Bard song cooldown timers drift out of group burst window permanently with cutscenes

[Fendred]

Bard must use three songs that have two minute cooldowns at very specific times to stay aligned with the group's burst window. A cutscene throws off the use of the bard's songs causing a DPS loss for the group. This has all sorts of effects like the group losing out on a song or weaker than normal radiant finales. Due to how linked they are in use, this inevitably throws off WM alignment with the group's burst.

Meanwhile, dancer's standard step is a single 30 second cooldown that applies a one minute buff, so it practically never falls off and technical step gives the benefits of radiant finale without the need for buildup.

As things currently are, wouldn't it be better if Radiant Finale just gave a flat 6% buff? Decoupling pitch perfect from wanderer's minuet sounds compelling as that would bring the benefits of all three songs closer to one another and remove the pressure about whether a burst is occurring under WM, MB, or AP. Additionally, they could make the use of any one of the songs reduce the remaining cooldown timer on other songs.

[Valence]

There is hardly a cutscene longer than a full song in the game (if you don't count Edensgate 1, of perhaps the Four Lord trials with their minigames). I'm sure you can find extremely niche examples but that's really most of the time not a thing, and when it's a thing, you can just reopen with everything because all the cooldowns are back anyway. You won't get a fully charged Apex perhaps, but even then it's not a given, because you can still cover 45s of an entire song over the cutscene.

Anyway, for more standard cutscenes, you just play around it. The way to do it is to make sure a song fully covers the downtime, which continues charging the apex gauge even if you can't do anything else. As long as you fulfill that condition, you'll not lose gauge generation and will be better off than many jobs that can't generate any resources at all. When it comes to songs drifting, maybe there is a case scenario that makes it awkward that I have yet to encounter, but most of the time you can just start the next song just before the cutscene starts and it should be fine. You can then resume with the next when appropriate after the cutscene.

Also i'm sorry to say it but I really hate the changes you're offering, they make songs completely irrelevant mechanically for the job kit on top of removing all flavor from them if they lose their own gimmick, which is already not that huge so I'd like to keep as much from it as possible...

[DixieBellOCE]

Also i'm sorry to say it but I really hate the changes you're offering, they make songs completely irrelevant mechanically for the job kit on top of removing all flavor from them if they lose their own gimmick, which is already not that huge so I'd like to keep as much from it as possible...

So basically what every change to bard in the last 7 years has done. Gotcha.

Bard needs to just be reworked into either a support or a DPS, it obviously cannot be both if they keep gutting every single mechanic from its kit

[JohncarterIx]

they should leave bard alone