It's high time SE addressed Bard's timing issues

[lugiaXD]

To me it suits a theoretical dancer with multiple dances they need to use to empower it. I just hate the whole idea of a song rotation for bard. I think burst buffs should be only dancers thing while bard is all about constant buffs exception being defensive buffs personally.

Thematically I like Radiant Finale personally because it ties back to bards being musicians, the idea behind it being that you compose your piece by playing Wanderer's Minuet, Mages Ballad and Army's Paeon in theoretically whatever order you'd like (oh how nice that would be) and finishing it off with the Radiant Finale to represent the "end" of the composition. It might be nice to have the effect be based on the order the songs were played in but if that happens it would mean certain buffs would be looked at more favorably than others and so we end up with the decision that it is just a straight up raid damage buff and nothing else.

I do still prefer having it though, I like being able to give my party a nice damage boost to make all their numbers go up higher than I could ever reach XD

[Ramiee]

Thematically I like Radiant Finale personally because it ties back to bards being musicians, the idea behind it being that you compose your piece by playing Wanderer's Minuet, Mages Ballad and Army's Paeon in theoretically whatever order you'd like (oh how nice that would be) and finishing it off with the Radiant Finale to represent the "end" of the composition. It might be nice to have the effect be based on the order the songs were played in but if that happens it would mean certain buffs would be looked at more favorably than others and so we end up with the decision that it is just a straight up raid damage buff and nothing else.

I do still prefer having it though, I like being able to give my party a nice damage boost to make all their numbers go up higher than I could ever reach XD

I know it's not a popular opinion but it's simply my opinion. I just prefer stronger constant buffs over bard having burst buffs, its more engaging to me. I just never really liked radiant finale and it fully pushed me away from the job which was my first main job so it's simply me being frustrated.

[Connor]

I just never really liked radiant finale and it fully pushed me away from the job which was my first main job so it's simply me being frustrated.

I love Radiant Finale* in terms of the animation itself, it actually feels like a Bard skill. Ironically though, the effect itself is almost the opposite; just do your damage rotation and it basically activates itself lol. Not what you’d imagine for a ‘‘support dps’ lol

I was worried Bard was going in this direction once they made Stormblood songs into dps cooldowns instead of support spells that used MP. And frankly I’m glad I did because the 120-second meta obsession kinda killed a lot of fun for the job by moving its entire support function to ‘press button every 120s as part of normal damage rotation and party just happens to get buffed.’

Like if we still had some kind of non-120s-meta support it wouldn’t be so bad, but Minne kinda sucks and Paean is a joke skill at best (considering literally all current existing removable debuffs in the game are 100% avoidable lol). There’s literally a regen song in the game right now from 2.0 (Jehantel sings Voice of Valour during the job quests), but SE doesn’t have the guts to give it to us.

Addendum: Radiant Encore is my favourite skill animation in the game currently and it’s super lame that we can’t use it more often lol. Also it looks like a spell despite hilariously being classified as a weaponskill (what’s the weapon though? Our bows are sheathed lol)

[Cetonis]

Personally I've wanted SE to make a change to the song's cooldowns so that it makes it better if a death happens in order to recover. They could possibly make it so that the songs only have a 10 second cooldown but after starting one song locking that song until the other two have been played which would be reset on death allowing for an easy way to get back into the rotation.

Or even, make like Summoner or Picto where there's simply one song button, it starts as WM and then turns into MB and then into AP, and the whole thing has a 30s cooldown or something. This might open some known-fight-time short MB stuff, but by and large you'd still do the song timings we have now I think. MB is close enough to WM in value that cutting it off to increase your ratio of both WM and AP time is probably not worth (disclaimer - math not done, just vibes).

This would make coda moot I guess but coda is silly anyway. A lot of Bard's kit - coda, enhanced AP, to an extent soul gauge - seems to exist to try and convince low-information players that they should use all the songs, why not simply force it instead at this point?

[Connor]

Crazy idea but what if they reclassified the songs as spells again, removed the cool-down, and made them instant-use outside of combat? Then during combat they could make each song grant a self-buff when completed that makes the next one instant use, or if they wanted to enforce a specific rotation do it that way (i.e minuet - ballad - paeon etc).

That way the songs are technically always available if you mess up in some way with timing (i.e dying), but if you need to use the same one twice you’d have to take a 1.5/2s cast-time hit (assuming they still want there to be a ‘punishment’ for mistiming songs). Not sure how they’d stop everyone just staying in Minuet the whole time though, maybe adding a feature to songs that it can’t be sung again if the coda from said song is present, forcing players to cycle through the songs until resetting at burst?

Like how you can’t repeatedly use Motifs until you’ve activated the associated Muse.

Idk dumb idea I just want an excuse for the songs to be cast again lol, it felt more like singing and less like ‘playing an entire song in the space of 0.5 seconds’ lol. Pretty sure my idea would cause billions of issues with opener alone by reclassifying songs as spells and thus being on-the-GCD. I mean, maybe it could work? The devs are making pretty questionable decisions, so maybe that means there’s hope for my ridiculous ideas lol.

[Cetonis]

random bump in hopes of 7.1 fixes

[Carighan]

Mostly I want Bards to either feel unique, or at least like Bards/Paladins/Chanters/etc from other RPGs.

So either find something they do on their own that isn't just being an archer pressing a group buff every 40 seconds (Or at least rename them back to archers to be realistic about things!), or fully deconstruct their current gameplay in favor of the "song weaving" that usually exemplifies this type of class in actively players RPGs. See Bards in EQ1 or Paladins in DAoC or so on for examples.

[mallleable]

Not a single BRD change in 7.1. Gotta keep playing a buff bot, and not a real dps for another patch cycle.

[Carighan]

(btw if someone is wondering why they keep making jobs simpler, keep in mind that opinions such as these here "remove player skill expression please" are just as valid as your "I want more complex plays")

[Cetonis]

Yeah, it's one of those things where jank tends to create a form of "skill expression" to manage the jank. So dealing with messy design elements ends up reducing skill expression in that way.

I'd point out that flexibility can also lead to skill expression, for instance truly maximizing EA charges would have its own little line of opti. Case by case scenario but sometimes you can fix things without it being a pure "dumbing down". But other times it's something like deleting Muse which would be a straight simplification. (one that's easily worth it imo ofc)