HW Bard was fun

[A_moth_called_rose]

Call me mad or crazy, but I enjoyed the old traditional heavansward long cast time bard playstyle. reminded me of a traditional archer who had to take time lining up their shots, current bard you're just whack-a-mole-ing your buttons and flinging out arrows without any care to precision or nuance. I wanna go back to having cast times and making each of my arrow attacks feel like they had real potency behind them.

[Stepjam]

I feel like you are gonna be in the minority about caster bard. Despite it's issues, I feel most enjoy that ranged dpses have no cast times

[Akiudo]

Call me mad or crazy, but I enjoyed the old traditional heavansward long cast time bard playstyle. reminded me of a traditional archer who had to take time lining up their shots, current bard you're just whack-a-mole-ing your buttons and flinging out arrows without any care to precision or nuance. I wanna go back to having cast times and making each of my arrow attacks feel like they had real potency behind them.

you asked for it, so here goes. you are crazy.

On a serious note, lets leave aside for a moment that this would totally not be a patch thing, if anything it would need to come next addon and go for all 3 physical ranged, otherwise even the "hurr durr free movement" crowd would have to agree to let bard (but only bard) get competitive damage, which would be a balancing nightmare if the same wasn't done for the other physical ranged, heavensward bard was anything but fun.

Mind you that is not because i am against cast times, if it can get a certain crowd to finally be silenced than for all i care give the physical ranged all the cast times in the world, but Heavensward Bard did not work.

This is not about heaving to ready your shot, animations or having "weight" behind attacks, i can get behind those things. but heavensward bard simply had menuett tacked on as an afterthought because "hey, mch had cast bars too" . if you compared actual flow of mch with bard the difference was like a sad joke.

If you want to advocate for cast bars on bard go ahead, if square could make it work well i would even side with you, but for the love of god don't give them ideas that heavensward bard was anything but a disaster.

IF bard were to get castbars (which i highly doubt as it would force square to redesign 3 classes, 1 of which is finally liked after falling short for 2 addons in a row) they would need to actively incorporate cast bars into bards design , to get something about smn levels of free movement, everything less would never flow well with the amounts of cooldowns bard still has.

I feel like you are gonna be in the minority about caster bard. Despite it's issues, I feel most enjoy that ranged dpses have no cast times

seeing as i'm allready posting anyways, i for one at least would not mind cast bars on bard, what i do mind however is when something like this just gets tacked on to a class without thinking about what this really means for the flow of a class like square did in Heavensward. Heavensward bard, if it was actually designed around cast bars (like mch was) could have been a thing of beauty.

[Connor]

I just want my cast songs back like the old versions of Ballad, Paeon and Requiem. 1.5 cast isn’t really enough to make you lose procs significantly if timed properly, since they take 3 seconds to tick anyway. Naturally they’d all have to have different effects than before so Bard wouldn’t become guaranteed raid spot again.

I didn’t dislike the cast times on weaponskills for Bard, the main issue I had is that it was just slapped on because of Machinist’s existence and there was barely any effort to adjust how Bard played with the new cast times on everything

[Eloah]

Call me mad or crazy, but I enjoyed the old traditional heavansward long cast time bard playstyle. reminded me of a traditional archer who had to take time lining up their shots, current bard you're just whack-a-mole-ing your buttons and flinging out arrows without any care to precision or nuance. I wanna go back to having cast times and making each of my arrow attacks feel like they had real potency behind them.

Bard was always a bit iffy, that's probably because Archer was never supposed to become Bard in the original 1.0 design. If anything good came about from 3.0 Bard it's that it made SE rethink how Bard should work. I mean in theory their lore is one of the better ones in terms of functionality. I mean using a weapon to mimic a musical instrument makes more sense then bringing an actual instrument into battle, lol. 3.0 Bard helped SE realize they needed to rework Bard into something that fit into their own lore better, instead of just being an Archer with a tacked on gimmick. 4.0 is when people felt that Bard was truly a Bard in both form and function. Regardless of any issues now, with DPS output, it still feels like a Bard.

[Rika007]

Eh... the one good thin I could say about Heavensward Bard is it forced me to become a better player. It's rotation and opener was so rigid and unforgiving that it prepared me for other jobs and actually forced me to understand the game and DPS rotations at a conceptual level, and truly grasp what it required to push yourself from a 'good' player to a 'great' player. And I liked that it showed in the damage you could deal compared to Bards who did not have that level of skill.

Outside of that though? Nah I hated it.

[Risvertasashi]

Call me mad or crazy, but I enjoyed the old traditional heavansward long cast time bard playstyle. reminded me of a traditional archer who had to take time lining up their shots, current bard you're just whack-a-mole-ing your buttons and flinging out arrows without any care to precision or nuance. I wanna go back to having cast times and making each of my arrow attacks feel like they had real potency behind them.

Have you played summoner?

The problem with HW Bard is it was basically a better or worse summoner, depending on how buffed it is.

But summoner's still there to play if you enjoy that playstyle, and hits way harder.

[houjuun]

Heavensward bard was the most fun Bard has ever been in this game and its a tragedy that we can't go back. Nearly everyone I know who played ranged back then misses it, it's not a niche opinion

[Risvertasashi]

it's not a niche opinion

If this genuinely isn't trolling, it's certainly very, very out of touch.

[Akiudo]

Nearly everyone I know who played ranged back then misses it, it's not a niche opinion

Nearly everyone I know who played Bard back then hated it, it's called anecdotal evidence.