Bard "buff"

[SaitoHikari]

Ranged Meta will NEVER come back given how you all have set up the Ranged - incompatible raid mitigation(Samba can't stack damage resistance with Tactician, Troubadour) already discourages this. When we get to this new tier, I want to bet that Ranged are going to be edged out in favor of Casters because of gear creep like what happened in Titan in the first tier. In fact, there was a mention about the "1% Buff" that Ranged bring with them a while back - but Caster DPS can theoretically out DPS that 1% coming into next tier with how far gearing has gone. We didn't run into it in Shiva's tier, thankfully, but most of that was merely due to them being high mobility.

I would like to add to this, 'Ranged Meta' wasn't even the fault of ranged classes. It would be way more accurate to describe it as 'Piercing/Crit Meta'.

It wasn't Bard's fault that DRG had the only piercing damage up debuff in the game, a party critical hit rate buff, AND a targeted party member attack boost. It wasn't Bard's fault that SCH as a healer had a critical hit chance debuff. It wasn't Bard's fault that AST cards were the way they were in SB. It wasn't Bard's fault that MNK's Brotherhood used to scale off crit rate. It wasn't Bard's fault that Ninjas were... Well, Ninjas.

Yet from the way you hear people talk in these forums, the entire blame of the ranged meta was thrown at the feet of Bards everywhere. Granted, Bards did contribute to the meta too, but it was rather miniscule compared to the impact that the others had within their respective roles, which stigmatized the selfish melee and casters. It seems the absolute biggest sin in everyone's mind was Bard being an essential role during raid tiers where ranged bait mechanics were generally more frequent, and having an entire gameplay kit that took advantage of everyone else's party buffs, in a way no other class had. When all of the party utility was stripped down across all classes, Bard ended up getting indirectly hurt the most from a personal performance standpoint, and having their identity robbed from a party support standpoint.

The other classes mentioned received adjustments that made up for their losses somewhat (though that's putting it mildly, Healers in general have a right to riot but for entirely different reasons)... But Bard never really did in comparison, only because of 'lol ranged meta'. It's kind of telling that Bard's overall gameplay actually changed the least out of every DPS class between SB and ShB, and ended up getting hurt the most.

Although quite frankly, I wasn't even aware that there was even supposed to be a buff to Bard at all this patch, so I'll take what I can get. Bard's overall design is fundamentally disjointed (and always has been, really - the only reason no one noticed in Stormblood was because our procs being tied to crit rate and all the party crit buffs masked those problems big time), and it's obvious by now that it would take a new expansion to fix those problems. Considering the existence of the Soul Voice gauge that's literally only relevant at endgame (fun fact: Bard is the only DPS class to pull a completely new gauge out of their ass at level 80), I almost wonder if the current iteration of Bard had actually been already designed with level 90 in mind. That would explain why current Bard feels so incomplete at level 80, with us suddenly getting an Army's Paeon upgrade that spends 3 whole paragraphs explaining how we just get 12% haste for 10 seconds, and a gauge out of nowhere that only one skill takes advantage of that doesn't even flow with the rest of the kit and with no real way to control how it charges up.

Any of you guys play Genshin Impact? Have you pulled Zhongli? Bard's Apex Arrow feels like THAT right now.

[Jirah]

People be acting like the Ranged jobs are worthless, they aren’t outclassed to the point of redundancy but the gap is abit large for what it does. Let’s not forget anyone can out-DPS a corpse

[CKNovel]

People be acting like the Ranged jobs are worthless, they aren’t outclassed to the point of redundancy but the gap is abit large for what it does. Let’s not forget anyone can out-DPS a corpse

Ranged job are not worthless because they bring the 1%.
Without it, they would be replaced with a second caster right away.

They're still not worth enough to see multiple ranged in a party composition.
Two casters, no problem.
Two Melee, no problem.
Two ranged, your group just lost 2k DPS for the sake of "mobility" that will profit only them.

So far, this savage tier is not as mobile as the previous one. Ranged DPS are still the lowest when they should shine if mobility was that usefull, but it's only the 4th day into savage. We'll get to see real data much later.
The gap will stretch itself as day passes like it did for the previous tier.
The main problem is that there is no excuse for that gap, no utility, nothing that brings anything to the group. So far, not a single bait mechanic, again from my experience.

[Jirah]

Ranged job are not worthless because they bring the 1%.
Without it, they would be replaced with a second caster right away.

They're still not worth enough to see multiple ranged in a party composition.
Two casters, no problem.
Two Melee, no problem.
Two ranged, your group just lost 2k DPS for the sake of "mobility" that will profit only them.

So far, this savage tier is not as mobile as the previous one. Ranged DPS are still the lowest when they should shine if mobility was that usefull, but it's only the 4th day into savage. We'll get to see real data much later.
The gap will stretch itself as day passes like it did for the previous tier.
The main problem is that there is no excuse for that gap, no utility, nothing that brings anything to the group. So far, not a single bait mechanic, again from my experience.

isnt 2k moot in the grand scheme of it all anyways? also jobs good jobs bad isnt black and white its based on a fight-to-fight basis. Progression Meta and Speed meta are soley relevant in these fights along with ultimates but the calculations are every changing mastery of the job and the mechs are the only thing thats important and topics like this just fuel vitriol when its not even that big of a deal

also didnt TEA first clear had 2 ranged jobs? BRD and DNC? F i bring BRD to Savage and clear it thats end of story the issues are people taking this to heart and demanding specific jobs due to the majority view on ranged being "weak"

[CKNovel]

isnt 2k moot in the grand scheme of it all anyways? also jobs good jobs bad isnt black and white its based on a fight-to-fight basis. Progression Meta and Speed meta are soley relevant in these fights along with ultimates but the calculations are every changing mastery of the job and the mechs are the only thing thats important and topics like this just fuel vitriol when its not even that big of a deal

also didnt TEA first clear had 2 ranged jobs? BRD and DNC? F i bring BRD to Savage and clear it thats end of story the issues are people taking this to heart and demanding specific jobs due to the majority view on ranged being "weak"

TEA first clear had 2 casters, SMN and BLM. DPS check are not that hard in Ultimate.
World First E12S had, again, BLM and SMN, it was the same group. And they had the clear by the very last GCD.

Currently, after one week of prog, all fight showed that it's indeed based on the role.
However:

E9S was kind of equal for everyone, SAM&BLM above everyone, DNC and BRD lower.
E10S was very good for SAM&BLM again, but the gap started to widen. MCH was lower of around 600 rDPS, BRD and DNC even lower.
E11S was one hell of a good fight for BLM but the bane of SMNs, DNC is higher than other ranged and all ranged starts to drop. I think it's all about timings, raid buff and gauges.

E12S is mostly the same. Ranged far below and Melee&Casters equal.

Meaning the more difficult the fight was, the less ranged were above, mobility was no help at all.
On top of that there is barely any bait mechanic, again. And more Melees can have a consistent and easy uptime.

[Rai_Takara]

TEA first clear had 2 casters, SMN and BLM. DPS check are not that hard in Ultimate.
World First E12S had, again, BLM and SMN, it was the same group. And they had the clear by the very last GCD.

Currently, after one week of prog, all fight showed that it's indeed based on the role.
However:

E9S was kind of equal for everyone, SAM&BLM above everyone, DNC and BRD lower.
E10S was very good for SAM&BLM again, but the gap started to widen. MCH was lower of around 600 rDPS, BRD and DNC even lower.
E11S was one hell of a good fight for BLM but the bane of SMNs, DNC is higher than other ranged and all ranged starts to drop. I think it's all about timings, raid buff and gauges.

E12S is mostly the same. Ranged far below and Melee&Casters equal.

Meaning the more difficult the fight was, the less ranged were above, mobility was no help at all.
On top of that there is barely any bait mechanic, again. And more Melees can have a consistent and easy uptime.

This is more of an issue with SMN being too strong than ranged being too weak which is another problem of itself but it has little to do with where ranged are right now.

[Liam_Harper]

isnt 2k moot in the grand scheme of it all anyways?

What, that's huge? People pot, use food buffs, push for uptime and farm gear for smaller gains. 2k can very easily be the difference between enrage and a clear.

Savage PF's are generally reasonable and many will take 2 phys ranged outside of log runs, but players still want to contribute to their team. Not everyone is happy that their class could mean a 2k drop in rdps over a similarly skilled player.

[Sauteed]

I don't think an expansion should be needed to fundamentally change a class but I do hope hard gets fundamentally changed at least by 6.0. Maybe bard can be a featured class of the next expac.. like monk for stormblood, drg for Heavensward and dark for shadowbringers.






Hehe.

[ADVSS]

I don't think an expansion should be needed to fundamentally change a class but I do hope hard gets fundamentally changed at least by 6.0. Maybe bard can be a featured class of the next expac.. like monk for stormblood, drg for Heavensward and dark for shadowbringers.






Hehe.

I see what you did there lol

[dinnertime]

The mobility argument falls flat anyway when you realize that even the melees and casters are capable of 100% uptime on DPS within actual fights, along with various tools added throughout expansions that gave them more mobility.
Ranged DPS mobility nowadays is but a quirky novelty with nothing special about it.