FFXIV Bard: Endwalker Job changes
In the recently live streamed Letter from the Producer LIVE Part 66, numerous details were revealed about the upcoming expansion to the hit MMO Final Fantasy XIV, Endwalker. The Live Letter primarily focused on the changes and adjustments being made to all of the jobs currently in the game and the two new classes. While I’m not a master at every class in the game, I have a baseline knowledge of every class, enough to comment on the most apparent changes. Here’s everything we know about the new FFXIV Bard!
NOTE: As the Media Tour embargo has lifted, extra info has come out about all jobs. While most of the information is still fairly accurate, I’ll be making a piece per “role” in the game to make note of especially interesting things we couldn’t glean from the Job Actions trailer.
READ MORE: Endwalker Ranged DPS changes: new info from the Media Tour
As a disclaimer, all content in the video is technically subject to change, and Naoki Yoshida did mention that not every new trait or action has been shown in the Job Actions trailer. Additionally, my comments are based on a mixture of the content shown and discussed and speculation based on previous job knowledge. Without further ado, let’s get started! Here’s the Job Action Trailer for reference.
While the physical ranged DPS role used to only be populated by Bard, Machinist was added to the fray as a more selfish class, and Dancer as more support oriented DPS. As such, in Shadowbringers, Bard felt much less of a support-y class, where its party buffs were marginal at best. In Endwalker, it looks like they want to pivot Bard’s identity back to more support and the occasional high damage attack.
READ MORE: FFXIV Machinist: Endwalker Job Changes
As can be seen in the video, after usage of the three songs, the bard uses the little tokens gathered on the Job Guage to use some type of party-wide enhancement. Whether it’s a damage, critical, or direct hit buff is unclear as of now, but we do know it will be some type of enhancement.
The final change I noticed was the follow-up action of Apex Arrow, and will likely act as Bard’s highest damaging single move. While not a huge change, Bard certainly lacked “oomph” before, so this is a nice little addition.
READ MORE: FFXIV Dancer: Endwalker Job changes
While physical ranged DPS have suffered from low damage in the past two years of FFXIV, Bard looks to take what made the class fun to its players and ramp that appeal up even more.
