Quote Originally Posted by Merryl View Post
I mained bard since november 2013. Quite frankly I took one look at the crossed out actions, read the descriptions, but the deal breaker was having to spam straight shot to fill a gauge to use the 3rd action.
I got nothing to make up for that rotation loss in slot 3.
So I erased bard from my gear list today.

Now I'm a machinist/black mage
What are you talking about? Straight Shot doesn’t exist anymore in any capacity to its previous iteration. It’s a proc off of Heavy Shot, and at level 70 it turns into Refulgent Arrow, which functions the same way.

The Soul Gauge fills based off of your Repertoire, which is a flat 40%*. The Enhanced Empyreal Arrow trait you get at level 68 also helps fill it, but it in no way fills based off of spamming Straight Shot. So you misread the tooltips completely.

*Lower level content lowers Repertoire to 20% — which is cancerous, but it ultimately doesn’t affect the Soul Gauge since that’s only available at level 80.