Bards, Eureka and the Archer who lost their voice

[Connor]

This thread is to discuss my thoughts on Bard and the issues I feel it currently has.

Please don’t misunderstand, this isn’t a thread about how the job needs buffs or anything, if anything I feel it’s too powerful for what it does.

Eureka is an area where ‘support oriented’ jobs (at least in XIV’s content) shine, to the point where many of the parties you join will be made up of Red Mages, healers and the occasional Summoner.

Now, as most of us know by now, Eureka can be extremely boring. Unless you’re high level, you spend most of your time afk, able only to contribute through healing / support. You’d think this would make Bard a great job for the area, but because of the way our support works now, all you do is stand around waiting on cooldowns. You can sing Foe Requiem, but you’ll likely die from pulling mobs.

Back when songs were actual songs and not dps cooldowns, as a Bard you could consciously decide whether to sacrifice dps to support the party. Now, with Refresh and Tactician being cooldowns, as well as things like Lucid Dreaming / Thin Air / Manashift / etc making MP management extremely easy, you don’t get to make this choice. The cooldown does. The same applies to Warden’s Paean and Nature’s Minne; you don’t get to decide when you want to use them to support your party, your cooldowns do. Bards playstyle took a pretty weird step backwards from a job that could support the party at the cost of dps, to a high dps, proc-based job with a couple of choice support cooldowns that you could probably forget about and nobody would be any the wiser

Outside of opener much of Bard’s playstyle is standing around waiting for procs and spamming Heavy Shot. This is the perfect time to have players cast buff songs instead of making us use the same boring attack animation over and over and refulgent proc and over and over. The job is described in-game as being distinct from Archers specifically due to their ability to inspire their comrades to greater feats. How does this translate to an almost entirely dps-oriented with passive, infrequent buffs that require no thought to use? Surely having to strike a balance between the ‘bard’ and ‘archer’ aspects of the job would make more sense?

The reason I specifically mention Eureka is that these issues are exacerbated there. Unlike normal content, you might need to use Esuna more than once every 45 seconds. You might pop Refresh, only for the second healer to die, meaning you now have to stand around doing nothing for another 120 seconds until it comes back up. It feels like you’re fighting with your cooldowns, desperately waiting for them to come back up so you can support the party once again (them wait another 120 seconds). Even the standard dps songs (Ballad etc) feel pointless in terms of supporting the party; if the party member is high enough level to attack the mob, they probably don’t need a 3% crit buff to kill it.

Why have ‘Bard’ as a thing if the ‘Bard’ side of the job is constantly being undermined or outright removed. We don’t even have to ‘sing’ our songs anymore, they’re all instant-cast. When people complained about cast times on Bard, I don’t think anyone was complaining about having to cast their songs (considering it had been a thing since 1.X). I get that I’m instantly going to be hit with “well this is XIV not another FF!”. Which I get, but consider this:

Dragoon is released in FFXIV. It comes from the job ‘Berserker’. You wield a club, smack things, and every 120 seconds you do a jump attack, but it doesn’t do very much, so you just set it aside because you might need it one day if something goes very wrong.

Doesn’t sound like much of a Dragoon does it? Honestly, I don’t get why it’s ok for Bard to be moved away so much from its base material but every other job has to be ‘traditional’. Would we be happy if Black Mages were to cast Ruin spells instead of Elemental? Or if a White Mage was more of a dps than a healer? (Oh wait).


Personally I believe that Bard really needs this aspect to return to the job, of actively buffing and supporting the party instead of doing it entirely passively. Songs could have a base MP cost, 1.5 cast like Requiem, and a short duration. Ballad/Paeon/Minuet could give different buffs instead of all giving the same crit buff, and have a slightly higher potency to balance out the cast time if such a thing was needed. This would let the Bards actively decide whether it’s more appropriate to support the party, deal damage, or a mix of both, rather than having to constantly wait for timers to stop ticking before you can do what your job was made for.

As an addendum: I’m well aware that my opinion is solely my own and doesn’t represent the opinion of the community. I understand that Bard is one of - if not the - most popular job, and thus nobody wants it to change. I understand that nobody wants to be a traditional ‘Bard’, they want to be a cool Hunter Ranger with useful party support that gets them into raids easily. But, as one of the extremely few players who always loved the Bard job for what it was in past iterations of FF, it’s painful to see the job I loved becoming so distorted, especially when it’s the only job in the game that still has two diametrically opposes roles thrust onto it (both dps and support), in a game that can barely accommodate the trinity role system, much less the notion of a ‘support’ class