Thread: DNC 7.0 is in its worst state.

Originally Posted by mallleable

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Personally I don’t see it that way at all in terms of identity. I feel like you’ve maybe misunderstood what’s meant by ‘Final Fantasy Bard’. It’s not the traditional ‘D&D bard’ with a guitar running around singing to people in taverns like a medieval pop star. I’ve put the rest in spoilers since I’m veering off topic quite a bit..

Bards (the real ones lol) were originally scholars and storytellers who tended to gravitate towards poetry, and that’s what they’re (meant to be) invoking with ffxiv’s Bard. Hence why they use harps and flutes instead of more attention grabbing instruments like an electric guitar (no idea why they threw violin in there for a single skill lol). Shakespeare, for example, is often referred to as a ‘Bard’, but that doesn’t by extension mean he’s also a musician. I mean, look at Jehantel in the Bard quests.

An old man who talks in verse whilst plucking a harp isn’t really giving the ‘rock star’ vibes. I feel like the fact it’s translated into Japanese as ‘Poet’ and not ‘Musician’ or ‘Pop Star’ (idol?) reinforces that they’re going less for a stereotyped image of ‘bards’ and drawing inspiration from the image of them more as storytellers and historians, and not simply ‘musician with bow’. Naturally, add ‘ffxiv aether manipulation’ to that equation and you get ‘storyteller and historian whose recitations manifest real-world effects’ lol. It’s worth considering how the songs are named in ffxiv. A Ballad is often considered ‘a sad song’ by today’s standard, but originally it referred to a narrative with musical accompaniment (in this case the narrative is of the Mage’s amazing feats and somehow that makes everyone hit 1% harder lol). A ‘Paeon’ is a poem written with specific stresses on syllables as opposed to a musical composition, etc. Minuet, funnily enough, is a type of slow graceful dance, which is funny considering Minuet used to be our caster stance lol

Anyway, personally I think having songs go back to being spells is the best way to give the feeling of ‘singing during battle’. I mean, Dancer itself already has a mini-rhythm game with Steps doesn’t it? I’d rather see them get more Steps with more interesting effects than more damage abilities. Maybe a two-step aoe heal? Haste buff for Dance Partner with three steps? Damage reduction and regen for party but it’s a 4 step one? The ‘busyness’ of using procs and fan dance procs during Technical Step made the rotation feel like it came together like a dance, but that’s kind of lost now with all the shiny poop ‘HIT AFTER 120s’ abilities (they’ve been cleaned up to look good but they’re still poop)

Originally Posted by mallleable

The thing is that BRD already has the numerically strongest raid buffs in the game right now. At full power, BRD has 6% dps + 20% dh + 2% crit buffs during burst while everyone else is 3-5% buff with AST likely being the second strongest (6% + 2X 6% single target buffs). And yet, BRD is the least played phys ranged even though it is currently the strongest in its role, but still one of the weaker dps jobs according to The Math™.

Well it's partly because it's the only job in the game with a raid buff with a fail state, if you die you lose percentage increase on your buff and the raidbuff isn't way stronger than others to make it feel more rewarding. 1% increase over everyone else for perfect play is not rewarding enough to deal with the terrible song timer system.

It's the least played Phys ranged because it's one of the hardest jobs in the game due to song timers forcing you to stare at your hotbar, having to check for procs constantly and being the only DPS in the game now with dot management, all of this while barely being above tanks in damage. Even if the buffing Bard did was absurdly op, if it's damage remains near tank levels a lot of people wouldn't play it. It's not worth having such a busy job that's got low damage when you could play dancer which is much less busy, punishing and has strong buffs too.