Thread: Split Archer into Ranger Bard for 7.0

Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

If people are playing Bard thinking it is partially a pet job and that this is causing them to lack a solid identity, then it's entirely in their own mind. Bard is not a pet job, and it's not conflicted. It manages things. Dots, procs, songs. It's like a captain being on top of all the different things it has to keep track of, which is quite a lot more than many other jobs, even ones in the same category.

I think you’ve misunderstood my post. I just referred to ‘Ranger’ as being a ‘pet’ job because it’s one often associated with forest animals in some way (like FFV’s Familiar). It’s also often associated with bows etc in general, hunting weaponry I guess. I’m not saying people expect literal Beastmaster; just that they see the bow and immediately associate it with Rangers/Hunters/Whatever you want to call them

The point I was making is that people go in expecting either a job that’s about archery and whatever ‘ranger/archer’ things are associated with that, or a ‘Bard’ and whatever ‘song / music’ related things are associated with those.

Personally, I don’t think anyone goes in to playing Bard expecting a physical magical warrior mage launching beams of malevolent darkness and radiant light, a sound based (?) arrow (?) blast, summoning sigils for almost every attack, and a random harp animation you do every 30-45 seconds.

And I mean surely what you describe is a Scholar? A tactician managing a group of soldiers, leading them to victory with its control of the battlefield? The whole point of Bards is that they started singing because they were too far away to do anything else besides shoot arrows lol, then they realized the songs had tangible effects. So they tried to create a Bard army only to find that the songs they sung didn’t mean anything since basically their party wasn’t wiping lol. Basically, a Bard’s songs got their power from the emotion of the singers. Bard’s identity is kind of predicated on it not being the ‘manager’ of the party, if anything, otherwise they’d go in and help the party, not get emotional about it.

Bard’s identity as a job is supposed to be centered around the emotional toll of back line fighters as they watch battles unfold (which somehow becomes a song that physically harms the target lol). But in my opinion they’ve forgotten about that and focused almost entirely on the archery aspects of the job, neglecting the ‘bard’ half of the job.

Splitting it in two is a fun idea to think about but it’s also literally impossible since they’d essentially be making two new jobs from scratch; I don’t mean it as a literal solution. To me discussing it is just a way to evidence the fact that Bard has a problem with balancing it’s identity between ‘Magic laser archer who totally uses normal physical arrows’ and ‘musician with Magic Songs that actually hurt people’. And it is possible for them to balance the two equally