Thread: FFXIV 2.0 Random Speculation/Question Thread XII: End Of An Era - ASK YOUR QUESTIONS HERE!    

I can see how people would've been a bit peeved that they signed up for ranged and ended up with a hybrid DPS/support class. It was a lot worse than some think. Speaking endgame boss mobs only:

MNKs, DRGS 25-35k/fight
BLMs 25k+
WAR tank 7-10k
BRD 10-14k
PLD: lol

Is what I remember most of our parses being for most things. Of course, it depends on what fight you were doing and what setup you were using. Longer fights, higher numbers. This is also having everyone fairly evened out in gear. No gimps skewing things. At some point around when speed runs became the thing to do, we stopped using BRD completely and had people sing then swap to MNK or BLM because it was better that way and because they were always 10k+ behind in the parse during zerg. They were useless at raid bosses for the most part. They shined during Garuda and Darnus HM though.

Stuff like Ifex we instructed our BRDs not to bother with DPS and just focus on complete support. One of the only fights where BRD couldn't really do much no matter how you set up to fight it. This is the only fight where I felt BRD went back to it's roots as a pure ballad/support bitch. Exception being nails of course. There were exceptions even to this case, though. If you were familiar enough with everything you could poke it and piss it off a bit at best.

I wish I'd saved some of those parses. =( But yes, I would consider it a lot closer to Corsair in terms of how the flow typically goes as BRD. Anyone comparing it to XI's bard is out of their mind.

Looks like most of those DPS problems went out the window in ARR though if classes are any indication of the capabilities jobs will have. We'll see! Plowing through everything with MNK, DRG and BLM gets a bit old, so I can only hope.

It's worth noting that some mobs (HNMs/bosses) seemed to have a straight up resistance to ranged damage, in particular Chimaira almost certainly did. Most obvious when comparing light shot/barrage damage to WSs which seemed to be unaffected (ie. 5 hit barrage for 17/hit then Quick Knock for 60/hit).

On top of that their AA:WS damage ratio (AA being light shot in their case) was much higher than it was for other jobs which made the nerfed damage from light shot that much worse in terms of their overall damage.

Originally Posted by niwaar

Im sitting here reading all this stuff about BRD, but I guess I am just confused as to what the job was actually supposed to do in 1.0. Was BRD a support class? Was it a damage class? You guys are talking about "trying to play support" but doing it was a waste of time. So it sounds more and more like it was designed to be a buffer class with damage. Sounds more like it was more akin to XI Corsair than it was to XI Bard. Cast a couple of buffs and then go to town shooting until it was time to recast? Or were your combos more about debuffing or buffing than doing any real throughput in terms of damage?

BRD was essentially like playing COR going full DD mode. The time spent on "support" amounted to casting a 3 sec song every now and then and occasionally throwing out an AoE stoneskin if the situation called for it and the WHM(s) were busy.

Despite their cross skills being from CNJ/THM spells like Cure were so ridiculously weak when not on WHM they weren't worth the time they took to cast. 1 tic of a WHM's Regen was like half of a non-WHM's Cure and the time it took to cast Cure was at least 2 tics worth of Regen (which cost less than half the MP with a very short cast/recast time). If a BRD was casting Cure during combat it usually meant the situation was already FUBAR.

BRD was certainly the most screwed over by lame cross class selection (PLD was 2nd).

Originally Posted by Niiro

They weren't nearly as bad as a lot of people thought. So many ran around in full AF using ghetto arrows and trying to play support (which outside of the occasional AoE Stoneskin was a massive waste of time) more than DPS and it kinda hurt their image.

That said, their damage wasn't supposed to stack up to other pure DDs, they had the advantages of mobility and range (as well as combo requirements that were very hard to fuck up) in addition to their songs.

Yeah, with good gear, it wasn't all that bad, pulled hate at times O_o (maybe jsut bad tank, dunno!)

Originally Posted by Fayttt

Well, I assumed being an Archer, I would be using a bow and arrow and not a fucking harp. I guess that's a huge leap, though.
And yeah, that's my concern precisely; I can take an educated guess as to how things will go having a class like bard be an attachment onto Archer; that's why I'm upset lol. I'll never get to play Archer. I guess I'll suck it up until NIN comes out eventually.

But oh well, as long as I don't have to sit there singing songs every minute I'll live I guess. Still ticks me off, though.

It's not bad though, the support aspect is fairly minor and there were some times were you had to be good for your group to be successful. Bard had a stun it could use and timing it appropriately through skill rotations or getting enough TP (3000) was pretty crucial to success.

Originally Posted by Alkar

aren't really your main thing because you can only have one song effect active at a time.

Not exactly true, you can spend a good deal of time getting songs up for a group of people and that is your main thing. If we needed a pure DD we'd get one.

Originally Posted by niwaar

I am just confused as to what the job was actually supposed to do in 1.0. Was BRD a support class? Was it a damage class? You guys are talking about "trying to play support" but doing it was a waste of time.

It was both/flexible. The people saying going support was a waste of time are the people who did 0HPS during Ifrit and got carried.

Originally Posted by Niiro

It's worth noting that some mobs (HNMs/bosses) seemed to have a straight up resistance to ranged damage, in particular Chimaira almost certainly did.

BRD was certainly the most screwed over by lame cross class selection (PLD was 2nd).

Chimera had damage resistance to all melee. You could overcome this the same way Thundara did. That's why Monk worked.

CON/THM were pretty important to Bard functioning in a group, I don't really see the issue. I can't really imagine the class without those abilities and then beating 1.0's content.

Originally Posted by Gulkeeva

Yeah, with good gear, it wasn't all that bad, pulled hate at times O_o (maybe jsut bad tank, dunno!)

Bad tank.

Other than AoE Stoneskin CNJ/THM didn't really add much to BRD, Resonance was nice when people were spread out but it's not like songs took long to cast or BRD was frequently short on MP anyway.

It was both/flexible. The people saying going support was a waste of time are the people who did 0HPS during Ifrit and got carried.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, BRD was pretty worthless in Ifrit. If you're referring to Extreme you'll have to elaborate, I only did it a few times and don't remember much.

Originally Posted by Niiro

If you're referring to Extreme you'll have to elaborate, I only did it a few times and don't remember much.

For Ifrit extreme there was a 1 WHM setup that required a BRD for Ballad. People used MNK with FoW up for the damage boost and movement speed bonus to avoid eruptions. BRD supports in this setup. It was like PLD WHM BRD MNKx5 or some variation of MNK and WAR mixed (3/2 split iirc).

Originally Posted by Jinfire

Anyone know more info on PvP? Me and my friends are getting really excited for FFXIV and we are big PvPers in every MMO we play. (Im the only FFXI vet) and I told them its really not heavy PvP at all but Yoshi-P keeps giving me the impression he is a huge PvP fan and in the beta roadmap (which I know isnt 100% perfect) it does say something about PvP coliseum.

Very few specifics have been revealed regarding PvP so far. I think the only things are:

The Coliseum: more "casual" bite-size PvP where you can fight matches (team vs team and whatnot).

Frontlines: Where companies (grand companies? free companies?) combat in large-scale battles over control of a particular fortress and the valuable caverns it protects (implying exclusive access to an instance or zone for those in control of the area).

Edit: Oh yeah, they also revealed several animal-themed armor set designs that come from PvP content as well as mentioned classes/jobs having separate skills learnable and only usable through PvP participation.

If you were running 1 WHM with a BRD on Ifrit-EX then I could definitely see that the BRD would have to help support a lot. My group didn't use a BRD on this fight, we did WARx5, DRG, WHMx2.

For fights that we did use BRD for, I don't recall fights where the BRD had to spend a lot of time support instead of DPS. But that could just be because I was never that BRD, so maybe I just didn't notice, or because it's been so long that I've forgotten (that's been about 6 months now).

Fight didn't take too long, 5 WAR's popping Vengeance was huge DPS. We used that to force the nails at good times up until 13 nails (and let us save our WS's/TP for the nails), then after the 13 nails we burn him down pretty quickly by popping Vengeance on cooldown.

I looked around on our forums but it doesn't look like we have a video of our kills. >.<

Ex was more an issue of how many times he jumped than how much DPS you had. If he never jumped, 5 Warriors would be the slowest way to kill him.

There were times we even timed out just due to the fact that every TP chain after Phase3 included a jump and we just sat there dodging. With solid hate post Phase3, you could do >15% hp with no problem every WS cycle.

Our last win was basically a near timeout, lol.

Last day we'd all be on, selling a Darnus afterwards. First time we get in there we get to the 0:02s remaining mark. At about 0:10s it's time for a WS, coming after next swipe. Tank and me are only ones alive, eruptions pop and I'm like fuck it. Started popping buffs and HF'd him dead lol. Was pretty lulzy considering in the Darnus win we sold it also ended up being 30s remaining and we had to get the win while he was teleported up top.

He jumped and there was this moment of oh fuck, really. Then I started screaming at everyone to get the fuck up top and everyone was scrambling, pretty funny.

We did get the win for 2 friends we hung out with and the buyer so it was all good.

Playing BRD during ifrit extreme was by far the most fun I had in any fight on any job in 1.0.

Veng was crazy even with our two WAR strat. I hope it sticks around in ARR.

this was our last I think http://youtu.be/nOFvw9ThlaI