Please never change Bard (feedback)

[Shurrikhan]

I guess I'm in the minority here, but while I do enjoy Stormblood Bard (as I had ARR's and HW's before it, each for very different reasons, despite actually being very picky about my jobs), I feel like it's taken as many steps in some other arbitrary direction for each step forward.

"Active" use of songs is no longer a matter of support whatsoever. We are simply Selene with permanent uptime and crit in place of attack speed. We also come with her double-cleanse, and her partner's healing received boost, but limited to a single target. We can also Non-Synergetic Battle Litany. None of these things shout "Bard" to me.

The song system now feels more like a macrorotational variant of Monk's forms. Start in Coeurl/WM, and cycle from there. Make sure you blow your final proc before fade and start the next asap. Trim Paean because it's currently badly inferior. None of this feels like nuance (though it does have—preset—strategy), and overall it feels less fluid than bow mage to me.

Mobility felt sufficient in HW. I'm glad to have more of it, but it's only impact has been in kiting boss FATEs to death. In raids, I was already capable of taxi'ing my BLM's Aetherial Manipulation casts as a fellow "mage".

oGCDs now feel less impactful by virtue of not needing to pray for or make my own opportunities to fit them in tightly into my windows, but I got over that somewhere around level 56 just by virtue of having everything "Bard" about the job now being oGCDs and better filling up that time with healing boosts, MP restoration, Palisade, and so forth. But the songs? They still feel just as clunky as when I started into Stormblood. It's honestly the clunkiest that Bard has ever felt for me (at least, since WM was a 3-second cast and toggled off immediately after opening with EA, give-or-take DoTs and Sidewinder, back at HW launch).

If there were just actual control over our songs, rather than merely their order, differentiation in their supportive effects, and a bit more point-support over them, I'd be incredibly happy with SB Bard, but the songs timers and same-ness of their effects feel, while more subtle, as much some strange flaw in design logic as WM did in its first iteration.

[SaitoHikari]

[snip]

I actually agree with much of this, being someone that started playing Bard in HW so I never got to experience ARR Bard.

To me, as someone that raided and cleared A12S as a Bard main, I find that SB Bard also has its own set of flaws compared to HW Bard, although I am of the opinion that SB Bard is better designed overall. The thing about this expansion was that the devs were supposed to lower the skill ceiling and raise the skill floor to tighten the gap between the least skilled and the most skilled players. But what happened to Bard was that while the floor was raised, the optimization ceiling was raised a lot higher - I can already dish out damage comparable or even higher than most Samurai I meet, juggling all of my support on top of that, and I'm supposed to be at my weakest now early into the expansion, when my crit rate is at its lowest. Bard has always been a super RNG-heavy class with damage that increases exponentially as our critical hit rate increases due to how our procs are tied to our crits, and I predict that if Bard were to stay the same as it is, we have a high chance of overtaking almost every other DPS class towards the end of the expansion - something the top Bards saw at the end of HW.

The current Bard design emphasizes planning a whole minute ahead into a fight, if not even longer, knowing a fight top to bottom to get the most use out of all of the absurd utility we have. And it's not just because of our utility, it's also because of our three song rotation and the off-GCD procs we get to spam. Bard is now by far the hardest class to optimize for that reason - an optimized Bard now pretty much plays like a ranged monk, spamming everything they can as soon as something procs, but simultaneously keeping an eye on the rest of the party as well. HW Bard did have a certain flow to it, SB Bard is a lot more chaotic in nature. Not to say it's a bad thing, but many players just won't have the reaction speed to play the class to its fullest potential. I would still keep SB Bard over HW Bard, if only for the simple fact that HW Bard doesn't have any merits that can excuse the fact that massive Bloodletter clipping and double-resetting while casting was a thing.

That said, I've been dabbling a bit into Red Mage myself recently, and now I understand the other, less obvious reason why the devs got rid of bowmage/gunmage - because Red Mage plays almost exactly like HW Bard/Machinist did, due to their dualcast nature. The only real difference is that their cast times are doubled, but their mobility is also doubled.