Thread: So about bard 7.0

Originally Posted by mallleable

I actually messed around with such changes on a striking dummy, and I was indeed pressing more buttons outside of Burst Shot. I tried 30 /45 seconds, and 15/30 seconds. And I ran into issues.

What tuning contexts were you assuming for this? Did you try to (im)balance the DoTs around total damage (hard to delay the shorter DoT)? Tick potency? PPM contribution over nonuse?

Did you allow for any RA banking (allowing the proc to stack or applying some other mechanism that keeps it from capping straightaway) / did you remove the RA proc chances from DoTs?

Those things will make huge differences to the use of two DoTs (as opposed to the current basically one DoT that happens to take an extra GCD to reset once per target or upon maintenance failure).

The kneejerk potential solutions that did not sit well with me: DOT weapon skills no longer granting GCD procs, letting GCD procs stack so they can't be overwritten, making one or both dots Sonic Break clones, making one of the dots an oGCD.

While I agree that the others would be "kneejerk" or at least cross-purpose, I see nothing wrong with letting GCD procs stack.

RA, for instance, has literally no reason to exist as a button separate from Burst Shot in its current state (nor our Procced-AoE from our AoE), because there is never a time in which it's worth using the filler over the proc. Allow those procs to bank a second stack and... there you go: that second button then actually has some value, and our burst periods gain an extra element of prep that makes them more interesting. Without that, there's no more reason for Refulgent to exist separately from Burst Shot than for Leaden Fist Bootshine to exist separately from regular Bootshine.

I encourage anyone to play BRD (or any other job) "wrong" to discover potential ideas on how to improve the job feeling and rotations --- on a striking dummy of course!

Likewise!

Ultimately, we're trying to create a gameplay state where (A) the rhythm and diversity of button-presses and (B) the count/frequency and depth of decision making (i.e., the job's cognitive load, and the types of optimizations backing it) both... feel good. It's hard to beat actually trying things out in a variety of ways / according to diverse premises for informing ourselves individually of what... feels good -- and later, from that, as a sort of equilibrium or "consensus" on the subject.

Originally Posted by mallleable

This has left me further questioning whether or not having two damage over time debuffs to maintain is even critical to the fantasy, and identity of bard/archer because it feels keeping them around is holding the job back, and the only reason they seem to be kept around is that BRD always had them.

I don't think they're essential or particularly "Bard-like" about two DoTs, no. But, I might say that multi-DoTing has largely been iconic, since Bard would tend to (A) do that in periods where other physical fighters with even 3 DoTs might not bother to multi-DoT, and (B) they traditionally gained funnel-able resources through doing so. Even that isn't iconic to theme, though -- only to its XIV gameplay.

Of course, neither is there anything wrong or "un-Bard-ish" about having those two DoTs, and so long as they remaining on the GCD, the fact that DoTs can essentially have as many charges of its "soft-CD" as there are targets could allow for some really interesting interactions with songs.

As such, I don't think it's the fact that Bard has DoTs that is holding it back, but that we've never bothered to do anything more or increasingly "Bard-ish" with them; on the contrary, we've only ever done less and less with those DoTs (or, with the skills that hold them).

In ARR, they made up 2 in 7 GCDs. In HW they became slightly more integral but made up only 1 in 7. In Stormblood, 1 in 12. With Endwalker, they were made absolutely irrelevant except as a modest DPS boost and were used for only 1 in 18 GCDs. And across that whole time, the DoTs themselves have never picked up an additional effect (unless you count Sidewinder-prep which has since been removed anyways).