Why Bard must be redesigned for the expansion

[Dignan]

This is already possible. I was in an MDD run last night with a Bard healing. (though I was in Inquisicar and Scarn was interesting) They can easily solo-heal any of the expert dungeons.

P.S. Tank did the cleansing ;)

Interesting to hear, although I still think that I'd have problems convincing the group that I can solo heal it. This is a good sign, although I still think that something needs to be done about the fact that bard is always going to be far more desirable in larger groups than five mans. A small amount of changes could make the scenario you described happen a lot more often!

[TheGrinnz]

Interesting to hear, although I still think that I'd have problems convincing the group that I can solo heal it. This is a good sign, although I still think that something needs to be done about the fact that bard is always going to be far more desirable in larger groups than five mans. A small amount of changes could make the scenario you described happen a lot more often!

The one point is, unlike the Bard's buffing/debuffing role, healing requires having the gear, like if an Archon tries to do any useful amount of DPS.

[Mirimon]

exactly.. Bard can defintely main heal any expert 5m's.. if he's geared to the hilt.. and hopefully knows how to heal the best as a bard (yes.. some cant, and others just don't even use the best healing builds).
Thats the extreme case though.. and with geared other players.. and being upset that the healer was afk.... but it truely is not suited for 5m content..

[Efaicia]

i'm in the camp of reworking the soul completely, being the one often to bard..

and now with conquest you see it much sooner as within some raid content, the 20m range on barding abilities ends up getting us killed. (sure, you could stack melee, but that actually nerfs any bard healing)

another issue is the synergy between barding buffs and debuffs and other classes.. losing a CoJ to a chloro for 15 seconds, and not being able to reapply, while having to search around and find out of that is why it's not up is terribly time consume and often comes at a waste of 6gcd, which could have been better spent elsewhere.

just add all this to the year long list of bard deficiencies and fixes left untouched.

as a bard its gets really hard to do many of these things sumultainiously.

Raid buffs + constant motiff spam
aoe debuffing
st coj
interrupting
armor reduction
CC, (yes, I have often found myself using mez on select targets
and of course, attempting to fill out some raid wide overhealing to cover the hp gaps between raid heals.

Oh, and reapplication of core buffs for those who die mid raid, which totals 9-12gcd give or take for 1.9 lag. (and lol, takes a bit of lag and you will see bard not working right, motiffs not going off, or the cadence issue, where cadence won't stop mid cast when you are attempting to reapply a motiff.

for a good bard it's not simply spamming something.. its constant monitoring, applying, changing.. friggin carpeltunnel

as a more or less, dedicated bard.. I am supposed to maintain 4-5 different barding specs all depending on which fight we are doing in ID.. 4-5 BARD SPECS??? because lets face it.. the soul is incomplete.. the synergy with its own class and the game is incomplete..

it needs reworked.. and this has been known since beta.. sadly, we can't even get "barding gear" in the loot boxes on pts to test.. I for one have a list of greater essences, trinkets, and weapons I would still like to test out to see viability with barding.


Devs.. give us the tools to help you weed out these issues and show you what works and what doesn't.

There are some still fighting the good fight, eh?
I was making all the same noise a year ago when I left. I somehow managed to get 3 free days on my account so am looking to see if anything has progressed with bard. (was my main role and what I played rogue for as I HATE dps roles)
I'm hoping still that there will be some changes, I have heard there is a lot of changes coming for the expansion.

[Remli]

If it weren't for Rogue DPS requiring Fervor, Bards might have already gone extinct. I definitely understand the raid-wide benefit of Resonance, but if you replaced that Bard with another full DPS, you wouldn't see too much of a difference in either DPS or healing, and of course that player would be having a lot more fun DPSing than playing Bard.

I definitely have to agree that Bard needs some major tweaks in Storm Legion, and hopefully we can see a sexier cooldown than Verse of Joy.

[Ailene]

This is already possible. I was in an MDD run last night with a Bard healing. (though I was in Inquisicar and Scarn was interesting) They can easily solo-heal any of the expert dungeons.

P.S. Tank did the cleansing ;)

Yup, I've healed mDD as bard, with a warrior tank and no cleanse. Was a bit interesting after the 2nd boss, but went all fine. Bards can outheal most dots anyway. We've done mCR several times with 4 rogues and a cleric (mCR isn't so bad anymore when you drop down to under 30 mins), cleric tank+bard heal and the 3 other rogues love it, fervor ftw! I really enjoy healing dungeons as bard, too bad we need to mess around a bit when we queue up like this for random experts, as the tool won't allow me to queue up as healer

Actually I guess I'm one of the rare few that enjoy playing a bard, even in raids. (Am I really weird then? Come try convince me that Ranger is more fun...) But that might be cause I put my effort into the role, trying to find every little thing I can do different to improve in different fights. But indeed there are changes in this thread that I'd welcome a lot.

Range - oh please make it longer
Motifs - just do something (I like both the idea of different order give different extra buffs and also hit one key to refresh all)
VoJ - more or less useless atm
Fanfares - hate the casttime when I need to rebuff dead people, sucks even more in fight where you need to move a lot
Scaling - I'd so much love to see my gear do something to my role apart from making me able to survive longer cause of more endurance on gear... Make my weapons mean something! And my stats! Anything... Something...

[Galibier]

There are some still fighting the good fight, eh?
I was making all the same noise a year ago when I left. I somehow managed to get 3 free days on my account so am looking to see if anything has progressed with bard. (was my main role and what I played rogue for as I HATE dps roles)
I'm hoping still that there will be some changes, I have heard there is a lot of changes coming for the expansion.

I think when it came to bard, Trion has been their own worse enemy. The first guild I was in had a mix of players right down the middle, half from EQ2 and half from WoW. While those of us from EQ2 had issues with hiw the bard played we actually had me and 2 other people fighting to bard. We got support and liked it, the fact that at the time a well played bard could out heal "healers" on a couple fights with heavy AE damage was icing on the cake. Many of the people from WoW had issues though. They didn't necessarily "get" the idea of role/class that was not focused on a dps or hps parse and the fact it's play style was frustrating just completely turned them off from it.

Now we are well over a year in and as time has gone on the bard issues have just continued to degrade the view of the role. I think it will take something pretty spicy (read: something that will make some people scream "OP") to get the tarnish off the role.

[Kithiel]

OP: Overall, a great post and I agree with almost all of it except the following-

[*]Bard/archon only items are a bad idea and should never be done again.

I think the Songblade is a fantastic idea. Then again, I've been a Bard for a long time and I see it as class love that's been a long time coming, not an item that's going to pigeonhole me. Additionally, I have a couple suggestions for making Bards fun to play:

1) Cadence on the move. I know at least one other person mentioned this earlier in the thread, but I would like to second the motion.

2) Increase run speed. Significantly. It's hard to not enjoy playing your Bard when he runs at the speed of sound.

No matter how you slice it, the soul definitely needs a lot of attention and I hope this thread helps in generating it.

[Mirimon]

Indeed.. I would prefer a more firm position on the support roles, gear for them or not.. sitting on the fence as it is being a support, please don't have us sitting with the post up our backside being given meager options for gear.. either set us up to be phenom with the right gear or without it (which is solved by adjusting the soul itself.., which is far past it's expiration date..)