Barrage is terrible now imo
Barrage is different but acceptably different to me.
I don't really have a problem with them nerfing our AA damage, and doing what they did to barrage is an acceptable part of that. Plus Buffs + Barrage + Empyreal Arrow is like... how I killed
everything leveling.
I'm actually pretty okay with essentially everything but the way they handled Minuet. Cast times are a fundamental class change, and a lot of how Bard works up to 52 is just flat wrong in the post-Minuet world. We're now I think the weakest when it comes to attacking in a movement-heavy fight, as anything that requires consecutive dodges without at least 1.5 seconds of downtime in between means we're probably losing the GCD (where this gets messy is when you're constantly moving for, say, five seconds. You lose the GCD, but it's not long enough to seriously consider dropping Minuet AFAIK.)
It's possible I guess that someone will theory craft out a way that turning Minuet off *ever* makes sense, but all of our big cool skills mandate it's up (Iron Jaws goes a long way to addressing our TP drain problems, and EA and Sidewinder give us some pretty hefty attacks), AA isn't a big deal anymore, and 3 second fucking cast time.
I mean, I've said before and I'll say again that new bard isn't an inherently bad class, it's just fundamentally different in a way that sacrifices a lot of what I liked about 2.x bard. Finally having all the skills unlocked gives me room to mess around with it more and see if I can adapt, but right now I actually *like* level sync because it lets me play the job I enjoy even if it means losing shiny new toys. I'm curious to try out machinist, because Gauss Barrel sounds like Minuet but with better implementation. The complete lack of a movement-friendly GCD on a class that was, prior to this patch, all about mobility is insane to me unless you come at it from the perspective that old bard was just totally broken.
So I mean... Barrage is like the least of our problems.