All physical range DPS are perfect now!

[Jonnycbad]

Make Bard into Ranger. Change songs into traps or arrow types or something. Create a new healer called Bard that uses instruments to sooth and heal with various songs

[HyoMinPark]

Make Bard into Ranger. Change songs into traps or arrow types or something. Create a new healer called Bard that uses instruments to sooth and heal with various songs

And do what with BRD’s existing lore? Retcon all of it? I’d rather see BRD return to its roots—not be overhauled (again) and turned into a completely different class and in a completely different role at that. If people want a Ranger, it would be more feasible to just design a new DPS job into it, and return BRD to what it was before without all the need for overhauling a job deemed near perfect in the last expansion by many and retconning its BRD lore into Ranger lore.

[Rika007]

Simply put will never happen.

1) It technically would be a massive undertaking. They would have to rework the entire questline to an entirely new job, rewrite a whole new job's questline from level 30 to max level. Recode all art assets and gear to the new job which would also be a role switch. The amount of background development that would go to this would be absolutely obscene, it is not as simple as just create two new jobs.

2) It would require an entire retcon of the lore and backstory of not only the current Bard, but the world around the current Bard as well. The dev team has proven time and time again that this is a story first MMO, and considers the lore and story of the world one of it's highest priorities. Retconing the entire lore of the Bard job would force them to rewrite their lore books and the entire base story any time a Bard was in play. This is why they left themselves open in certain lore based decisions like Male Viera or Female Hrothgar. They didn't totally shut down that they don't exist, just stated you almost will never see them. Thus leaving it open for them to make the change down the line. But to completely rework the entire jobs's lore that Bard had nothing to do with bow's or empowering their fellows and instead was a healer? Not happening.

3) SE would also want to avoid making players who are perfectly happy with Bard as this hybrid DPS/Support job and have gained an identity with it over the last 6 years angry. Bard is one of the most popular jobs in the game. Taking the risk that they would make such a drastic change to the job is taking a risk that you are making a sizeable portion of the player base angry about it. They wouldn't take that risk.

[Mistyregions]

Let's casually forget that playing a Machinist well is also prohibited on the entire east coast because of lag. If MCH didn't need to constantly double weave or, especially, single weave on a 1.5s GCD, then MCH would truly be perfect.

I'm on the east coast and use time Warner and pull 10k on eden prime so I understand your complain but at worst you drop to 9k and that's pretty good.

[Xieldras]

snip

For sure Bard was very popular and felt perfect in SB (it's why we had the bad Bard meme lol).
I personally really enjoyed the potential MCH's Heat Gauge had, badly implemented but interesting management. I'm sad that it's gone but the class is more popular now than ever so it's still a win to me.
MCH and DNC have had good implementations and I'm happy for them, but other than our DPS gameplay Bard is far from perfect.

Having DNC get "its time in the sun" while BRD lost half its kit goes counter to what the Devs apparently learned from 1.0: Don't forget your roots, Don't forget your fans and the mindset that it can just be fixed next expansion.



Is it lack of funding (probably)? Lack of time? Stubbornness? And I know Game Dev is very hard work but I'm not shy of throwing the word Complacency in there as well.

All in all, 2 out of 3 have great implementation this expansion but it can be better.

[YanderePrincess]

I don't think it's complacency, or that they've broken any of those ideas in those images. Not being able to fix everything immediately doesn't mean the mindset is "Eh, we'll just fix it later." They have to actually see how the fans react to what changes they did make before they can determine how to fix it, and any fixes aren't likely to be able to come instantly. Hotfixing all the time would also be bad, even if they could complete the fixes immediately, as it would create a feeling of instability in the game.

[Ryaz]

I just picked up my mch again while waiting for leves to regenerate. It feels like a completely different class and I'm still trying to figure out how to play it properly. Will actually need to look at a guide for the first time in ages. A lot of fun so far, though.

[Taranok]

I'm on the east coast and use time Warner and pull 10k on eden prime so I understand your complain but at worst you drop to 9k and that's pretty good.

Well, not everyone is so fortunate to have a connection that's 100% stable, and the packet loss is maddening on the rotation.

[Kitfox]

I'm on the east coast and use time Warner and pull 10k on eden prime so I understand your complain but at worst you drop to 9k and that's pretty good.

10% dps drop because of latency is not okay. That's terrible design.

Thankfully the difference isn't that huge but MCH still feels garbage to play when you get a bad instance and start clipping your double weaves and everything in Hypercharge. The 1.5s gcds were a problem in Stormblood and they're a problem now, even if the job is more fun to play for more people. I still can't understand why they decided to double down on a bad design choices from Stormblood even though they got negative feedback on them. They even designed a charge system that was suggested as a solution for the ping problems, but then decided not to use it for Heat Blast/Wildfire! I'm glad that people are enjoying the job but I would really like to have a word with the dev who decided that this was a good base to build up from... the core problem with latency dependency is unfixed and if they keep this as the new foundation for the job, it's going to plague future job development until they're forced to do yet another rework.

Please, SE, fix this bad foundation for the future of the job! 1.5s gcds were a mistake, at least in this quantity and with this many ogcd weaves!

[LunaProtege]

I preferred basically every previous version of MCH over the current version; the only thing about it I'd consider improved is that overheat is activated rather than how it worked in the previous expansion. The Queen Automata isn't a bad thing, but its not part of the core gameplay.
The new MCH lacks a core rotation, and its now just a spam fest that I've repeatedly likened to whack a mole. A comparison that becomes even more apt when you get to how the REST of overheat works now when combined with Wildfire, which leads to you just pressing one button frantically while praying that you can get weave two abilities into a time-frame that only allows one thing to be weaved in.
Previous versions of the class had rotations that once you'd understood the mechanics, you'd find yourself making a rotation that you could easily read WHERE in the rotation you were in. Everything used to fit together perfectly, like a well oiled machine; and for me, the "randomness" of hoping for crits during the wildfire wasn't even a drawback; critical hits don't radically redefine your rotation, they are just an occasional bonus to damage, so getting a lot of extra damage via a mechanic that benefits a lot from them is neither good nor bad.
I saw someone in this thread post an image that says "remember your roots", and for me, the new MCH utterly betrays everything about the old MCH that I'd leaned and gotten used to. How is that "remembering your roots"?
The new MCH is dumbed down, chaotic, and virtually impossible to play consistently, all by the very nature of its lack of a rotation.
It seems that unfortunately, I'm going to have to abandon ranged DPS until MCH gets changed again; BRD and Dancer don't appeal to me. Meanwhile, Gunbreaker plays like how old MCH used to, so that's what I'm going to be sticking with this expansion.