Bard Rework

[RisenDante]

Yeah I can agree with the points when it comes down to "what fits with the class fantasy" and for example picking up flute to buff your friends seems a bit out of place for me. When it comes down to class fantasy with Bard in FF (I am really bad at giving opinions in this, since I've played it only to level 60) I had totally different expectations of what bard was going to be. Name suggest it as someone who makes songs from heroic tales, but in the Job Quest it gives you impression that they were the marksmen in the infantry. What I would do to make them more "in-line" with the bard style, is to utilize that beautiful bow since it has strings. Buff allies? Play the strings on the bow. Debuff enemies? Slap the strings in aggressive manner on that bow. Would remove the gimmicky "one-man-band" stuff from it that feels really out of place. That way it would focus on the bow part solely, while still keeping some of the bard stuff that SE did seem to be going for.

I think they messed up majorly with what they wanted to do with Bard, since I got the vibe they were "the snipers", but after bringing mechanist it feels like they've taken that role and bard has been just left as "one-man-band-person". So I totally agree that focusing more of ranger/bowman side while using the bow strings on spells would be more epic and fitting. Also would enable on creating some nice animations utilizing those beautiful bow aesthetics.

Exactly! Bard right now feels as two compressed classes while we could have two rocking around, one true archer and one actual bard buffing allies and cursing enemies there is even in Japanese folklore about musicians shooting slices of air able to cut made out of instrument sound, some kind of magic i guess, not bow tho.

[Reimmi]

Tbh the best thing that could happen to bard is to make a branching path for ranger as a new job, and focus entirely on the ranger aspect for it, then make bard an actual bard again.
Current weapons would be shared between the 2 but going forward bard would get musical instruments and ranger would get bows. Would be nice

[RoraBun]

I think archer alone as a stand alone class would be very limited in what you can do with it, i like the idea of bard buffing with music but maybe not with bows, would like it more if it had its own instrument/s and maybe give archer a better fitting job. Alternatively, they could make archer equip different kinds of weapons in offhand (like the paladin shield) so you can have the choice of choosing bard abilities by equipping a bard instrument or other abilities with something like arrow types or arrow coatings for more DoT damage or higher potency, but they will never do this cause their main route is that every ability will be useable and you don't have to sacrifice some for others.

Bard as a raiding job is fine it's viable at least but generally doesn't feel as fun as other ranged jobs to me especially the songs, i like the idea of passive buffs during the entire fight but the songs doesn't feel as impactive to the job itself.

[Ianmaru]

agree. the bard & ranger should have been two separate jobs, rather than a bow wielding bard. brd could be just like edward from ffxiv. using harp as weapon and deal damage with melodies, instead of using a bow. i very much doubt they will be able to separate it now though, sadly.

[mallleable]

As a 'bard player who would rather be playing ranger,' I think BRD genuinely only really needs the walking cast system from PVP. Giving BRD walking casts will give BRD a wider range of tempos to play with, and potentially make the job feel more musical. GCDs with walking casts would feel the slowest, but can be sped up with haste buffs, instant GCDs will feel faster, and having a plethora of oGCDs will make the job feel the fastest when it needs to. Having procs will jazz things up. Giving BRD walking casts will allow actions like Burst Shot to hit harder, making it feel like a better archer, and makes spam feel a little better. BRD needs to feel like a combat rhythm game like Hi-FI Rush or Thumper with archery being its focus.