Quote Originally Posted by Wayfinder3 View Post
Snip.
Again, my problem is the current state. Hell I'd be fine if they removed Piercing/Slashing/Blunt from the weapon skills and instead added them back in as role skills that act as a TA-like buff for those specific classes, then gave casters Elemental/Magic Vul Up. Give all types to melee, Piercing to Ranged, and Slashing to Tanks. Then add a virus-like immunity to them (different immunity for each type) so they can't stack or be chained back to back. Boom, only NIN is a problem now. Regardless, SE can go all-in on adding more, or remove it all. Either way action is required, and we agree on that point.

I'm still playing a BRD because of our party's mana concerns and I find MCH too frustrating to play, however, it's not strong atm. It's personal DPS is the biggest contributing factor, because of its variance. They need crit/raid buffs to get enough procs to be viable. Without it you're more likely to never get procs when you need them in order to contribute meaningful damage during your RS window. Before Bard could pull its own weight with cooldown management, but that was completely gutted as part of the 4.0 changes. Minne and Troubadour are good in specific situations (Tank busters/preys for Minne, Back to Back AoE situations if you can get WM to line up) but Dismantle is better overall since it's a Reprisal that also stacks with Reprisal.

Hypercharge is objectively better than Battle Voice, and whether Crit buff is good or not depends on whether you're running DPS classes that have defined peaks/troughs or maintain constant DPS. Sure, Crit's always on and it's a small bit of value (less than a percentage point over the entire encounter), but it's at complete odds with the kind of classes BRD wants to be paired with. BRD needs piercing and Battle Litany to actually shine. It wants TA the same way MCH does, because it can fit all its peak damage into that window. I'm in a comp that's full of sustained dps classes (MNK/SAM/BLM) atm, but none of those classes really have a way to catch up on damage from a death the way a BRD/NIN/DRG/MCH can when combined. Buffs are an all or nothing kind of deal because of the multiplicative way they stack up. It's why SE completely obliterated all of the cross class DPS cooldowns from ARR/HW in the first place. If we had all of those abilities now people would be pushing close to 10k DPS spikes on bosses. Given a choice, I'd much rather see bard lose the damage bonus on Raging Strikes.

MCH puts out enough numbers on their own that they don't need NIN or DRG to buff them at all, though they certainly benefit highly from it because of their narrow burst window, just in a far more reliable fashion by comparison. They work better with Embolden than BRD does, and they can use all of the phys only buffs just as reliably. If not for their clunky kit atm i'd say they would be played more.