Thread: Bard's 6.1 changes - why bother?

Originally Posted by dartfan

Bard saw three extremely minor changes in 6.1. Can't help but think none of them were necessary and one of them is counter productive.

repelling shot - increased jump back distance. Ok, I guess? Being honest, haven't had it on my toolbar since it stopped doing any damage years ago because the odds of it sending me into a wall/off the arena are too high relative to the minor benefit of extra mobility.

battle voice - no longer needs a song playing to use. Again, ok. I suppose this may change the opener slightly since you don't have to have a song up (the number crunchers out there will tell us where to slot it in), but it seems like a solution in search of a problem. Never saw anyone complain about this.

pitch perfect - now shares a button with wanderer's minuet. This change makes no sense and clearly was made by people who don't play bard and thought it was a way to reduce button bloat. Anyone who plays bard regularly knows why this isn't the case. One is a song that will be on your secondary toolbar next to the other songs so you can do a rotation and hit it once every 2 minutes. The other is an oGCD that you will spam heavily over a 45 second window and will have on your main toolbar near your other oGCD skills. So rather than eliminating a button, you now have the same one on there in 2 different spots because you will still want minuet near the other songs and pitch perfect near the other oGCD attacks.

This is completely subjective. Your making this change all about how you set up your hotbar and assuming everyone does it EXACTLY like you. This change would then force you to change hotbars. This is an inconvenience for you.

This was a simple fix that represents a TON of other skills that could use the same treatment.

Less....is...has...and forever WILL be MORE!

I play bard and enjoy it immensely, but one thing I could give as opinion. I like that it is incredibly busy, but busy needs to make sense. This makes sense that I can put more buttons on my hotbar as I play with controller. Anytime a change like this happens I have to sit back and redesign my whole hot bar, rotation, to get a better sense of what my muscle memory will pick up.

Did nobody even catch High Jump changes to Mirage Dive now? Because I think that is perfect to fit the major skills on the 1st page of my hotbars. Others might arrange differently, but this just makes sense. Condensing, combining, traiting, will be a huge theme for Endwalker for the future of what is to come.

Originally Posted by Sqwall

This is completely subjective.

This was a simple fix that represents a TON of other skills that could use the same treatment.

Less....is...has...and forever WILL be MORE!

Tell that to the healers. I don’t think they’ll agree.

Saying “less is more” is also an equally subjective statement.

Originally Posted by Sqwall

I play bard and enjoy it immensely, but one thing I could give as opinion. I like that it is incredibly busy, but busy needs to make sense. This makes sense that I can put more buttons on my hotbar as I play with controller. Anytime a change like this happens I have to sit back and redesign my whole hot bar, rotation, to get a better sense of what my muscle memory will pick up.

I also play on controller. This change didn’t do anything, considering BRD can fit everything it comfortably needs into less than two crossbars. I don’t know if you’re trying to make a “controllers have less space” argument for bloat or not, but controllers have a ton of available space to them that don’t fall into impractical.

Did nobody even catch High Jump changes to Mirage Dive now? Because I think that is perfect to fit the major skills on the 1st page of my hotbars. Others might arrange differently, but this just makes sense. Condensing, combining, traiting, will be a huge theme for Endwalker for the future of what is to come.

So, apparently, is simplification. Which is a divisive position at best. More and more people are coming out to express their dissatisfactions with what is being done. While there are jobs that do have bloat issues and could stand to have some skills removed due to pure redundancy (SAM, AST), the changes being made are still failing to address that problem. The BRD change is ultimately inconsequential…until you consider the problems that have already arisen from it. The only thing I can give the dev team is that they acknowledged one as a bug. But the issue QT brought up is still present.

Originally Posted by Sqwall

Well...they're a healer...sooo..

...they shouldn't heal?

Are you saying AST needs more DPS buttons?

Heal what? I just did the new Alliance raid last night with a friend and pressed literally nothing but Dosis in terms of GCD almost the entire time. Every bit of healing I needed to do could be easily covered by the occasional oGCD. In fact, I threw out completely useless Kerachloe's just for MP.

There is no healing, which is the chief complaint healers have right now. Their role has nothing to do except be a gimped DPS that occasionally heals.

Originally Posted by Sqwall

Well...they're a healer...sooo..

...they shouldn't heal?

Are you saying AST needs more DPS buttons?

I mean, why not? They spend 80% of their time dealing damage anyways. Might as well make it interesting.

Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but healers don’t do a lot of healing in this game. They’ve always been more support than anything else. DPS is part of being a healer.

Originally Posted by Sqwall

There is that word again. Simplification.

If it was SOOO simple to press Pitch Perfect on another button, why would this be any different as it's now...the SAME button.

Perhaps because of the queuing issue with it. I suggest you read QT’s posts, since she already addressed this problem.

This whole dumbing down and over simplification is just out of control. The game isn't getting dumbed down or over simplified. It's becoming a well oiled machine. Fine tuning should NOT be mistaken for removing unnecessary old design choices that "seemed good at the time", have just become a hindsight 20/20 situation. I'm constantly going back to older programs I wrote and refining them, which DOES not mean I'm dumbing it down or simplifying. It means I'm making it better, and more elegant code.

The game is getting simplified. It has been for a few years now. Jobs are more simple—a lot, BRD included, have lost the nuance they once had, and had the gaps between their skill floors and skill ceilings closed to the point where the two might as well be the same thing. Content is more simple—Extremes can hardly be called Extremes anymore, and the first two floors of Savage have debatable monikers as well. The only decent difficulty comes from Ultimate and Unreal, and we only get a handful of those each expansion.

There’s a difference between “well-oiled” and “dumbing down”. FFXIV is definitely teetering way closer to the latter instead of the former.

The big picture here...you have no idea what is on the horizon for 7.0 and beyond. This is clearly a "cleaning house" phase of the game and setting the game up for a new style of adding buttons, skills, abilities. You will see MUCH more merging and traiting up skills to higher versions.

Neither do you. Yet you still make your subsequent comment… Think on that for a moment.