The future of range physical DPS playing support role

[Miziliti]

Since BRD is the only somewhat supportive job currently, I want talk about the "supportiveness" of BRD's kit. When people talk about supporter in game I usually think of the role that can keep buffs up for the entire party consistently. My ideal supporter is a job that pre-buff before boss fight, and re-buff when the effect falls off. The way XIV distribute support skills and their effectiveness barely make the current BRD feel like a support.

I thought BRD songs would be the main source of the buffs, but not really in here.

The Wanderer's Minuet for example: Increases critical hit rate of all party members within a radius of 20 yalms by 2% and it counts as additional effect. The 2% crit rate support portion of this skill is so insignificant it is almost nonexistent no matter how I see. Songs are instead a source of BRD's damage kit. The other 2 songs brings the exact 2% buff to the party that made no difference. They only really affect what skills BRD can use.

Except for Foe Requiem: Increases damage taken by nearby enemies by 3%. MP is drained while singing. Again, I have to ask which dev thought 3% would make much difference? My TP bar allows me to spring for 45s while this thing completely drains my mp in about 10s. Even Contagion from Garuda-egi (SMN) is more potent with it's 10% magic damage taken vulnerability.

Well there are still a few potent ones that are worth calling them buffs, but their extremely long CD plus short duration makes me wonder their necessity outside opening of the battle.

Battle Voice: Increases direct hit rate of all party members by 15%. Finally 15% looks and sounds more fitting as a support skill. The unsatisfying part of it is 180s CD for 20s duration. Boss fights such as ex primal are often set to be done within 11 to 12 mins otherwise rage mechanic kicks in and it's a wipe. So in general, I can only use it at max 4 times and 3 times if clear fast. It suddenly gives a lackluster and very limited feel to it.

Troubadour: even though it's effect varies upon the song currently being used. Due to it's long 180s CD, it has to be used depends on situation. Magic/physical defense/HP boost don't really help all that much when our healers can cast their shield all the time when mitigation is needed.

Then there are the weird single target ones.

The Warden's Paean: casts a barrier that prevent debuff from applying or a 45s CD esuna. It sounds good on paper, but in reality I only use it on myself. I just don't bother with it because healers got esuna. If it is a party wide aoe buff that can help prevent dots affecting my entire party, that would be awesome and useful....Like Selene's Fey Caress (SCH) party wide esuna.

Nature's Minne: Increases HP recovery via healing magic for a party member or self by 20%. Just like The Warden's Paean. I only use on myself and sometimes on tank. If it is a party wide aoe buff....oh wait Eos's Fey Illumination (SCH) got it.

Finally, role actions. This is where the range physical DPS role call themselves "support DPS" while I don't understand the reason behind it.

Refresh: for mp in case our healers/RDM/SMN went oom from rezz too much. In 5.0 everyone will be using mp, so it would makes less sense that it must be range physical DPS to have it and not melee DPS.

Tactician: probably gone since TP is removed in 5.0.

Palisade: This just feels like they throw a tank CD for me to give it back to the tank for the sake of forcing me to feel supportive. Both the description and 150s cd give a bit of déjà vu as I have lvl 70 PLD/DRK.

In fact some jobs, regardless of roles, have at least 1 party wide support skill. Take DRG for example.

Battle Litany: Increases critical hit rate of self and nearby party members by 15%. The buff that makes DRG a popular choice in end game party composition. Battle voice is just the direct hit version of battle litany you know.

So far I don't see any clear line that divides range physical DPS from the rest of melee/caster DPS base on the perspective of a support role. I hope the addition of DNC can actually bring more than what we currently have. Of course, and rework what BRD have. Or should we forget this whole range physical DPS being support DPS?

[HyoMinPark]

I feel like you’re not giving enough credit to BRD’s current support capabilities—there’s a reason this job is in high demand in high-end content.

Between Foe’s, the passive crit buff, and Battle Voice, BRDs can bring roughly ~800 rDPS on average to a given fight, provided that the party they are buffing is skilled—sometimes it can bring even more: I’ve looked at fights where BRD gave over ~1,000 rDPS; these are with some of the best players in the game. Its raid buffs are certainly nothing to scoff at—there’s a reason why it hasn’t been uprooted by MCH (barring MCH’s choppy gameplay, it just doesn’t offer the same amounts of support or rDPS gains that BRD does). It all boils down to how the interact with other buffs in a party.


Damage Buffs

Foe’s has specific points where it is played during a fight, utilizing Refresh as a tool for restoring both your MP and mitigating the steady drain of your healers’ MP. A given fight can have 5~6 uses of Foe’s, depending on how long said fight lasts and when you time Foe’s to line up with other raid buffs (which is dependent on your comp). Foe’s also lasts ~22 seconds, not 10 seconds; you get 7 full ticks, additional ticks if a caster Mana Shifts you to increase the duration of your opening Foe’s.

The Passive Crit buff has a 100% uptime. Considering that crit always scales the highest the further along in the expansion, its value only increases as the tiers go by. Especially when it stacks with other raid buffs. Alone, it can provide up to ~300 rDPS, if not more.

Battle Voice is used every three minutes, and lines up with other major raid buffs such as Battle Litany and Trick Attack. Foe’s is also timed to be up when BV is used.


Lining up both Foe’s and BV with other raid buffs only increases their effectiveness. Think about how you said that Foe’s +3% damage is too small. Now think about it being combined with 10 seconds of +10% damage from TA, and 30 seconds of +5% damage from AOE Balance. You will have 10 seconds of +18% damage to the party, and another 12 seconds of +8% damage to the party. This isn’t counting boosts from potions/infusions and other buffs, like Litany, Chain Strategem, and Battle Voice. You can’t just look at the buffs individually; you need to think about them in a setting where there are multiple buffs. Especially a skill like Foe’s, whose usage is centered around periods where there are other raid buffs active.

There’s a reason why meta comps are full of jobs that just buff each other.


Mitigation Buffs

Troubadour is used mostly in Wanderer’s Minuet to stack mitigation, which helps with building LB—10% magic mitigation of AOE damage for 30s is nothing to scoff at, especially for things like O12S’ Patch and various mechanics during UCoB/UwU. Timings are not terribly hard to figure out, since all damage and attacks are scripted in high-end content, and your songs follow a strict rotation unless otherwise altered (UwU song rotation is slightly altered, for example, but this does not affect effective Troubadour usage). While Mage’s Troubador (+15% Max HP) is rarely used, there is actually one instance of Troubadour’s Paeon (+10% physical mitigation) in O11S this tier—for the giant punching fists followed by Electric Slide. This mitigates the amount of damage taken by the party, subsequently lightening the healing load and allowing for more healer DPS. Physical Troubadour can also see use in dungeons to mitigate physical autos on the tank during trash pulls.

Nature’s Minne is used primarily for buffing a SCH’s Adlo so that they can Deploy a +20% buffed shield to the party for extra mitigation. It can also be used as a free Convalescence every 45 seconds on the MT if the healer finds themselves having to cast GCD healing spells on them (Cure II/Benefic II/Adlo/Physick). Honestly, you using it on yourself is incorrect and ineffective play—it should always go to the MT, because they are the one individual that is consistently taking damage and who can consistently benefit from its healing boost. If an Adlo is being spread, it should be placed on the WAR or whichever target the SCH is deploying off of—which is usually one of the tanks, since you cannot place it on the fairy.

Palisade is a free cooldown that you can throw on a MT for physical attacks—allowing them to save their own cooldowns for busters. I’ve used it frequently in UwU during healing-intensive moments to offset boss autos on the MT—I also find it useful to use during O12S Hello World to mitigate Final Omega’s autos on the MT, just to name a few examples. In high-end settings, you usually work with your tanks/healers to decide when is the best time to use Palisade for free mitigation. In dungeons, it’s great to use on the tank on cooldown for trash pulls. Again, free cooldown that costs the tank nothing and you nothing.


Party Resource Buffs

Refresh is an offensive tool used for Foe’s management (so more buffing the raid), as well as healer MP. Optimally, you use it at ~22 seconds (when your MP hits 0 from your first Foe’s), and then on cooldown after that (for healer MP and your own MP refresh for more Foe’s!). Refresh offers 6,000 MP worth of refresh every 3 minutes, and for jobs like AST who struggle with their MP even at the best of times, this is a godsend (trust me, I play AST more than I play BRD). It’s not just about casters running OOM from raising—it also supports healer DPS, which is certainly nothing to scoff at these days (~3,000 on average, if not more... there are two healers that have broken 10,000 DPS combined). With healers DPSing, things die faster, which is always a good thing.

Tactician is used mostly as an enmity reducer in high-end content (something BRD desperately needs because they burst every 80 seconds), but it is useful for AOE in dungeons. Since BRDs have both Invigorate and Tactician, they can AOE quite effectively in dungeons without worrying about having to run dry... providing that their party is also playing their party and AOEing effectively. It also helps melee replenish their own TP while AOEing. While it will, unfortunately, probably die with TP in 5.0, I hope that the developers provide BRD with an adequate enmity management tool in its place... like Diversion, since that was originally our Quelling Strikes.


My Poor, Sad Warden’s Paeon

The only tool BRD really has that feels borderline useless now is the Warden’s Paeon. Simply because so many debuffs in high-end content are not cleansible, so where is there ever a need for a single-target Esuna/debuff prevention? It can find limited use in non-high-end content, but I would like to see it have a different effect.


Comparsions between BRD & Casters, and BRD & Melee

The differences between BRD and the casters, or BRD and a job like DRG (which DRG is also considered a “utility job” since it brings Piercing to the physical ranged, Battle Litany, and Dragon Sight) is that its support is more.

Casters cannot contribute anything close to what BRD contributes in rDPS—the gains from Embolden and Devotion are small compared to the combined values of BRD’s Foe’s, Passive Crit, and BV. They also do not have an answer to Refresh or Troubadour—both Mana Shift and Apoc are single-target; Mana Shift restores half of what Refresh does in terms of MP, and Apoc is shorter duration and only protects one party member. This is why the casters have not been able to unseat BRD and do a double caster comp.

The only other jobs that contribute as much or more rDPS than it are NIN (Trick Attack), DRG (Battle Litany, Piercing [the major one because physical ranged get 300~400 extra DPS off of having it], and Dragon Sight—which is actually very small, about ~1% increase), and AST (depending on the cards drawn and used during a fight). However, neither NIN nor DRG have anything that resembles Palisade, Troubadour, Nature’s Minne, or Refresh, some of BRD’s biggest party support/mitigation skills.




BRD is honestly not in need of any kind of rework—for skillset or for adding “more support” (or taking it away). The support they offer already is tremendous—again, there’s a reason they’re a meta job. I wonder if you would rather them be a “pure support job”—which is something that just won’t work in this game, I don’t think. Pure support jobs are either trash because they don’t deal damage, or they’re broken because they offer huge amounts of rDPS and there is no substitute for them. As I’ve explained already, there’s already things in a BRD’s kit that casters don’t have an adequate answer to.

The Stormblood iteration of the job is absolute perfection (especially when we think back to the Dark Days of the Bowmage)—the only thing that would need to be looked at is the OP crit scaling for BRD’s Repertoire mechanic, which only got stronger from Deltascape to Sigmascape to Alphascape because of the amount of Critical Hit we can stack (I have almost 3,000 crit on my BiS BRD for example—no Eureka weapon).

Other minor QoL things can be added (like just replacing Straight Shot with Refulgent when it procs; maybe adjusting the Repertoire effect of Army’s Paeon since the Haste is not a huge gain), but its nothing gamebreaking if they aren’t added.

[Lambdafish]

Agreed with everything said above, and that's not even taking into account the fact that ranged physical DPS can move and shoot, making them perfect candidates for handling DPS mechanics over the other roles, which could be counted as a supportive role.

[Shurrikhan]

Agreed with everything said above, and that's not even taking into account the fact that ranged physical DPS can move and shoot, making them perfect candidates for handling DPS mechanics over the other roles, which could be counted as a supportive role.

I guess it's just a matter of whether SE figures, "Perhaps the jobs with the greatest ease of positioning and only middle-of-the-road rotational difficulty shouldn't also be guaranteed the highest tDPS across most compositions?"

[Kabooa]

I guess it's just a matter of whether SE figures, "Perhaps the jobs with the greatest ease of positioning and only middle-of-the-road rotational difficulty shouldn't also be guaranteed the highest tDPS across most compositions?"

It only took them 6 years to figure this out.

[Phoenicia]

Lining up both Foe’s and BV with other raid buffs only increases their effectiveness. Think about how you said that Foe’s +3% damage is too small. Now think about it being combined with 10 seconds of +10% damage from TA, and 30 seconds of +5% damage from AOE Balance. You will have 10 seconds of +18% damage to the party, and another 12 seconds of +8% damage to the party. This isn’t counting boosts from potions/infusions and other buffs, like Litany, Chain Strategem, and Battle Voice. You can’t just look at the buffs individually; you need to think about them in a setting where there are multiple buffs. Especially a skill like Foe’s, whose usage is centered around periods where there are other raid buffs active.

Please note that multiple buffs stack multiplicatively in this game, not additively. Foe's + TA + Balance is closer to 19%. 1.1 from TA x 1.05 from Balance x 1.03 from Foe's nets you 1.1897. One might thing it's small, but when you also factor personal buffs that are also multiple 10% and 20%s, you suddenly have phases with double damage from some of the DPS. Even more on WAR that more than "Doubles" its damage with IR DCHs.

Also 2% is not little. Considering at very high gear levels we have 20~26% crit chance. BRD is practically increasing everyone's crit by ab out 10%. It's all about perspective in the end.

[Shurrikhan]

It only took them 6 years to figure this out.

Have they, though?

I don't see any live letter comments indicating as much, and fflogs/xivrdps have yet to indicate Bard's been at all dethroned when equally percentile to its party-mates.

Please note that multiple buffs stack multiplicatively in this game, not additively. Foe's + TA + Balance is closer to 19%. 1.1 from TA x 1.05 from Balance x 1.03 from Foe's nets you 1.1897. One might thing it's small, but when you also factor personal buffs that are also multiple 10% and 20%s, you suddenly have phases with double damage from some of the DPS. Even more on WAR that more than "Doubles" its damage with IR DCHs.

Technically, I thought they confirmed sometime in ARR that multiplicity only happens between buffs and debuffs, as the two sets have to be summed separately -- i.e. that Balance would stack multiplicatively with [additive] Foe+TA for 1.05*1.13 -> 1.1865, up from 1.18, but not quite 1.1897.
It's not as if this is consequential to any single parse vs. the 5% deviation attached to every instance of damage, but as long as we're being precise...