a very odd decision to leave what is essentially a party-wide cooldown with one member still prone without it, whoever the prone member is. It makes it less reliable as a cooldown against raid-wide damage.

[AniCelestine]

Snipped..

Of what use are the songs for you? Well. Mages Ballad gives you the bloodletter cooldown reset when DoTs crit. Army's Paeon gives you 4% reduced GCD up to 16%. And Wanderers Minuet gives you a new skill that uses stacks which you get for each DoT crit up to 3 stacks at which point Pitch Perfect hita for 420 potency iirc. Once 68 your Empyreal Arrow gives 1 stack just like a DoT crit would making these less RNG.

Sure I myself too would like for the song's party effects to affect me but they're already quite nice as they are.

Edit: cottected the name of the 2nd song listed

[Deathtator]

Snip

Try getting bard to 64 so you have a better understanding of how the class will flow, 30 sec dots make a huge difference compared to 18 seconds.
I don't know if you are aware of this but bows and guns now have as much weapon damage as any other melee weapon, at i275 melee weapons have 85 weapon damage and bows had around 77,so overall you are not losing that much damage. The total damage is lower yes but not by a lot. The risk reward system for bard has changed from dot management and proper buff alignment to something that now resembles managing stacks or a stance. The overall complexity of bard is still here its just done in a much different way.

[AxelDH]

I'm used to our group DPS buffs not working on ourselves, so that's not so bad (at least we benefit from Foe Requiem now!).

But I think Troubadour really ought to work on the caster...

There are workarounds though, I suppose. Say if the entire group needed mitigation from Magic damage, the Bard could use Minuet->Troubadour, and a caster could use Apocatastasis on the Bard, and that should do the trick.