Yoshi-P Sanpo comments re: Bard

[Cetonis]

In the Yoshi-P sanpo the other day, he made a passing comment along the lines that they're getting a lot of requests to "fix Bard", but with a lack of concrete suggestions as to what/how.

Soooo, I figured I'd post a bunch of them Not that I expect SE to give the time of day to constructive forum feedback (just ask MCHs), as they only seem to react to riots, but hey might as well.


Note: This is not a flavor thread. If you want to talk about rangers and job splits and identity polls and etc., there are all too many threads about that already. Please search up one of those for such topics.

This is a thread to talk about raw performance, numerical issues, reasons why Bard is providing less damage than the other ranged, and perhaps less than SE expects it to in their internal simulations.

And, practical improvements that can be made in the scope of a mid-expac patch. Yes, no-interaction song buffs were an awful decision, and there are some other core design flaws not brought up here. Realistically though, we're probably stuck with them until 6.0 at best. We should try and limit the scope here to ideally raw numbers changes, or other things that might (?) be 'easy' enough to change in a patch.


Credibility: I've been playing and theorycrafting for Bard for a long time, and am one of the Balance discord Bard mentors. Naturally, "how best to buff Bard" has been a frequent topic in recent months, and I'll be listing some of my favorite ideas here.

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Underlying Issues

First, it's important to point out that Bard's problems aren't quite as simple as "numbers are low". Fight design is a big factor, and there are some QoL / anti-synergy issues that result in damage losses that maybe SE's internal math doesn't account for. Not all of these things are "must fix at all costs" stuff, but having this context will help talk about how different changes might play out.


(1) Bard is not as bursty as the other ranged, especially Dancer. This is fine - not every job has to have big spikes and valleys - but it leads to gaps when you add long downtimes to fights. The quality and quantity of the cooldowns that the other ranged get back during 30-90 second breaks is just better than what Bard gets out of these situations.

(2) Bard gets punished by new-target situations. Any time a boss comes back fresh, or a new boss appears entirely, Bard has to spend two GCDs getting their DoTs back up. During that time, they're not using Burst Shot, can't use RA, aren't getting procs, or DoT the damage itself, etc. It adds up to a pretty chunky penalty that other ranged don't have to absorb.

(3) The damage gap between Iron Jaws and Burst Shot, as well as weaker party buffs / the removal of crit synergy, effectively nerfed Iron Jaws. For those unfamiliar, a good Bard in SB could optimize Iron Jaws and Foe Requiem / Refresh timings to out-perform what was expected from the job on paper. SE took all of that away in ShB (and we're still mad), but it feels like they might be erring low on Bard out of fear that the dynamic still exists somehow. It doesn't.

(4) Empyreal Arrow became a nightmare in ShB. In Stormblood with the old Barrage, the typical plan was to settle for using 5 EAs per 80 seconds - leaving three GCDs of free flex time to move it around as needed to deal with the autoproc. Now, with the Barrage QoL change, EA left as-is became a high-potency / short-cooldown oGCD that is very costly to delay. Yet, it also bops you for -150p if you use it at the wrong point in an invisible 3 second window. It's bizarrely punishing given SE's job design direction, and it leaks damage all over the place, even for experienced Bards.

(5) Army's Muse can often do more harm than good. It ends up shifting the end of your WM either by 1.2s or 1.5s, which causes a traffic jam between the end of WM and the start of a GCD. This means either leaving WM early every time (moving some overall proc chances into the AP dead sea), clipping heavily, or at worst ghosting PP (up to 450 potency lost) if you hold out and guessed wrong. It's possible to play in a particular way to try and get around this, but few do and it really shouldn't be a thing in the first place.

(6) Battle Voice's value swings quite a bit based on fight length, i.e. three BVs in 7:30 is a lot more value than three BVs in 9:00. This is an problem for any 3m buff, but other jobs with 3m buffs have strong bursts and buffs on other timings that hedge the issue.

(7) This is speed / parse run specific so not too important, but because it's on a different timing cycle than other jobs, Bard's rDPS-provided pales in comparison to Dancer especially. While the shift to rDPS has had some good impacts on i.e. jobs being locked out of PF, there's still a dynamic of "who does the most under my party buffs", which greatly disfavors BRD among the ranged.

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Potential improvements

These are all simple number changes that either target a weakness that needs shoring up, or improve QoL in a way that should lead to more damage output in the average case. While you couldn't do all of these things given that there's only so much room to make buffs, any collection of them would be a well-aimed improvement.


(A) Increase the potency of Stormbite, Caustic Bite, and Iron Jaws by 50 (would need to be part of Bite Mastery II). The main goal here is to mitigate (2) a small bit, cutting 100 off of the new-target penalty. The Iron Jaws change would be needed in turn to keep it relevant, but doing so would help with regards to (3) and (7) anyway. And both parts of this would help lower-skill Bards by reducing the penalty for DoT drops, as well as overeager safety IJs.

(B) Change Raging Strikes to 20% for 15s. This is mainly aimed at (1), though not every downtime plays nice with the 80s cycle. Still, some do, and we can manipulate it at times. As for the duration nerf, there's really no need for Raging to be 20s at this point (we only have two key GCDs to fit into it). If it were 20% for 20s, aside from burning more off the "budget" to buff things, there'd be some collateral impacts we probably don't want.

(C) Change Battle Voice to a 2 minute cooldown or, if possible in a patch, give it a second charge. A charge would be a smaller buff (only ever +1 usage) but better for gameplay - it'd feel a little like Foe (3) but more predictable for the devs. Making it 2 minutes instead would just align Bard's fight-based variance with Dancer's a little more (6).

(D) If possible in a patch, give Empyreal Arrow a second charge. Even though numerically +1 EA per uptime doesn't sound like much, allowing flexible EA timings would help a lot (4), and it'd also add to Bard's downtime recovery (1).

(E) If charges are a no-go, make Empyreal Arrow higher potency but with a 20s cooldown. This would put EA at predictable points in the 80s cycle, lighten the cost of delay a little, limit it to only one per MB, and allow it to be kept far enough away from the end of WM to cause problems around the exit (4).

(F) If possible in a patch, give Bloodletter a second charge. Bards have wanted this since literally 2.0, and it'd mitigate some of the worst impacts in (4) while aiding downtime recovery a little. It would also bring MB very close in power to WM, creating some fight plan flexibility that does not exist now, though it's hard to evaluate what if any impact that could have numerically.

(G) Change the duration of Army's Muse 15 to seconds. This would solve the problems with current Muse (5) by making it gain 2.1s fairly consistently, moving the exit GCD up enough to be easily managed. Another small-on-paper buff that'd have a bigger impact in practice.

(H) Buff Sidewinder, by a lot. As our only ability that plays well with most party buffs, it would help with our synergy (7), as well as downtime compensation (1), if Sidewinder was a bigger deal. Make-number-bigger is kind of lame because there's so much room to do cool creative stuff with this skill, but I doubt such things would be patch-friendly.

(I) Cut Pitch Perfect's cooldown to 1 second. There's never been any great reason for it to be 3 seconds. All that ever does is exacerbate end-of-WM issues (4, 6) and lead to clipped GCDs or wasted procs. More QoL than anything, but like a lot of stuff here it'd tick up the damage output in practice, especially for newer Bards.

(J) Speed up the DoT application delay on Stormbite and Caustic Bite, as has been done for some other skills. If these applied their DoTs closer to instant, it'd not only help with Sidewinder QoL, it'd also slightly mitigate (2) a little more by making startup a tad faster. This is a small deal that's actually a small deal, but it'd be good to do.


Obviously, if all you want to do is to make numbers go up, it'd be easy enough to revert the DoT potency nerf, make songs self-apply, etc., but such things fail to address any sort of real weakness or gameplay issue. They're pretty low quality band-aids, and we should be looking for some nice HQ band-aids to use instead~ More HQ ideas welcome!

[Ramura_Sono]

In the Yoshi-P sanpo the other day, he made a passing comment along the lines that they're getting a lot of requests to "fix Bard", but with a lack of concrete suggestions as to what/how.

That is what having a Team of Battle/Class Designers is for. There is a multitude of feedback for them to parse and discern a concrete direction to take the job in in an attempt to fix it. "Players haven't given us concrete suggestions" is just a way for the Devs to pass the buck. It has to stop. Monk players have routinely mentioned they enjoy the speed, dislike being overly punished by things outside of their control, hate all the niche skills; Bards have continually mentioned a desire for more support in their kit, more musical inspiration to their design, etc. Every single job has a set of core design principles that players enjoy about the job. And a multitude of issues they have too. It's not on the players to give exact specific suggestions. Especially when such suggestions are routinely ignored or misunderstood.

Their propensity to implement even the most simple and basic ideas in the most convoluted and asinine way also doesn't particularly make people want to provide feedback and ideas.

[EONX_]

One change I'd also like to see is having their song rotation last either 60s or 90s before restarting in WM. Currently it's a 80s rotation which aligns with very little in the game. Having them align more naturally at either 60s or 90s would definitely help the job a lot and make it more enjoyable to play since you have more windows to optimize.

[Morningstar1337]

Wouldlike Raging and Barrage to be 60/90s CD to go with the Song CD change mentioned in the post above mine.

[Cetonis]

I don't think 60s song cycle is a plausible option, degrading the song cycle concept is probably going in the wrong direction. If anything, you'd add a fourth super song on a 110s cooldown in 6.0 (cutting Raging/Barrage to 55s or 60s in turn) to produce a 110/120 option dynamic similar to RDM. But, that'd be a 6.0 thing, and I'm trying to keep to patch-friendly stuff here.

In order to move to a 90s song cycle in a patch, in the end you'd have to completely rework Army's Paeon, which means you can't do it in a patch. To buff it enough to make it palatable to stay in it, you'd be making the resulting GCD shorter than SE tends to want to allow, so there's not really a viable path there.

They could just make Raging and Barrage 90s, leave the songs as-is and put us back in 4.00, but people hated 4.00 and this would certainly just be a nerf (particularly given Muse). It's not like anything is stopping us from using them at those timings now, it just isn't worth it.


It's worth pointing out that Bard's "burst" (as small as it is) isn't actually tied to their song cycle right now. It's really all in Raging Strikes and Barrage.

In and of themselves, when you take Raging/Barrage (and Muse) out of the picture, Bard does (roughly / napkin math / not exact!) 212 total pps in WM, 200 pps in MB, and 188 pps in full-stack AP. It's not that big of a gap in the grand scheme of things, and in practice WM and MB are a little lower due to some of the issues mentioned in the second post.

So it's not really a matter of aligning WM with raid buffs (as it used to be in SB due to crit buff implications), it's about aligning Barrage in particular with raid buffs, and by extension Raging because you're going to keep them paired. It's just that those are generally going to be aligned with WM, so it's easy to conflate it. But, for example, there exist some E8S raid buff / kill time plans in which it's advisable to move your last one or two Raging/Barrages into MB for better raid buff alignment.


This is all to say that, making Bard more raid-synergy friendly isn't really a matter of messing with the song cycle at all. It's about the abilities. They could, for instance, just make Raging/Barrage 60s and call it a day. It'd feel weird and different at first, but it wouldn't really be a bad-design problem per se. Or, they could let those be 80s as they are, and focus on other ability-based options - like Sidewinder (H) and Battle Voice (C).

Or/also, charges on BL or EA (F, D) would allow for a little "save a charge to use two under buffs". As would, in a 6.0 vein, a more save-able / flexible Apex or single target variant. Also also, making snapshots more palatable by buffing IJ (A) would allow Bards to more consistently leverage raid buffs in that way.

While it'd be a mix and match package, and not as obvious as "oh look all the biggest abilities are 1m/2m", it's pretty feasible to give Bard a respectable level of raid synergy without having to rework the core 80s dynamic, and such a rework wouldn't really accomplish that much anyway.

[Wyakin]

OP I love a lot of your suggestions especially the bloodletter and empy arrow getting a second stack. I’d love to see ranged back where they belong

[Eloah]

One change I'd also like to see is having their song rotation last either 60s or 90s before restarting in WM. Currently it's a 80s rotation which aligns with very little in the game. Having them align more naturally at either 60s or 90s would definitely help the job a lot and make it more enjoyable to play since you have more windows to optimize.

The issue with this is that the 80s rotation is mostly player made. Since based on the songs durations the rotation should be 90s. If they are able to adjust Armys Paean so that cutting it short isn't desired then that, in theory, would adjust the rotation up to 90s.

It would be nice if in 6.0 the songs got some kind of an upgrade.

[Connor]

I get that they mean they haven’t received any concrete feedback outside of issues with the job ‘flavour’ and I kinda understand that, but I still don’t think it’s right to say to ‘Bards aren’t telling us what they want’, since I’ve definitely seen feedback that could easily translate into a concrete adjustment that’s doable mid-patch; reverting DoT potency changes is a straightforward example. Albeit it’s less common than the complaints around the job’s identity (many of which came from me, sorry!). But I understand if they’re treating ‘Bard’s current performance’ and ‘Bard’s overall identity’ separately, since one is quite a bit more easily solved than the other lol

I think maybe adjusting Apex Arrow scaling could make the job more interesting while directly increasing its dps (assuming the adjustments mean you use it more than currently). I can’t imagine a potency scaling change would require significant work. Maybe making it similar to Sabre Dance in that you don’t just wait until you hit 100 to use it? Like it could hit maximum potency at 70/80 instead of 100 so that if you overcap a little by accident you don’t end up wasting any gauge increases.

I’d still like to see Foe Requiem return; Scholars had Energy Drain returned to them in a previous patch so it doesn’t seem like returning old abilities is out-of-the-question. I can’t imagine it’d make a significant difference to Bard’s overall dps, but it might be enough to push it up a little to make it feel less weak. And naturally, Bards aren’t asking for major dps buffs, since that wouldn’t exactly be very balanced lol. I just mean that I think having it back would be a good balance between ‘buffing the job’ but ‘keeping it balanced’. And it’d make the job feel a bit more fun too (for me anyway lol)

Less realistic for a mid-patch adjustment but I’d really like if the Warden’s Paean did like...anything lol. Not that Esuna is a bad skill, but it’s redundant in like 99% of content because there’s so little debuffs that can actually be removed. That said, there’s not really any way I can think of that this could even be adjusted to be of use to Bards with current game design, and this thread isn’t about that. I just always look at it when I’m on Bard and think ‘this skill could do literally anything else and I’d probably use it more’ lol.

Lastly I’m not a raider and I’m not overly familiar with more in-depth things like raid synergies and how they line up specifically with Bard’s own cooldowns. I think my own feedback is from a more casual perspective, so it may not be concrete enough to be of any value since it lacks definitive potency / synergy / cooldown suggestions. But still, I figured I may as well put my thoughts across. I feel like the thread already suggests lots of more realistic and informed adjustments than I could give, so hopefully it’ll be enough to make the devs say so this is what they meant’ lol

[ItMe]

Casual perspective:
I don't like how you have to stand next to your target to use Repelling Shot. In part because Quick Nock only hits right in front of you. Those being at odds makes doing big pulls feels really janky.

[Akiudo]

The issue with this is that the 80s rotation is mostly player made. Since based on the songs durations the rotation should be 90s. If they are able to adjust Armys Paean so that cutting it short isn't desired then that, in theory, would adjust the rotation up to 90s.

adjusting armys paeon so cutting it short isn't desired would only mean you would cut mages ballad short instead. Only way to really make you "want" a 90 second rotation with the songs would be if the recast cooldown on them were 90s each, but that would

a)be a straight up nerf even with perfect gameplay
b)punish accidental cutting of other songs even harder than it allready does
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from the things proposed here i will just say that while i like basically all the points you mentioned, the biggest by far for me would be
1/2. (tie)buffing sidewinder (its simply too weak for the cooldown, especially with EA as comparison)
1/2. (tie)stacks for EA and BL, its simply overly punishing right now aswell as more or less forces you to just spam BL during mages ballad which well, "doesn't feel nice" to say it nicely
3. pitch perfect cooldown of 1 second, its bad enough getting the skill out when the server tick happens at 1~ second left, really no need to make it worse by also having to watch out that you use it early enough so the cooldown is even ready.

btw, one point you didn't specifically mention about a second EA charge is the more flexible timing this would offer would actually allow us to keep an extra charge for wanderers instead of using it during armys paeon when its not needed, which would be great because that would actually be a small way to optimize a bit more, instead of simply "more/bigger" number