Inevitable Job Simplifications?

[Wentiko]

The future is PvP skills, one button rotations for every class.

[Sparkthor]

MCH was pretty popular on HW, but it's popularity was probably heavily tied for being part of the best (and only) top raid compo back in time : WAR, DRK, AST, SCH, NIN, DRG, BRD, MCH.
It's kinda strange : bow and gun mage were heavily turned down but performances were here so played.

I however wonder how people can think EW BRD to be the worst iteration as it stricly better than ShB one :
- Loss of many bloodletter/rain due to having one charge, so full CD reset hardly happen and double proc were wasted.
- Need to apply DOT on target in case of mutlti target situation.
- Having dot to roll in not better than having a song active.
- Not being buffed by it's own party abilities.
- Being a 80s rotation job which never/poorly align with standard 2/3min party cd, and never with reopener at 6min.

[Valence]

MCH was pretty popular on HW, but it's popularity was probably heavily tied for being part of the best (and only) top raid compo back in time : WAR, DRK, AST, SCH, NIN, DRG, BRD, MCH.
It's kinda strange : bow and gun mage were heavily turned down but performances were here so played.

I however wonder how people can think EW BRD to be the worst iteration as it stricly better than ShB one :
- Loss of many bloodletter/rain due to having one charge, so full CD reset hardly happen and double proc were wasted.
- Need to apply DOT on target in case of mutlti target situation.
- Having dot to roll in not better than having a song active.
- Not being buffed by it's own party abilities.
- Being a 80s rotation job which never/poorly align with standard 2/3min party cd, and never with reopener at 6min.

As a Bard player and main right now I do think they had the gist of what was wrong with previous bard which was heavy clipping issues due to empyreal + unreliable procs that would make your repertoire overflow and waste way too many procs (much like monk has always had with chakras but actually worse). On top of it bloodletter still didn't have any charges even in shb. I also understand why they wanted to go away from the crit based procs after SB since it went out of hands.

But I guess my problem with it is how they solved it, as usual. It felt watered down, or in the case of dots for EW, outright nuked.

- I actually like the idea of a job relying on a substat to get procs or special benefits. The problem is that bard (and monk) was the only one in SB and combined with poor itemization control (anybody remember the omegalulfire gun of alphascape compared to the bow?), it naturally made the job impossible to balance out in the later stages of a savage tier. I'm not gonna cry too much over it though, although I wished all jobs relied more on this instead of none, because substats besides speed right now really feel useless (and I could honestly not even be surprised if SE decides someday to remove them altogether, like they removed main stats out of the picture).
- The fact that dots meant getting procs was fundamental for the dots to feel meaningful.
- Being able to literally spamm rain of death during AoE was super fun.
- We used our MP for something (foe requiem and manasong)

Now then, the points you make, I actually definitely agree with, and i'd even add a big one: the current gauge charges during downtime, which is a huge gain for the job viability.

[Kosachi]

I however wonder how people can think EW BRD to be the worst iteration as it stricly better than ShB one :
- Loss of many bloodletter/rain due to having one charge, so full CD reset hardly happen and double proc were wasted.
- Need to apply DOT on target in case of mutlti target situation.
- Having dot to roll in not better than having a song active.
- Not being buffed by it's own party abilities.
- Being a 80s rotation job which never/poorly align with standard 2/3min party cd, and never with reopener at 6min.

Some of these were valid problems but the way in which they decided to address them made it so much worse.

-Loss of Bloodletter/RoD because of proc loss? More stacks of BL/RoD like in the media tour. Instead they gave us half procs, lower potency and a fixed proc rate. Threw the baby out with the bathwater.
-Multi dot on multi target? And? Literally the point of the job. Bard was tied for highest DPS on multi target in ShB for a reason. It was harder but the rewards justified the effort. If you're in a dungeon, just stormbite 3 mobs and you were a turret. Any more than that and you were wasting gcds.
-Agree to disagree. Skill expression is already something we're gravely lacking and it ties back to my previous point on multi targets.
-Agree. needs to hear its own songs.
-Once again, media tour fixed it and in a pretty amazing way. Song cycle was 2m and RS was 60s. Literally perfect. Two burst phases per cycle. But no. we can't have nice things.

I keep talking about the media tour, I know but f*ck man. We were so close.

[VentVanitas]

-Once again, media tour fixed it and in a pretty amazing way. Song cycle was 2m and RS was 60s. Literally perfect. Two burst phases per cycle. But no. we can't have nice things.

I keep talking about the media tour, I know but f*ck man. We were so close.

I'm still mad that they removed the 30s Blast Arrow Ready

[tearagion]

MCH was pretty popular on HW, but it's popularity was probably heavily tied for being part of the best (and only) top raid compo back in time : WAR, DRK, AST, SCH, NIN, DRG, BRD, MCH.
It's kinda strange : bow and gun mage were heavily turned down but performances were here so played.

I however wonder how people can think EW BRD to be the worst iteration as it stricly better than ShB one :
- Loss of many bloodletter/rain due to having one charge, so full CD reset hardly happen and double proc were wasted.
- Need to apply DOT on target in case of mutlti target situation.
- Having dot to roll in not better than having a song active.
- Not being buffed by it's own party abilities.
- Being a 80s rotation job which never/poorly align with standard 2/3min party cd, and never with reopener at 6min.

- who cares about BL stacks when it only refunds half the CD now? one step forward, two steps back
- multidotting was fun, as was proccing tons of Repertoire with multidotting, why wouldn't I like it if I was interested in playing a DoT job.
- ???
- who cares, any buff that gets applied to brd is taken out of its potency per second, and we lost the crit synergy on Repertoire that would have made getting our own buff more interesting to begin with.
- aligning being a thoughtful exercise and not handed to you on a silver platter is more interesting (see: all the 2min complaints everywhere), and ShB bard had more flexibility to fit different comps. it also wasn't hard to align anyway

all this and ShB bard was worse than SB bard anyway

[Jirah]

- who cares about BL stacks when it only refunds half the CD now? one step forward, two steps back
- multidotting was fun, as was proccing tons of Repertoire with multidotting, why wouldn't I like it if I was interested in playing a DoT job.
- ???
- who cares, any buff that gets applied to brd is taken out of its potency per second, and we lost the crit synergy on Repertoire that would have made getting our own buff more interesting to begin with.
- aligning being a thoughtful exercise and not handed to you on a silver platter is more interesting (see: all the 2min complaints everywhere), and ShB bard had more flexibility to fit different comps. it also wasn't hard to align anyway

all this and ShB bard was worse than SB bard anyway

do people forget SB BRD was really good?
spoilers

emet was right, destroy the game if they cant retain their past, zenos was right, no thrills to be had. meteon was right, this will only end in misery so let us sing in oblivion

[Jirah]

MCH was pretty popular on HW, but it's popularity was probably heavily tied for being part of the best (and only) top raid compo back in time : WAR, DRK, AST, SCH, NIN, DRG, BRD, MCH.
It's kinda strange : bow and gun mage were heavily turned down but performances were here so played.

I however wonder how people can think EW BRD to be the worst iteration as it stricly better than ShB one :
- Loss of many bloodletter/rain due to having one charge, so full CD reset hardly happen and double proc were wasted.
- Need to apply DOT on target in case of mutlti target situation.
- Having dot to roll in not better than having a song active.
- Not being buffed by it's own party abilities.
- Being a 80s rotation job which never/poorly align with standard 2/3min party cd, and never with reopener at 6min.

-Charges were beneficial no ones gonna argue this
-DOTs retaining no synergy isnt a pro at all, and dungeons are less fun now that you cant spam AA or RoD 5 times a second. Making Soul voice very very static as a gauge, borderline contrived even now that it only doesn't accumulate soul if no songs are running and its as trivial as the DNC step execution.
-Having a dot to roll in takes more effort than having ur songs active. making the job less punishing and easier/routine/boring
-tangibly I never cared about this complaint as it only adds something to the invisible measure of dps only parsers can see and is irrelevant in all none dps check content. Plays the same with or without
-Fair

Adding Sidewinder is boring to use, a dot checker is no reduced to fleche. but im not entirely down on EW BRD just needs a few additions to be the most fun ranger with laughable competition from the other 2 jobs ppl main "because i dont have to think"

[fulminating]

Anecdotally, I've gone from playing bard as my physical ranged of choice in shadowbringers to only playing it in pvp. Sure you can say it's not much of a horse race but the EW changes really haven't endeared themselves to me. Complete overcorrection on the issues I had with it to the point it's not really enjoyable anymore.

[Videra]

I honestly just miss when jobs were allowed to be complex. MCH and BRD during HW were the most fun any classes have ever been in this game, and the fact they are what they are now? It vexes me.