Bard really?

[Juran]

I guess people don't practice theory crafting anymore. Here is why the way bard is currently is set up fine, if not awesome.

1. Bard + Scholar will be mandatory for endgame dungeons. Scholar's cool down reductions will result in people rapidly burning through their point wells, and bard will be needed to extend heavy burns on bosses/adds.

2. Bard has AOE and DoT attacks, this may not be support in the classic sense, but by keeping a constant pool of damage going on the entirety of a group, you are supporting the group by softening up everything in the fight.

3. buffs/debuffs.

Seriously, all of this stuff is right on XIVDB to look at and consider.

[Inuakurei]

I guess people don't practice theory crafting anymore. Here is why the way bard is currently is set up fine, if not awesome.

1. Bard + Scholar will be mandatory for endgame dungeons. Scholar's cool down reductions will result in people rapidly burning through their point wells, and bard will be needed to extend heavy burns on bosses/adds.

2. Bard has AOE and DoT attacks, this may not be support in the classic sense, but by keeping a constant pool of damage going on the entirety of a group, you are supporting the group by softening up everything in the fight.

3. buffs/debuffs.

Seriously, all of this stuff is right on XIVDB to look at and consider.

This doesn't say anything...

1. Maybe true, we will have to see how it plays out.

2. We are talking about the BRD abilities, not ARC. The only aoe BRD has is Rain of Death and they have no DoT attacks.

3. This is very vague, but also the amount of mp drained by these BRD songs is too high. It's impossible to keep them up for longer than 60 seconds. They are also pretty useless for anything but a boss fight when any kind of mp or tp regen will even make a difference. I get that they aren't supposed to be kept up forever but once you do run out of mp then what? BRD has no built in way to regain mana so once your out of mana the BRD part of being a BRD goes away.

People don't mind BRD being a more dps centered role, just make the BRD part of BRD shine better.

FFXIV 1.23 had this at a good balance. In 1.23 BRD was about 60% dps and 40% support. Your songs when cast would put a buff on everyone around you that lasted for 2 minutes, and you could have 1 buff on at a time. So the idea was to buff mages > buff melee > dps for 2 minutes > repeat. There was no reason to mess with this play-style imo, it appealed to both people who wanted to dps and people who wanted to play a support role. Now it's more like BRD is 90% dps and 10% support.

[UllrHellfire]

This doesn't say anything...

1. Maybe true, we will have to see how it plays out.

2. We are talking about the BRD abilities, not ARC. The only aoe BRD has is Rain of Death and they have no DoT attacks.

3. This is very vague, but also the amount of mp drained by these BRD songs is too high. It's impossible to keep them up for longer than 60 seconds. They are also pretty useless for anything but a boss fight when any kind of mp or tp regen will even make a difference. I get that they aren't supposed to be kept up forever but once you do run out of mp then what? BRD has no built in way to regain mana so once your out of mana the BRD part of being a BRD goes away.

People don't mind BRD being a more dps centered role, just make the BRD part of BRD shine better.

I agree with most of this but BRD has DoT's and More then one AOE

[BloodOmen]

Carry ethers if you worry about running out of mp and not having it regen.

[Inuakurei]

Carry ethers if you worry about running out of mp and not having it regen.

Potions have a really long cooldown.