Will bard lose it's identity/class fantasy?

[MPNZ]

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1. Well, that sounds like it would go against the current design philosophy for FF14, and it might turn into another bowmage or latter 2.0 situation. And, the playerbase is def not up to something of that skill level. It might be better to enable players to mitigate wipe mechanic damage, alternative emergency personal-dps-up skills, or lowering the walls players must climb by limiting the current obsession of DPS numbers and how high they can push it and thus what everyone else is expected to push to and instead focus on giving the feeling of that content being difficult, which is one of many illusions practiced in game design. Like they could redesign the tells of Suzaku EX based on "The players will not be able to communicate with each other during the trial", so they would have to design it so that the trial would have more observable tells like clockwise and counter-clockwise notes to distinguish between pull and push and a visual tell like an aura to draw the player's attention to her and engage the player in a way that gives them "Eureka" moments in play

2. Well, the 5.0 effect for paean is a 30 sec extended haste that will be scaled to the number of notes/procs activated, and allowing the haste buff to affect the whole party would require them to fix the two issues involving clipping for faster jobs, and TP, which is finally gone forever. The former could be fixed with animation tricks like creating after-images to complete actions that would make the character appear faster, but in a way that would avoid seizures and not upset the spaghetti code. They could also make it reduce the time it takes for ogcds to reset.

Having less actions can mean having less to balance and tweak too

3. Everyone said that redmage would be totally broken, and it would just end up like SCH/SMN too. But, it ended up being really fun to play

[MOZZYSTAR]

I kind of agree in that, right now, support is an integral part of bard (it is a support-DPS class; that's the whole gimmick in its questline: play songs to rejuvinate your comrades or weaken your foes, etc.). They don't have the same repercussions as they did in 2.0 that I'm aware of and the songs have enough variety where you can strategically use them provided they aren't on CD. Personally, I like playing synergists (and saboteurs) as a whole, so for me as an individual, I think the support skills to bard are an important part of its current gameplay. It's literally the only reason why I play it and not some other DPS class.