Red Mage or Bard?

Off-Topic Games, Gaming and Hardware
38

Pick whatever flavor you like honestly…although two of the four tanks are locked behind certain requirements. Gunbreaker requires you to have reached level 60 on any job and Dark Knight requires you to reach the Heavensward-expansion. A quick breakdown:

Warrior (starting class marauder): The short version? Imagine being a Warcraft-warrior but you’re permanently a tank with a big, heavy axe. You have the self-healing of fury, you have the “Press this button to do heavy damage” of arms and you’re tank like protection.

Paladin (starting class gladiator): Well it’s a paladin what do you expect? You have your holy magic, you have your sword and shield, and lots of glowing particle effects including giant wings which boosts your parties defense if they stand behind you. Also you flat-out get Divine Shield. It’s like a combination of Retribution-Protection-Paladin with a bit of Holy (you can heal party members for example).

Gunbreaker: You’re not a tank. You’re a DPS who pretends to be tank. You’re rotation is pretty much closer to that of a DPS-job, and involves using special-enchanted-cartridges to pump out damage.

Dark Knight: And now my personal favorite and honestly my main job and as such I will write more. The edgelord-job. You get a big-two-handed-sword, lots of red, black and purple particle effects with edgy names to get along with it (Souleater, Delirium). This class starts out somewhat weak compared to the others until level 70 when you unlock “The Blackest Night” and suddenly get access to the best mitigation spell in the entire game.

But, even if you want to play any other tank you should still unlock Dark Knight because the job has arguably one of the best storylines in the entire game. It’s so well written that you could add the class story into the main plot of the game…and it would make perfect sense. I honestly could write several paragraphs about why it’s so good, but I really, really don’t want to spoil anything of it because especially the level 35-50 part is absolutely amazing. My eyes actually got wet during the final parts is all that I can say. Yes, it’s that amazing.

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39

If you like to listen to and play music def go Bard.
They can play actual songs.

40

I play both and RDM is more satisfying.

It does more damage, more rDPS, has repeat brez, is easy to play, and doesnt really have many downsides.

Meanwhile BRD does less personal damage, less rDPS, no utility, and the only benefit being you can bounce around like a crazy person.

41

Just need to point out that BRD has a ton of utility. Each of your “songs” provides a passive buff to party members around you, plus you have a group-wide damage reduction ability and a single-target healing buff.

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Porque no los dos? Start Archer at level 1 and unlock RDM at 50. I’m still “leveling alts” so that’s all the input I can really give. The Mr. Happy 1-50 guide made the grind much less boring.

43

The rDPS metric in FFLogs accounts for the damage enhancing aspect of BRD’s utility, and even with that, it still does less than RDM. By a lot.

https://www.fflogs.com/zone/statistics/38#

If we’re talking non-damage utility, in regards to prog, RDM utility is far, far superior to anything BRD an do. Because chaincast Verraise. Group-wide DRs and mini heals are nice, but Tanks and Healers can do that too.

Nobody can single handedly raise an entire party in seconds without a healer LB3.

Sure that utility goes out the window after fights are on farm, but then they probably will kick the BRD and replace with a DNC anyway just to amp up SAMs.

This is probably a tax you pay for having limitless mobility and not having to root, ever, and still be at range. Even an RDM will have to root for a second or two, and melee are always in the crap.

However, Peloton is quite nice. I’ll give you that.

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44

Oh, I wasn’t trying to criticize RDM or anything, it’s actually my main dps class and I love it. Just wanted to point out for any random people reading his that BRD also does have a lot of utility skills, and don’t count out the defensive ones!

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