Sorry.... I meant to say "I'm 'not' changing this into a NIN discussion". Went back and edit my post. But I see what you mean. Weakening the BRD even more... I guess it's true what people were saying, BRDs are more like rangers now.
It seems like the developers seriously overestimated the power of the new song buffs, perhaps they didn't expect that Army's Paeon would provide such an absolute pittance of rDPS compared to the other two songs. The only real way forward for Bard is for the DoT nerfs to be reversed as soon as possible, since the data clearly shows this was an unnecessary nerf.
problem is that square during the last liveletter basically admitted ranges are struggling and will get buffed, yet when the actuall buffing happened everyone else but the strongest 2 classes got buffed for basically the same amount.
If you put aside the strongest 2, classes that were very clearly seen as outliers and until the patch happened as at least slightly overpowered than literally nothing changed for the physical ranged compared to pre patch, only that the role in itself is even more unbalanced than before the patch with mch being the one that actually gained a slight edge compared to pre patch (mind you its still pitifully weak), dnc basically taking over bards level of "hey at least i'm not the worst" and bard getting the short end of the buff stick by far
They fully admitted they were playing it REALLY conservatively when they added the buffs back to the songs. If bard is weaker than it was before (I'm going off what I'm being told since I have no first hand knowledge) then it seems they may have gone too far with the nerfs when adding the song effects. BUT I would still argue this is the better outcome than if they hadn't been so conservative. If they had broken the job and made it over powered, then it's a lot harder for them, from a player backlash perspective, to apply nerfs after a buff than to do what they've done now and then buff the job afterwards, this can even be done in a small patch, like the 5.11 patch.
Though they likely won't change the job so soon since they want to give the changes across all jobs time to settle in, most likely, before applying new balance changes. This could easily be adjusted come 5.15.
bard is on average 500~ dps below mch, if this waits till 5.15 brd is dead for ultimate, and thats completly ignoring that the state of the phys ranged as a whole , even mch is pretty much as bad as it was before the patch
also, on bard being weaker or not you could read my post on page 1, it should be the second or third post, basically what it boils down to is that while we are not weaker in a "deal less dps than before" sense we are indeed weaker in relation to everyone else than we were before the patch, you know, the patch that should buff us (well, all ranged) as we were struggling
well... there will always be a class at the bottom