Bard gearing question

[Seddrinth]

I'm relatively new to the game and this is the first time I've cleared a tier to be able to look at the gearing issues. It just doesn't make any sense to me that SE designed the gearing process to have lower ilevel items be better than higher ilevel items. For example. one of the bis ring is a pentamelded 380 ring. It's literally way better than the omega ring that drops from a raid boss. The 385 weapon from Suzaku is better than the 390 weapon and on par dps wise with the 400 weapon. The 395 Seiryu weapon is better than the 400 weapon. The 390 24-man chest is better than the 400 chest. I don't understand the reasoning behind those designs. To get a 400 weapon, you have to kill Omega which is 20 times harder than Seiryu. Why would they choose the sub stats that make the 400 weapon worse than something as simple as Seiryu? Before twines were handed out to the masses, you have to kill Omega to upgrade your chest to 400. And the 24 man zerg raid will get you a better chest which is 10 ilevels lower? Is this some kind of oversight or is there a reason for SE to design lower ilevel items/weapons to be better than higher ilevel items/weapons? I played another game before FFXIV so it's really confusing to me.

[QT_Melon]

Depends on the stat weight. WD (weapon damaged) is weird because it's much higher stat weight on bard. However, because everything is crit based losing a certain threshold of crit DOES become a DPS loss. I'm not sure though because I haven't seen the recent numbers. I'll have to look up the formula.

[lulunami]

The truth is Best-in-slot is only marginally better than Worst-in-slot even for a Critical Hit focused job like Bard. You gain much more damage by having a Dragoon, Scholar, and Astrologian in your party. Dragoon have Dragon Sight during your Raging Strikes and Disembowel debuff. There is Battle Litany, Chain Strategem, and Spear for your Wanderer's Minuet/Mage's Ballad songs.

If you are interested in a few percentage point increase in damage, you want the Omega i405 BRD Weapon and i400 Omega Body.

In general, higher iLvl is better but there can be diminishing returns on main stat (like Dexterity) compared to certain preferred substats are available on lower iLvl gear. On various theory-crafter simulators, they have varying damage formulas which can result in certain gear being better.

[HyoMinPark]

Bard is a strange job. Because of how everything in its rotation interacts with critical hit, gearsets for both progression and BiS focus heavily on stacking Crit. Repertoire is entirely dependent on our DoTs dealing critical damage, and Repertoire is what gives us things like Pitch Perfect procs and Bloodletter/Rain of Death procs. Pairing high crit with critical hit enhancing buffs like Battle Litany, Chain Strategem, and the Spear make us far stronger than I think the developers even anticipated.

In terms of stat allocation, I personally think the developers just dump gear into an algorithm that arbitrarily assigns stats to it. It's unlikely that they intended for for the i385 and i395 bow to be inherent better than the i390 and i400 bow.

[Seddrinth]

In terms of stat allocation, I personally think the developers just dump gear into an algorithm that arbitrarily assigns stats to it. It's unlikely that they intended for for the i385 and i395 bow to be inherent better than the i390 and i400 bow.

That's very unfortunate. It would literally take one person (who understands bard) 5 minutes to check the substats to make sure gear/weapon upgrades are tied to ilevels. SE certainly has more than enough resources to do that.

[Judas_Ramirez]

That's very unfortunate. It would literally take one person (who understands bard) 5 minutes to check the substats to make sure gear/weapon upgrades are tied to ilevels. SE certainly has more than enough resources to do that.

This is Square Enix & Yoshi's development group at there best.
They don't check, They don't test. They don't care unless it means money
Think i'm wrong log into the mogstation & compare costs to other games, Log into Amazon.co.jp & check merchandise that come with codes for in game, check your subscription costs that are for 8 chars instead of 1 which is utilized by RMT's (the majority of the FFXIV playerbase to date) & makes the average 1 char player overpay for his subscription! Once again Mogstation check it, Its correct, Legit & True.

The games in a sorry state behind the scenes, Fan Boi's will argue otherwise but it really is. They rince repeat everything (including bad stuff), add "End Game" to gathering (scripts) which already has/Had a bad end game to begin with (timers on gathering) which isnt what players asked for at the time. Crafting basicly the same since SE didn't do stat controller. ARR>HW>SB now have mixed markers that mean the same or different things which is confusing.
Actually i'll give some specific examples on this to ruin some of those Fan Boi's fantasys & have reason to report Forum CM's if they try to ban me for speaking the truth!
Bardam's mettle - Rush = move away
Amdapor Keep HM- Valfodr = Run to boss
Same marker (one small exception if you are far enough for "Rush" [Stormblood] Arrows appear, Very important you need to have decent distance for them to appear, to show its a distance lowering damage mechanic as first appeared in Heavensward - Alexander if memory is correct), same mechanic (more or less) different actions for same markers.

Purple Single Marker - Five-headed Dragon (World of darkness) = Stack
Same marker as Scylla lighting ball one from Sycrus tower which is a run orb to pillar, but also looks like single damage/AOE attack on player marker.
(4) Arrows pointing inwards - Most content mainly SB - Stack

I was originally going to point out on bard rotation is also as important as gear, theres 3 you can do, all do around 5-7k dps. all lose around 1k DPS if you don't keep DOT's up 100%
Actually to add to above Bard would be in line with the other classes if they tested it & added the Straight Shot Additional Effect: Increases critical hit rate by 10% to apply on Refulgent Arrow use so you can refresh DOT's in every fight at 0-3 seconds (some people wont understand this). Testing is key, shame they never do it! then again if they had a better combat designer they could of removed iron jaws & made the double dot refresh on Windbite/Stormbite. while adding another skill/dot/Self buff.....
As i said Square Enix for ya expect what you currently see because they live in hindsight while players have Foresight & the Fan Boi's are Submissive!

[HyoMinPark]

Bardam's mettle - Rush = move away
Amdapor Keep HM- Valfodr = Run to boss
Same marker (one small exception if you are far enough for "Rush" [Stormblood] Arrows appear, Very important you need to have decent distance for them to appear, to show its a distance lowering damage mechanic as first appeared in Heavensward - Alexander if memory is correct), same mechanic (more or less) different actions for same markers.

Unrelated, but small correction here: while the rest of your examples are correct, the Amdapor HM indicator for the first boss is actually a solid line (like for a line AOE). The same marker is used in Gubal NM during the second boss. The Arrow “Rush” indicator wasn’t used until A10, if I remember correctly, but its meaning has remained consistent since it was implemented.

That being said, it doesn’t give much indication that one should run to the boss—technically, you don’t take any less damage by being at a distance or running towards them; however, it’s common courtesy for the tanks and melee to run towards the boss if you’re targeted so that they don’t go zipping around the arena for no reason.

[Ursa_Vonfiebryd]

Honestly I think the discrepancy is a little bit of random stat generation as mentioned previously and, at least in the case of the tome gear, the fact that the tome gear is the easiest to get. For people like me who dont do endgame content, that iLvl is what lets me continue to get into relevant content and the individual stats are less important (to me). Thankfully we have a lot of options to chose from (weapons to gear) but I've heard multiple times that the tome gear is garbage and I've always assumed this is because is because its intended to give casuals decent gear that lets them still contribute but is certainly not the best out there. I do feel bad for people who are shooting for BiS though, because that requires hands in a lot of pots (crafting, pyros, savage and ex primals).

As a bard who has just recently learned proper rotations, I'm still trying to figure out melds, let alone best gear. (Hopefully the Orbonne gear is good because thats what im shooting for).

[HyoMinPark]

As a bard who has just recently learned proper rotations, I'm still trying to figure out melds, let alone best gear. (Hopefully the Orbonne gear is good because thats what im shooting for).

The good thing is, is that BRD is easy to gear:
"Does this have Crit on it?" If yes, it's probably BiS. If no, it's probably not BiS.
As for Orbonne, the Aiming body from there and the i390 Augmented crafted are both good for BRD if you don't have access to the Savage body.

Melds are also easy for BRD:
"Can I shove more Crit into this?" If yes, yay! If no, "Fine, I guess I'll meld Direct Hit".

[Raldo]

For anyone reading this and feeling overwhelmed... Just use the higher level iLv stuff.

In the grand scheme of things, the difference between a BiS-but-lower-iLv item vs a higher iLv item is very small. Unless you're doing savage/ultimate content, you're not going to notice the difference.