Continued Bard feedback because maybe someday the devs will stop ignoring us

[Cetonis]

This is obviously futile at this point, as the community team clearly never passes on thoughtful constructive feedback. There have been several Bard threads by lots of thoughtful folk over 6.0x, with a lot of rough agreement/overlap on a bunch of issues. Yet all we get is a minor death QoL and some irritating changes nobody asked for. (Bard is hardly alone in this, of course)

But this is where we're told to post feedback, so here we are.

As background, I've done a lot of guide writing for Bard this expac, and follow conversations about it in the Balance, the reddit discord, other discords, reddit itself, the forums here, etc. I'm not trying to speak for myself, so much as reflect broad sentiments I've seen around and about.



On the 6.1 changes


Battle Voice - strictly good change, only matters if you die in a specific 6-second window but that does happen so hey why not.


Soul Gauge - The little line addition is nice. The sound queue at 80 gauge is... tone-deaf? Nobody wanted this.

The key issue is that pressing Apex at 80 gauge is incorrect under normal circumstances. So the sound queue is mostly an irritant that calls Bards' attention to a gauge they don't care about yet.

In those cases where you do want to Apex at 80, it should be welcome, but those are the exception and not the norm. I think most Bards would prefer not to have this sound effect going off.


Minuet / Pitch Perfect - I only recall a few people request this on the OF, and most of them were not Bards. It's not necessary. Bard does not have button bloat issues.

Most Bards will have their three songs arranged in a group on the hotbar, and find it pointless at best and annoying at worst to have one of them turn into PP with its distracting glow. They aren't going to want PP in that area of their bar.

Nor do people generally want WM separated from the other songs, to go where you'd want PP. It's what people will end up doing eventually I guess, and some are fine with it, but I'd say about 3 in 4 Bards would like to see this split reverted.


On the biggest 6.0 issues left unaddressed

Roughly in order of how much I see them complained about -


1. Shadowbite - Barrage still does not proc Shadowbite, and that's still baffling and very irritating.

Also, Shadowbite's small radius is still a headache for Bards everywhere. Pressing the button is often incorrect, because it will hit far fewer enemies than Ladonsbite will. Cycling through targets reactively on the fly to try to make your Shadowbite usable is more irritating than multi-DoT'ing ever was.

Increase the radius of this skill, or rework it, or something. It does not make any sense as-is.


2. Song inflexibility - Bard's inability to work with odd-minute bursts has been a source of frustration for many players this savage tier. Most jobs can simply hold their 2-minute cooldowns, but Bard's songs don't work in a way that allows for this.

The easiest "fix" to this would be to make Mage's Ballad closer in power level to Wanderer's Minuet. Balance and tuning and etc. though.

Alternatively, you could instead give Mage's and Army's shorter cooldowns (ironically, 80 seconds would make the most sense). This would allow Bards to alternate them as needed to delay Wanderer's. It would also aid in death recovery, make dungeons feel better and so on.

Or some other creative solution. It's a pretty big feels bad in a number of fights already.


3. Mage's Ballad vs. Army's Paeon - Four months in, and unsurprisingly, still nobody likes Army's Paeon. In the pre-EW kit, it made some sense to have a do-nothing because the job was so stressful the rest of the time.

But now that Mage's is easy and comfy, and even Minuet isn't bad at all after the burst, Army's Paeon just does not belong. In a sense, Mage's fills the role that Army's used to, and does it far better.

Ultimately, making Mage's better than Army's would only affect nine seconds out of every two minutes, so I've seen calls for that kind of die down as people realize that.

Nonetheless, Army's Paeon sorely needs some sort of added gameplay element - anything at all - so that it doesn't feel like you're playing a level 6 class for over a third of your rotation.

[QT_Melon]

I agree with pretty much all - with a MINOR exception to the Apex Arrow. Since I do have bit poorer eyesight - sounds do help me quite a bit. I wouldn't propose removing the sound but changing it to something shorter and softer. The 100% gauge sound should stay the same.

The reason for the 80% is actually for CD alignment in the first Mage's to get the gauge to align better in WM in later rotations.

On the topic of songs - definitely need better recovery on a death of our songs - we either go out of alignment or songless on a death. It obviously feels the worst death on/during WM but due to the benefits by our songs, if you're out or down on songs it hurts.

A couple of other things to note. I really also dislike the change of Wanderer's and Pitch Perfect because I am used to seeing Wind-down timers our songs.

While this may seem minor- the timer also helps when learning encounters ..like for a jump or a mechanic that may have you lose out on a burst window to see how much of it is worth keeping around or not. It also helps see if your song was queued in order properly.

Also want to finally say - regarding the bug. I find myself personally more irritated with it because not only is the 2nd time a bug has happened with Bard - but this time feels like further insult to injury that it's regulated to a 2 week fix. I know it's due to a client update, but feeling sidelined. I'd feel that way about anyone who has a BUG that affects a major part of their kit. This will never sit well with me and even more so due to the length it will take to fix.

[Cetonis]

Holding the 3.0 bug against them six years later is maybe a bit much although it is funny. And part of a long history of Bard feeling like a design afterthought.

It is not correct to Apex asap at 80 in a normal rotation though, even on the first cycle. The two extra ticks does not change the math there, you will still on average miss your 2m burst window.

[QT_Melon]

Holding the 3.0 bug against them six years later is maybe a bit much although it is funny. And part of a long history of Bard feeling like a design afterthought.

Right, but if you go out to eat and one place gives you something acceptable, 80% of the time you eat, you're still gonna remember the 20% times you didn't. Especially if you were okay with it/forgave it on the first time.

Breaking a job where it can't actually function (not that the design is clunky or less satisfaction/reward) feels to be a bigger "no no" imo. So it's not something I'd feel about bard, but any other job put in that position - and especially multiple times in its lifespan.

That absolutely doesn't mean I demand a refund and or want to quit the game over it. Though given the drama with other jobs that don't face a bug you'd think they will. :P

I'm just thinking it's all relevant in Bard and Ranged Physical jobs in general's history. (Honestly - I felt Dancer would have probably been better as a healer - but that's just me)

[ExcMiddle]

I will also mention the overall rigidness of the job's rotation, from the mentioned songs, to Empyreal Arrow having very little room to be drifted, to the burst window where the single 80% chance doesn't tend to add much variety and it is mostly about moving thing around to fit them on the limited space you have.
Of course the burst is busy and that's not a complaint on that, rather that the RNG element of the job has been put to the side and some people did like that variance.

A second point to mention is that a portion of the bard players were playing that job as it was considered by many a "dot job". Currently any such identifications are referring to past iterations of the job, the same way people considered previous iterations of summoner or scholar to be dot jobs.
Hence people talk about the potential future removal of dots; some have expressed their wish for a return and further leaning into the dot job identity, others say to remove the dots completely at this point because they see the developers as reluctant to add any interactions of the dot kit and currently their only contribution is a minuscule portion of the job's damage.

The change in WM further suggests that they don't have any plans on returning the procs on dots (since even further weaving problems could be caused this way).

The procs on dots was a core rotational element to bard and now that it has been removed, (along with the changes in Mage's Ballad) has created the problems mentioned by the OP where both Mage's Ballad and Army's Paeon are not songs that are particularly liked with how similar they are.

There is room to add more gameplay elements to the job and I do not think a button limitation is the problem currently preventing that.

[HyoMinPark]

I can agree with all of this. I don’t main BRD anymore, but I have played it a bit more in EW than I did in ShB (the loss of SB BRD was too fresh then).

I’m on the side of the camp that the Minuet/PP consolidation was a bit…pointless. The people I’ve seen advocating for it (alongside other consolidations like Mage’s and Bloodletter, which no. Just no.) seem to think that this job has issues with “button bloat” when I could fill half of my second crossbar with Nature’s Minne macros if I really wanted to. While I do think there might be potential in Heavy/Burst Shot and Straight Shot/Refulgent consolidation, I didn’t think the Minuet/PP consolidation was really needed even if it was a sound idea in theory. And the bug was just the icing on the cake when I tested it after reading the first report submitted on here about it. It made me wonder what kind of QA testing was put into this change. Did they not think to test the functionality in a party with multiple BRDs, since that is something that happens in DF groups?
Who am I kidding… this is the same team who said they didn’t balance the job around piercing back in the day so this probably didn’t even occur to them…

The Apex Arrow sound addition is just…why? Why not instead make 100 gauge a different sound from the 3-stack PP sound? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve reflexively tried pressing PP because the sound went off and I associate it with that. Maybe that’s just me, though. Like I said, I basically abandoned the job in ShB because I disliked the changes.

I’d personally like to see something come around to preserve the DoTs. That Sidewinder doesn’t scale off of them and that they have no interactivity with the kit makes me worry that they will be gone in 7.0. Along with Sidewinder itself since it’s kind of just there as a 60s oGCD (though DRG did keep Spineshatter and got charges on it, so maybe there’s hope???). I also…don’t really like the new song durations either. Independent of having to train myself to clip Mage’s early (still feels like a crime), BRD is a lot more punishing should you die right at the start of a new song. You’re songless for longer, and I feel like realignment is harder than it used to be. I could be wrong, though—I don’t play the job at the level I used to, so I won’t speak on that with too much authority.

I agree with the person above that EA feels like it has no wiggle room for drifting. It feels incredibly rigid now compared to how I always found it in the past, but again. I could be wrong here.


Just my thoughts as a former BRD main/SB BRD boomer.

[Jirah]

Army’s can utilize the ever-so-neglected Dots and try to tie some of BRD’s very loose ends it got in EW thanks to the “Genius” idea to make dots irrelevant solely cuz “well SMN did and everyone seems to love SMN….for a week” cynicism aside I simply don’t seeing this fixed (or reworked) until a expansion

But at the very VERY least they could have barrage proc Shadowbite

[QT_Melon]

I'm kinda mixed on this because I understand why people think DoTs are the identity due to how long they've been in the game I always felt that was more that Bard's identity was actually support. And I don't think the two were mutually exclusive btw. It definitely CAN be both.

But I think what I'm explaining may be one of the reasons why we're seeing it (our DoTs) at a possible chopping block like SMN.

Perception of a SMN - is that it summons, to an average (non MMO playing player giving this game a try). So yeah there was definitely a lot of buzz and excitement to see it executed - even if there are issues with tuning.

The other issues were during large scale conflict where if your kit is based on your DoTs interacting - and limitations being able to recognize your DoTs it did hurt your gameplay for BRD and SMN both.

Then people were pretty peeved that Dancer became the new Support Darling (which is gonna generally happen if a new job happens and works relatively well).

There's also the complaints or wishes for a "Bane" to spread or the fact you had to waste two GCDs on it. So my best hope is they reduce it to one harder hitting DoT but would not be surprised if removed completely.

If the devs want to make more inclusive large scale conflict, then either how many DoTs interact with mobs, then I guess many DoTs and other Debuffs will either get culled or reduced down so more people can count in participation based encounters. Though to be honest, the way large scale encounters are these days, not sure it really matter - unless they're doing different kinds of future content.

ANYWAYS... I was more of the thought - that DoTs were not so much identity but more that well executed DoTs and rotation were part of a reward/satisfaction experience. I won't argue about how *much* it was in terms of reward satisfaction there was - but certainly enough where many noticed it.

The issue is to me there isn't a replacement that's really satisfying to the other part of Identity which is Support. Other than making sure it's within a 2 minute window executed when people are in cuddling range. Or using your support skill with mitigation. I feel reward/satisifaction is meh for this job.

[Kosachi]

I posted my thoughts in the last bard post from this past January, but ill, reiterate my stance on the matter here since class discussions are hot right now.

I've been playing and maining bard since 3.0 so I've been around the block.

The current iteration of bard just isn't enjoyable to play. I'm even saying this after having played through bow mage. HOWEVER. The media tour build of bard that we had for Endwalker basically answered every request us bard players have had for years.
-Multiple uses of bloodletter.
-Proper 60 AND 120 second alignment.
-30s on Blast Arrow was an excellent way to show skill expression
-Same story with the 90s on Finale
-Procs on dot tick rewarded effective play as well as kept the job fast paced and hectic.

The current version of the job is so very slow and lacks the impact and feel it had in the previous two expansions. People meme about bard being a burst shot simulator but at this point, it's just not a meme anymore.

I'm not going to repeat what other people in this and other threads have said but I echo their thoughts as well. Nobody asked for the changes that came with patch 6.1 (BV change is a nice touch though); and if anything, we need to roll back to the media tour. That version of bard was the best the job had ever been and I had never been so excited to play ffxiv.

[Cetonis]

Unfortunately I think the ship is sailed on getting the media tour back, especially DoT-based ticks. I don't mind the song timer basis personally, in and of itself it's still a good and unique job mechanic and DoT timer tracking is the sort of thing I can understand SE not wanting in the game (unless it's on their favorite child BLM). It's certainly possible to have a fun, interesting and well-designed job without the DoT tick procs.

Some other MT things like 60s Raging would still be improvements for sure. However, when we can't even get Shadowbite fixed, asking SE to care about the job being more fun / interesting seems like such a long shot right now