Thread: 6.0 Bard complete rework please

I always felt bard should be more like Minstrel is in LOTRO, let my music playing damage opponents as well as do my buffs. No reason why Bard, having access to the library of instruments they do should be relegated to one for purposes of of job animations. Flesh it out, make it its's own class. Too many people lock bard into using bows, but isn't our first special bow not a harp? I understand Bard is bottom tier at the moment, which is sad for me to because bard was my first max level at the time. I just feel like more creativity could be used with this class instead of it just being relegated to minor buffs and super stripped procs.

Edit: SamRF didnt even read your post before mine! So sorry but totally agree! It's also to an extent how some Healer classes should be built but, Standing Stone isn't the best company is all, IS why I'm here and not Lotro anymore ( after 9+ years) It's a proper utilitiy but you have to switch loadouts, either healear dps or buffs, but you can buy more loadouts in you want to mix them

Originally Posted by SamRF

[...] like Demoralize and Stress (perhaps silly that those effects will then deal damage but w/e).

They sure do, trust me on that.

But yeah, it seems that with Shadowbringers, SE tried to give more "bard-like" animations. At this point, apart from Bloodletter, the whole kit of bard has new animations that are shiny arrows, powered by magic. Maybe they could tweak some of the effects a bit more, but most of the work is imo going towards this anyway. I guess that for the next expac, Bard will have only "magic-looking" abilities, which isn't bad at all.

Bard used to be able to cast actual magic in 1.0; being able to cast magic whilst supporting the party with songs was one of the main reasons I went with Bard in the first place. Hell Bards could even cast Thunder if they wanted to (they didn’t lol).

Ages and ages ago (maybe even around the time of either alpha or beta) , SE decided that Physical and Magical jobs must absolutely be fully separated with no potential overlap in any way, shape or form. So they removed all potential overlap, including Bard’s ability to use any form of magic whatsoever. So no magic for Bards, and no physical attacks for caster/mages. Then Red Mage happened so I guess they just forgot about that lol.

Then of course because of the Wanderer’s Minuet scandal of Heavensward, SE took that to mean ‘Bard should never have a single cast bar ever or nobody will touch it ever again and it will die off as a job’ and not ‘Please don’t throw lazy copy-paste mechanics onto jobs purely for balance without making at least a token effort to synergise the mechanic with pre-existing ones’

Splitting Bard and Archer would be for the benefit of everyone if you ask me.

How many players are there out who are thinking, ‘I love playing an Archer, but I don’t want to be a low dps support oriented style job‘. Conversely it’s clear there are players saying ‘I love the musical/magical elements of Bard, but I don’t want to play a pure physical dps over a support oriented one’

Nobody ever wins with the current setup. If you want to be a Bard you have to deal with predominantly being an arrow-shooting high apm pure dps with little to no worthwhile support (because of DPS balancing), and you spend most of your time as a Bard ignoring the Bard aspects of the job. Literally 99% of the ‘Bard’ section of the job is passive and requires no thought from the players whatsoever, then the ones that you can decide to use are either useless (Paean) or make little difference overall (Minne / Troubadour).

If you want to be an Archer you have to deal with random bursts of magical music every 30 seconds that have absolutely no bearing on anything worthwhile and could easily have been replaced with almost anything else. I honestly think nobody would bat an eyelid if the three dps songs got deleted and replaced with ‘Quiver Dip’ where you dip an arrow into a special poison and that makes you get procs. And then if you do want to be a high dps archer, you have to deal with the fact that your job will always be largely inferior to all other dps because of the ‘support capabilities’ (including movement).

So it’s like, you can be a DPS Archer, but you’re never actually going to be an Archer focused purely on dps. You can be a Bard, but you’re never actually going to be a Bard focused on supporting with songs and helping the party with magic (like they do in literally every other iteration in the Final Fantasy series lol)

I mean, they could just keep trying to balance both the Bard and Archer aspects of the job, but in my honest opinion they’ve been failing this on the whole since 1.0. Stormblood was a good start but even then I still have my own issues with how that was (maybe that’s for another thread lol)

When I hear ‘Final Fantasy Bard’, I don’t think of a high speed Legolas Archer that isn’t generally that interested in music or helping the party. Personally I think of a ‘spoony Bard’ with a harp that sings songs in battle to help out the party, or just runs away in the battle of battle lol (Hide). If you ask me then trying to conflate these two contradictory identities with a single job is ultimately a recipe for disaster. Yes FFXIV is it’s own game, but I don’t see people accepting that when it comes to the identity of any other job than Bard.

Why is it fair for Bards to become a distorted caricature of itself, when every other job absolutely must retain its identifying traditional features (e.g Black Mage uses elemental magic, White Mage uses healing, Monks punch).

Like, imagine if Samurai used a Quarterstaff and was all about smacking the enemy over the head as fast as you can like whack-a-mole? It doesn’t matter what it used in other final fantasy games because they’re not this. So why exactly wouldn’t it be acceptable? Because even if the end result was a fun job, it wouldn’t really be a ‘Samurai’ in the way it was previously. And if we want to be really pedantic, I’m sure we’ll see a reference to Gil Toss at some point in Samurai’s lifespan, even if it’s just for a joke.

I guess what I’m saying is why is it standard practice for all other jobs to retain their traditional identity and key identifiers that make the player say ‘oh that’s like in the other Final Fantasy games’, but then when it comes to Bard they’re allowed to just throw all of the previous identity out the window and make something entirely new?

Originally Posted by Connor

Ages and ages ago (maybe even around the time of either alpha or beta) , SE decided that Physical and Magical jobs must absolutely be fully separated with no potential overlap in any way, shape or form. So they removed all potential overlap, including Bard’s ability to use any form of magic whatsoever. So no magic for Bards, and no physical attacks for caster/mages. Then Red Mage happened so I guess they just forgot about that lol.

I wouldn't consider RDM to be a good example of this, since its physical attacks are more compromises than anything else. Yes, there's Contre and Fleche, but also unenchanted weaponskills that hit like a soft breeze.

Then of course because of the Wanderer’s Minuet scandal of Heavensward, SE took that to mean ‘Bard should never have a single cast bar ever or nobody will touch it ever again and it will die off as a job’ and not ‘Please don’t throw lazy copy-paste mechanics onto jobs purely for balance without making at least a token effort to synergise the mechanic with pre-existing ones’

I'll take that further and say that SE needed to learn the lesson of not making such a big change to gameplay mid-game, which is why Wanderer's Minuet was such a problem during HW. If they had redesigned ARC/BRD around WM from the ground up, the ARR BRDs would have eventually adapted to the new design or "died out" (move on to other jobs or just quit altogether) and new players would know only the WM BRD and nothing else. Instead, old and new players felt the rug being pulled out from under them the moment they hit lv52 because they were able to experience the non-bow mage BRD from levels 1-51.

Splitting Bard and Archer would be for the benefit of everyone if you ask me.

It's a bit late for this, but I agree. The perfect time for the split would have been with Heavensward or during one of the post-MSQ patches for that expansion. of course, this assumes the split you're talking about would be allowing the Archer class to split into BRD and a bow-focused DPS like how Arcanist split into SMN and SCH.

Nobody ever wins with the current setup. If you want to be a Bard you have to deal with predominantly being an arrow-shooting high apm pure dps with little to no worthwhile support (because of DPS balancing), and you spend most of your time as a Bard ignoring the Bard aspects of the job. Literally 99% of the ‘Bard’ section of the job is passive and requires no thought from the players whatsoever, then the ones that you can decide to use are either useless (Paean) or make little difference overall (Minne / Troubadour).

If you want to be an Archer you have to deal with random bursts of magical music every 30 seconds that have absolutely no bearing on anything worthwhile and could easily have been replaced with almost anything else. I honestly think nobody would bat an eyelid if the three dps songs got deleted and replaced with ‘Quiver Dip’ where you dip an arrow into a special poison and that makes you get procs. And then if you do want to be a high dps archer, you have to deal with the fact that your job will always be largely inferior to all other dps because of the ‘support capabilities’ (including movement).

To an extent, I agree with you. Hunter/Ranger fans can't compete with the regular DPS, bard fans get put off by not being able to use song and magic.

Designing an archer/ranger isn't hard, since there's already a framework for it. The hard and incredibly risky part is how to design a BRD that doesn't lead us to the princess BRD scenario nor give it abilities that are mandatory for raiding.

Off the top of my head:

- Have BRD rotate between Hymns linked to some of the 12 (the Wanderer, the Destroyer, the Scholar), with a charge system that allows them to either use music to damage the enemy or allows the use of an enhanced arrow attack. Like the current design, these Hymns would provide small damage boosts to party members.

- Paean, Ballad and Minne would become party cooldowns (90s recast). Army's Paean increasing physical damage of all party members, Mage's Ballad increasing magical damage of all party members, Nature's Minne either increasing healing received or regenerating party HP. The caveat here being that the BRD can only have one effect active, and using one puts the others on cooldown.

- Round things out by giving it music that deals damage to enemies (DoTs), bow attacks with a cast time, and attacks/buffs that react to music effects currently active.

Mind that this is a rough idea. I'd have to sit and write out a design for this, but I think there's potential in helping BRD lean more towards instruments/lore without having to go full Edward.

They could just like stop changing the jobs drastically or unneedingly every expansion instead of just ignoring totally glaring issues with jobs like WHM or the encounter design or the "every patch before this patch is now horridly monotonous and prepares no one for higher skill level content via ilv-cheesing and skill-pruning" or the "why doesn't any one want to explore the new-giant-flat-map we made and enter FATE-trains post MSQ until you unsub out of eextreme-burnout"

Originally Posted by MPNZ

[...] totally glaring issues with jobs like WHM [...]

Ahah, Glare and WHM, I see what you did there.

But... WHM has issues ? What.

Originally Posted by Connor

I guess what I’m saying is why is it standard practice for all other jobs to retain their traditional identity and key identifiers that make the player say ‘oh that’s like in the other Final Fantasy games’, but then when it comes to Bard they’re allowed to just throw all of the previous identity out the window and make something entirely new?

Well, I'm still waiting for the moment when we'll be able to choose between the Nin running animation and the Rogue, as I like Rogue's way more. While I'd like for this to happen, I don't think that Bard and Ranger will be splitted in the near future.
Although Ranger could be a really neat addition. Or Bard. Well I dunno which, but you got my point.

Originally Posted by Eliadil

Ahah, Glare and WHM, I see what you did there.

But... WHM has issues ? What.

Basically, it's extremely monotonous, boring, and has a lot of redundant actions that were designed for the exact opposite of the encounter design while being refitted every expansion further out of touch with encounter design while also having its kit cannibalized for new exact abilities and cross-class skills leaving it extremely hollowed out