Thread: BRD 5.0 Feedback, Suggestions, and Requests

Creativity is admirable, but big nope on all counts. AoE is not the problem with Apex, and we hardly need a Bane. Raging is one of the few nice things we have going, I wish it were stronger honestly. And doing that would be a better way to give us a steroid than self-BV, which is dubious for reasons well-explored in this thread. And we don't want Barrage to start mis-aligning.

Some people like Wide over Nock, but personally I'm a fan of a 12y cone > 5y AoE any day. If Wide was 8y like Rain, then maybe.

Circling back on the Raging point, buffing Raging is another option on the list of ways they could increase numbers while making the Bard kit reward better decisions. Especially if coupled with a change to a more flexible Apex Arrow.

I remember pre-launch I was really hoping they would have the foresight to make Raging i.e. 20% for 15s or something (along with expecting BL charges and hoping for a flexible Apex), but alas.

The thing with Apex arrow i'd like fixed is the range, why not make it 25yd? Interrupts the flow of bard so many times for me; that and the fact it's on GCD.

Some more thoughts about Bard I’d like to add for feedback:

Overall I think The number of support skills we have isn’t really an issue, I’d like more personally (even just Foe Requiem) but it’s not like we have nothing currently to work with. But Minne and Paean feel so ‘meh’, Battle Voice is strong but kinda boring, and Troubadour is essentially a role skill.

in terms of suggesting they add MP management, my intention for that is more around how readily available the songs are.

I really liked in 2.0/3.0 being able to say, ‘ok healers need mp’ and sing Ballad, then ‘ok I’ll increase damage’ and use Requiem, then after your MP recovers for a bit you could sing Ballad for a few ticks for healers (not saying you’d actually use your songs like this, just for examples sake). I know that the damage reductions meant you didn’t actually have that kind of freedom, but at least it was there in concept. With everything on cooldowns now, the support you can provide is largely dictated by said cooldown and not your own personal planning.

Of course, that kind of system would require a huge change to the playstyle and would just put off the people who do enjoy it. Plus it’s very difficult to balance.

So, while I’d like them to consider having Bard’s support abilities work more in the style they initially did in 2.0/3.0, it does seem like the kind of change that would be difficult/impossible to implement without some big changes. And then, those changes might satisfy people who played the job before like me, but for everyone else it would just feel like the job had changed too much. And that wouldn’t be fair on them either; people who would like the job to more like it is now shouldn’t have to suffer for those who liked it more before. There should be a fair middle ground between the two to satisfy everyone.

Overall I think The number of support skills we have isn’t really an issue, I’d like more personally (even just Foe Requiem) but it’s not like we have nothing currently to work with. But Minne and Paean feel so ‘meh’, Battle Voice is strong but kinda boring, and Troubadour is essentially a role skill.

Right. For all the "bring back Foe" calling, I think that can be cleanly translated to "we want interesting support skills", and Foe is just a placeholder for that notion.

As I mentioned at the outset, they could make BV resemble Foe via charges or some similar flexibility aid, and then any returned Foe would be redundant (barring a mirror concept in the vein of what I posted earlier here).


I think most people would like it if the role skill abilities were differentiated, it's clear that SE is super nervous about gaps in defensive utilities but I can't think of any historical reason why they should be. Like yeah, permanent -10% INT blew up job balance back in the day, but the difference between 180s / 30s vs. 120s / 15s vs. 60s / 5s or something is nowhere near that scale.

On Minne and Warden's, I think a stumbling block is that it's hard to change them in a way that doesn't just lead to us having two buttons that do close to the same thing - i.e. if Minne were made into Mantra, now we just have two party wide defensive things, or if WP were made into an Excog or Palisade or something, how we just have two solo defensive things. Design-wise you kind of don't want that sort of redundancy, as at that point you should probably just remove one button and buff the other.