Quote Originally Posted by Zerathor View Post
Honestly as it stands in this ultimate, preventing death is far superior to the rez. And I believe you're underestimating the value of troubadour and other ranged damage reduction abilities in comparison to addle. There are many times the damage source is untargetable in this expansion, even some of the boss's casts deal damage from an outside source that targeted mitigation will not affect. Then there's other party qol aspects bard brings, like the cleanse and minne. Idk if you want to look at a broad spectrum of fights or focus on this current ultimate, but in this current ultimate the ranged mitigation is amazing, and the bard being able to self cleanse gives healers a little more breathing room.
the cleanse which also hasn't worked on absolutely anything before this ultimate, it may very well be awesome there, it is however still a way (and i mean WAY) to circumstantial skill. and troubadour in general i'm not saying isn't better than addle, i'm asking (again, fights in general) if its better than addle+a rezz and if so by how much, especially as chances are you will neither need troubadour nor addle if things go smoothly at least outside ultimate.

the original question was "mch or redmage" to that i say mch cause that indeed is the strongest physical ranged whereas redmage right now is the weakest caster (if you say the rezz is worth enough to offset the dps loss compared to taking a blackmage i would disagree but thats another discussion alltogether, the fact smn so far eclipses redmage however is just a given fact, at least for the moment and that extremly devalues anything redmage offers), again preventing deaths and getting a person back up after they went down are not mutually exclusive, i'm not arguing that for ultimate specifically brd isn't the better choice compared to mch, but that never really was the original question asked, that which was redmage or mch, someone that has to ask that on the official forum most likely isn't aiming for ultimate at least right now (and both sadly suck there....) so to that i answered the original question with "you WILL want 1 phys ranged, make the group happy and fill that slot with the best physical ranged possible" the rest of what i wrote down was very much intentionally disregarding things like troubadour, addle or rezz, as i've said multiple times i try to look at an average of fights and also just wanted to give a general idea how classes can be weaker in certain fights, better in others, "equal" overall, of course in practice things like better buffs/debuffs come into this equation but that gets way to hard to quantify at least for simply illustrating a point. ultimate specifically i just pointed out because its the one outlier as far as the "mch is the best phys ranged" goes, however as this is for the fact that the fight literally bends over backwards to play to bards (and to lesser extents dancers) strengths someone thats not aiming for ultimate for the time being should most likely disregard as it simply does not translate into anything we had in years, sure the next raid tier may have 2 adds for half the fight in every single encounter, but i would assume chances for that are very slim