A post from our unofficial Bard rep (no, not Mr. Happy; he's bad) that pretty much reiterates the same conclusions raiding bards have come to. Too much movement in a fight reduces WM to a dps loss but using it in our opener is fine (unless there's early movement such as RAV EX). I don't agree with either of his fixes, they solve nothing.
One thing that has been overlooked by many bards is that we can now use RoD for free and will help with meeting ACC caps or free up stat allocation. During trash pulls I already spam this on BL procs in between quick nocks, which helps the WHM doing holy/aero 3 spam. I really like this change; it's about the only thing they did right in terms of mixing things up for the class, although wide volley is now 100% useless.
Something else semi-related to bards is the findings of the MCH community, in particular how Gauss Barrel works with wildfire. Players have parsed and discovered that due to the loss of auto-attacks (GB == WM) wildfire is actually losing damage over time thanks to the smaller buildup of attacks and the fact that wildfire damage is mitigated twice (once upon calculation of damage done to build wildfire and secondly on the use of wildfire). We're not talking small margins either: the difference between using GB full duration in a fight and opener only is at times 80 dps on a dummy (the example I saw was 760~ with GB vs 840~ without; yes I know ACT is broken for wildfire, this was manual calculation). This to me says that SE did absolutely no testing on these abilities in terms of balancing or it would have been instantly caught by anyone with half a brain. Furthermore, this illustrates that the longer a fight progresses, the more auto-attacks overtake any benefit from GB/WM. Every step you take under these effects are a dps loss so it's impossible to put a finite % buff on the skill the way this is implemented to cleanly cover the loss. It is too variable to the length and mechanics of any given fight.
This is just a can of worms they've created for themselves and it will never be properly implemented the way they intended. If I were SE, I'd dump these stances and just work on providing us with abilities that compliment the jobs, rather than completely change them.
One thing that has been overlooked by many bards is that we can now use RoD for free and will help with meeting ACC caps or free up stat allocation. During trash pulls I already spam this on BL procs in between quick nocks, which helps the WHM doing holy/aero 3 spam. I really like this change; it's about the only thing they did right in terms of mixing things up for the class, although wide volley is now 100% useless.
Something else semi-related to bards is the findings of the MCH community, in particular how Gauss Barrel works with wildfire. Players have parsed and discovered that due to the loss of auto-attacks (GB == WM) wildfire is actually losing damage over time thanks to the smaller buildup of attacks and the fact that wildfire damage is mitigated twice (once upon calculation of damage done to build wildfire and secondly on the use of wildfire). We're not talking small margins either: the difference between using GB full duration in a fight and opener only is at times 80 dps on a dummy (the example I saw was 760~ with GB vs 840~ without; yes I know ACT is broken for wildfire, this was manual calculation). This to me says that SE did absolutely no testing on these abilities in terms of balancing or it would have been instantly caught by anyone with half a brain. Furthermore, this illustrates that the longer a fight progresses, the more auto-attacks overtake any benefit from GB/WM. Every step you take under these effects are a dps loss so it's impossible to put a finite % buff on the skill the way this is implemented to cleanly cover the loss. It is too variable to the length and mechanics of any given fight.
This is just a can of worms they've created for themselves and it will never be properly implemented the way they intended. If I were SE, I'd dump these stances and just work on providing us with abilities that compliment the jobs, rather than completely change them.
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