Bard in Shadowbringers feels like an incoherent job

[kajv95]

3 Years of Bard gameplay, having mained it at all times and starting to feel like the changes to the job are making it hard to stay my main.

With Bard in 5.0 Shadowbringers, there have been a few controversial changes made to the job that ultimately impact the overall experience as a whole. With this write-up, I’d like to highlight the changes made to the job and how it affects the overall playstyle.
With every expansion come skill changes to prevent skill bloat and changing complaints with certain jobs, and Shadowbringers is no different in this regard. Below are the most notorious of these changes, ranging from good, to weird, to controversial and awkward.

Burst Shot - A buff to the overall playstyle
Burst Shot is an upgrade to Heavy Shot, with a potency increase to 230 from 180, and a refulgent proc rate of 35% as opposed to 20%. This also grants more stability to the proc rate of Refulgent Arrow. In addition, all DoT skills have another 35% proc rate on Refulgent Arrow, which will further limit your actual use of Burst Shot. This includes Iron Jaws.

Straight Shot - A relic of a forgotten past
Straight Shot has been reworked into a proc skill on the same effect as Refulgent Arrow, and will now be upgradable by trait. Of these two, I feel like Straight Shot is a bit of a problem, as the potency of it is only 20 higher than heavy shot, making it very unrewarding to use on lower levels, where it used to reward a 10% crit rate and a free crit proc every so often, which *felt* a lot better. I imagine the lower levels are a lower priority, but I feel like this is something worth highlighting as a high level player will still often be playing lower level content. Matching the potency to Empyreal Arrow’s potency would likely do wonders, as it is currently a meager upgrade to heavy shot with a 20% proc rate. It will also make Barrage feel better at lower level, as we can no longer use it with Empyreal Arrow since it has been changed to an ability rather than a weaponskill.

Barrage - It’s effect on the dynamic of gameplay
I want to address Barrage and Empyreal Arrow together, as these two have affected one another. In Stormblood, optimal Bard play would have you try and get a Refulgent Arrow to proc together with Barrage in a Raging Strikes window, and this in turn gave the job some much-needed flavor in trying to maximize efficiency. If you were unable to do this, Empyreal Arrow was your second go-to skill, and while you would feel bad over it, the choice to decide if you would give up on fishing for the proc and going with Empyreal Arrow was ultimately yours. Empyreal Arrow has been changed to an ability rather than a weaponskill, and Barrage now procs Refulgent Arrow for free, ultimately cutting a part of the bard gameplay experience out.

Utility, and the Job identity
In terms of the Bard identity, a lot was lost in the transition to 5.0, with Foe Requiem being cut and our songs no longer affecting anyone but our own repertoire procs. An extremely large part of the class fantasy went missing, which is a shame when certain other jobs such as White Mage and Summoner got closer to the general consensus of their respective class fantasies in this expansion.

Changes to Role Actions
We lost some role actions, in particular Refresh and Tactician, which used a music animation on Bard and gave it a little bit of extra charm where it felt like it fit our role perfectly. We also lost Palisade, which is a letdown as well. Admittedly this is an issue of quantity more than anything, as we do retain some “musical” party-wide buffs in the form of Battle Voice and Troubadour, but both of these are on a 3 minute cooldown, making them feel weak as a result. Finally, Bard has lost the 2% crit buff during the song rotation that Bard was notorious for.

The Survivors of the Purge
This leaves two other support skills. One being Nature’s Minne, on a 90s timer which is a single-target Convalescence-like buff. While useful in dungeon runs, this has nearly no usable utility in a Full Party environment since it only patches up a mistake, something that two healers are very capable of doing as opposed to Palisade’s ability to preventively mitigate a mistake. These same issues plague Warden’s Paean, while Warden’s is able to be used preventively, ultimately it is merely something that patches a mistake, and unlike Esuna it can only be used every 45 seconds while still being single-target.

Battle Voice and Troubadour are admittedly not weak at all, but feel bad to use. Battle Voice feels awkward because it impacts everyone but the bard themselves, making it more suited for Full Party content, and Troubadour feels awkward because every ranged dps has it, including Machinist, which is a much more DPS centric job. It makes it so that, unless Battle Voice puts everyone’s overall DPS high enough to reach around a 2000 damage per second difference combined, Machinist is simply the better solution.

Apex Arrow and the AoE
Finally this brings us to AoE type skills and the addition of the Soul Gauge and it’s respective skill, Apex Arrow. Quick Nock now gives a chance to proc Rain of Death outside of it’s Mage’s Ballad cooldown timer reset ability, which can sometimes result in some interesting looking weaving where Quick Nock can sometimes be followed up by two Rain of Death’s. One would quickly believe that this is how AoE works in this expansion, but there is an oddity with AoE in the addition of Apex Arrow.

Apex Arrow’s Flawed Execution
Apex Arrow is a line-AoE type weaponskill with a potency of 500, and requires 20 repertoire procs to effectively use. You can use it starting at 4 procs, in which I presume it will have a potency of 100. However, in order to use it, you will have to spam the Damage over Time skills on as many enemies as you possibly can, and as such you will be losing AoE damage during this time. At that point, you will start feeling like you absolutely have to hit as many mobs as possible with it, but herein lies a problem in it’s potency. With it being only 500, and losing so much damage on not using the other aoe skills instead, you are not doing damage effectively. However, not focusing on charging the skill will let you feel like there is no point to it being there, despite it looking so powerful. Aside from that, it is also on the global cooldown, which will make it interfere with quick nock even more, and the nature of the line AoE will make it miss a great deal of mobs in comparison to the cone and circle natures of the other AoE skills bard has access to.

The skill does not fare much better in single-target scenarios, being absolutely required to have proper damage output but feeling awkward to use. The slow charge rate makes it so that you’re waiting for it to charge a long time, and by the time it comes up, generally it will be better to wait for Raging Strikes to come back up, since the power of the skill is very meager on it’s own, and you are usually waiting 20-30 seconds. Not waiting for Raging Strikes will make it hard for the next one to align with Raging Strikes, and spirals out of control very easily. Of course, should a Ninja bring Trick Attack, or a dancer be using Devilment and Technical Finish on you at this time, you will want to use it before Raging Strikes, if you can align it with these windows instead. However, the skill on it’s own has no purpose being used aside from either of these scenarios.

This, in turn, poses an interesting dilemma. If Bard’s utility support has been neutered in such a way for the game to be based less around synergy, why does it’s strongest move center around synergy so much?

Solving the issues at hand
As the lack of synergy, the destruction of the class fantasy and the awkward implementation of our new skill has left a sour taste in many players’ mouths, I have thought of two ways to “fix” the gameplay of Bard. I believe implementing both of these changes will make the class outgrow the other classes, and as such I believe that only one of these routes should be used.

Fix #1 - Return the class fantasy
Let our songs affect the party again, if only ever so slightly. Make it so that the songs we are constantly playing are heard. This does not have to affect everyone at the same time, and a very simple effect would do it. I would propose having Mage’s Ballad give a weak MP regeneration effect or a magic damage buff of 1%, Army’s Paeon can give a skill speed buff of 1% or a physical damage buff of 1%, with the Minuet giving either a 5% damage mitigation or a 1% boost to everyone’s damage at the same time. This will grant Bards their class fantasy back while not having to mess around with the toolkit too much.

Fix #2 - Buff Apex Arrow
The DPS route, allow Apex Arrow to deal more damage. Give it a guaranteed critical hit or direct hit (not both!) to make it worth the long wait for the skill to come up. A large problem with the skill right now is that it only comes up every once in a while, yet when you’re unlucky, it only deals as much as a Refulgent Arrow on a Direct Hit. This change would suffice to make the dps of the job ever slightly less RNG centric while still retaining the core values of everything else and allowing the currently calculated dps numbers to stay mostly the same.
Alternatively, change Apex Arrow to have more potency, but let it have a damage fall-off effect. This will make it work better in single-target, while still giving it a place in AoE as well. I believe either of these changes would do wonders for the skill.