Hopefully not
There are dozens of classes I would want over a bard class which has no representation or precedent in WoW. There are several 4th specs for classes Iâd want as well before I would ever want a bard class.
A really good example I could think of how Bard would be designed would be League of Legends Hwei.
His spell book is basically 10 spells including ultimate in 4 buttons and bard could work the same. But
This is something I want too as well as blizzard getting their crap together with getting the classes we have as close to harmonious with balance and working with one another like they were in MoP. I also want ranged DPS non support paladin spec
If weâre talking about having bards I think the best way to go about it would be to have it take on the role of a 4th spec rather than a whole new class. Key contenders for a bard spec would be Rogue, Hunter, and Mage. They would have a new weapon type and could gain access to a performance stance where their spells instead of being cast in a normal way would become a song.
Going off Final Fantasy XIV Onlineâs bard class they wield a bow as they evolve from archers but the bows have multiple strings and fold up making their instrument. However they also let players actually play music themselves by using a performance system where you pick your instrument and can goof off like that.
Hard disagree. The problem with Support is that they can only replace DPS.
You canât have a class that takes the role of a Healer or a Tank and not be able to do the things that Healers and Tanks do as well as they can.
You take a half tank into a M+ dungeon and theyâre going to get instantly smushed by Rezan or any individual mob that REQUIRES the big defensive aspects of a Tank to survive. You take a half-healer into a dungeon and your group is going to instantly fold to anything with large group damage.
Which leads to the design issue of only âhalf DPSâ being viable. On paper, you absolutely can sacrifice DPS for utility in a way that you canât do the same for Tanks or Healers.
But WoW is also a VERY DPS centric game. Because the win condition is exclusively âreduce the bosses HP to 0%â (or whatever number Blizzard have decided â0%â is, such as in cases like Sylvanas or Iridikon), so more DPS is always better, as it lets you see less mechanics and thus have less mechanics to fail. And even when Blizzard design strictly timed fights (hi, like half of Sanctum of Domination), having excess DPS means you can hit the timers whenever you want and not worry about missing them.
So for any Support to be viable, they have to offer buffs that make their value at least comparable to bringing a DPS in their stead. Inevitably we find ourselves back at the Aug problem, where EVERY support has to be a force multiplier to be considered. And the nature of force multiplier is that theyâre impossible to balance across skill levels, being extremely overpowered at the high end if viable at low/mid end, and garbage at the low/mid end if balance around the high end.
Or in real terms, basically Aug last season vs Aug this season.
And if they made Bard a Support, youâre NEVER going to want to run Bard and Aug outside large scale groups, because thereâs literally no room anywhere. And when theyâre basically designed to be exclusive to each other, adding more supports just makes the existing pool worse since you can only run one.
TLDR: Adding more Supports wouldnât fix them. Because of how group comps are built and WoW combat exists, weâre basically capped at replacing 1 DPS in M+/Arena and maybe a couple DPS in raids. Any future Supports are going to have the exact same balancing issues that Aug currently has and if they make a better Aug, then we just have the problem of Bard being strictly better since they basically canât exist alongside each other.