Best Of

Throughout this post i will refer to "energy" and "power" while referring to Dance Mastery: Energy, and Dance Mastery: Power

DANCE MASTERY: ENERGY

- On live Energy works at the start of a dance's cast
- In practice: nimble, maddening, shielding dance can be cast back to back for very powerful burst movement: 3 flourishes in less than a second, at the cost of 3 of your strongest abilities being put on cooldown
- Whenever you cast mesmerizing dance (and it doesn't bug out, which happens often) you get one last little burst of movement that helps you land a 5 meter range skill, words ill express how much joy i get from this interaction

WHAT CHANGED?

- Energy was changed on PTR today to match the tooltip
- Now your flourish resets at the end of the cast for every dance (Get off the stage is unchanged)

WTF DOES THAT MEAN?

- Nimble Dance, Shielding Dance, and Maddening dance can no longer be "traded" for burst movement. What took us less than 1 second before now takes 12 seconds
- Mesmerizing dance is substantially weaker and WAY LESS FUN if you run Energy as you will always lose one final burst of movement, this was one of, if the most fun interactions I have on bard, and it really saddens me to see it go

MY ARGUMENT: THIS CHANGE DOESNT REALLY MAKE BARD WEAKER, JUST KILLS A FUN PLAYSTYLE

- Bards are already heavily susceptible to CC: Melodies and Resonance are removed by it, and the flourish reset from Energy often bugs while being slowed and tripped
- Because of the above weakness, playing in the backline as a bard with Power is already a meta playstyle
- Nimble Dance and Maddening dance were already heavily incentivized to be fully channeled: whether or not to cancel them is an impactful and important decision
- The other main style of bard currently is one that dives in and out of the frontline and side flanks, applying pressure before making a quick escape: burst mobility is obviously extremely important to this playstyle of playing out by yourself
- This change only hits one style: the fast paced disruption playstyle of bard, which, has more counterplay and is more fun to play as and against vs. the bard sitting in the back at max range with a longbow that never walks forward

MY CONCLUSION

- The team, accidentally or not, created the best class I have ever seen in any MMO.
- The foundations of that class are being fundamentally adjusted by this decision that was made as a bug fix, not as a balancing change
- An entire playstyle is being killed by the collateral damage
- The playstyle being removed is one that has more counterplay, is more fun to play as and against
- Several key abilities and fun decisions are being hurt or removed by the collateral damage

MY SUGGESTION
- Remove the ability to cancel cast mesmerizing dance, make the ability go on cooldown when the cast starts likes other dances, not when the cast finishes
- Rework dance mastery energy to trigger on dance start

IF INTREPID IS DEAD SET TO REDUCE BARD MOBILITY (PLS BUCKY NO) PLEASE RECONSIDER THE FOLLOWING
- Rework Dance Mastery Energy to no longer work on Get off the Stage, remove the 1 flourish charge limitation

IF YOU WANT TO MAKE BARDS WEAKER, PLEASE HIT THE THINGS THAT FEEL LESS FUN / CORE TO A PLAYSTYLE (NIMBLE EVASION %, SHIELDING #, RESONANCE IN GENERAL, GAMBIT ICD PER TARGET)