Bard Openning

[Furious]

I finally was able to go back to the game yesterday and immediately I jumped to my main job; Bard.

After analyzing its action and skill changes, I proposed the following opening for bard.

Lv 70;
--Foe Requiem
Song ( I prefer to use Minuet first )

--Straight Shot
Battle Voice
Raging Strike

--Stormbite
Barrage
Empyreal Arrow

--Caustic Bite
Bloodletter
Sidewinder

--Heavy Shot
Perfect Pitch (If you use Minuet and it procs) or Bloodletter (if you use ballad)

--> Iron Jaws when Battle Voice and Raging Strike is almost over.

And then start the filler and rotation with these guidelines;
1. Align Raging Strike (80s) and Barrage (90s) cooldown. Then you can also align it with Battle voice (180s) for every 2 Raging Strike
2. Only weave 2 abilities between each GCD (Songs are oGCD except for foe).
3. Use Sidewinder and Empy on CD, and BL every time it refreshes under ballad or on CD.
4. Keep your songs uptime 100% (2% crit buff for the entire party for the whole duration of the fight).
5. Don't forget to Iron Jaws to refresh your tics.
6. When you have straighter shot proc, don't use it immediately. Replace Heavy Shot with Refuigent Arrows until your straight shot effect needs to be refreshed.

For Lv. 60 Openning, It's not much difference. You'll just be using windbite and poisonous bite.

Conditional Skills :
1. The Warden's Paean - Used to be for berserk. I am not sure how to use this optimally yet.

2. Troubadour - For conditional. Your safest bet is to use it with ballad (15% hp to all allies)

3. Nature's Minne - Need to coordinate with healers.

Optional Skills for PVE
Must have : Tactician, Refresh
Good to have : Palisade, Invigorate, Second Wind
All the grazes are basically PVP stuff. And you are not the one responsible for the stun job .
Pelloton, completely useless, unless you are running around RPing

Well, so those are my opinions. I haven't devised a way to weave in potion there, but i'm open to suggestion. Cheers and have fun.

For your own personal DPS it's better not to apply a song until both your dots are up (since the first song you play is likely your highest dps song, you don't want to clip its uptime with no potential procs). However, that means ~3gcds with no 2% crit buff for the group.

Using barrage with raging strikes is obviously good, but more importantly don't delay raging strikes so it starts overlapping with the wrong song. Generally you want raging strikes to line up exactly after you put up minuet (since you are almost always going to be using a pitch perfect exactly as it drops to use the last of the charges). Barrage is a 90 second cooldown but it's never going to be used exactly at 90 seconds, reality is that you will delay it by atleast a few seconds every time waiting for a straighter shot proc or empyrial arrow to come up. You'll lose a lot of raging strikes time if you delay it for barrage.

Don't delay barrage too much waiting for refulgent. I basically wait for the next empyreal arrow cooldown and that's it. It's a lot of potential potency but you can be waiting upward of 20 seconds easily without a straight shot proc (and pushing barrage further and further away from raging strikes).

Using sidewinder on cooldown is fine, but it's ok to delay it slightly (it's only a dps loss if it loses you a cast during the fight, and with a cooldown of 60 seconds you have a lot of leighway on that).

Using empyrial arrow on cooldown is the goal, but sometimes you need to delay. It's more important to use bloodletter first inside ballad, for example, and pitch perfect at 3 stacks in minuet.

Keeping song uptime 100% is definitely the goal, but taking it one step further, you have 10 seconds of overlap in song cooldown that you want to capitalise on. Almost always this means clipping 10 second of army's paeon (3 songs have a 90 second duration, songs have an 80 second cooldown). Army's paeon is potentially stronger than minuet only in very high target sustained aoe.

To take iron jaws usage one step further, it is ok to clip it significantly early to snapshot buffs. How early depends on the amount of buffs. A full duration iron jaw + refresh with or without raging strikes costs upward of 110 potency; leaving a full dot duration without straight shot will cost you 1-2 song procs on average. It's hard to give a catch-all answer as to when to refresh, but broadly speaking the answer is always refresh unbuffed dots with buffed ones, as late into the buff duration as possible.

Always use straighter shot on refulgent unless straight shot refresh is your next gcd.

Peloton is great for dungeons. I typically take palisade, refresh, tactician, invigorate, and swap between peloton and second wind. The caveat is that if there is a stun required it absolutely is your job to stun if needed, as it is everyone else's.