It's played for 30 seconds because of the damage penalty, not because it's not needed. Ballad is essentially self-sustainable because it also regens the singer's mana, pretty much giving healers infinite mana to work with the entire fight if there's no drawbacks to singing it. Same with paeon, except replace mana with TP.
Either case, I still want to smack people that label bards as a "support" class. They have support skills yes, but their primary role is still dps by ingame definition and what they have to do in a group. All the singing isn't doing jack shite if they're pulling numbers below 300 in final coil or even WoD. I mean its semantics, but I feel that we're playing an "archer that learns bard skills, not a bard". Sure four of our five abilities are support, but that is far from our only abilities because we still have skills that carry over from an archer.
Even if it's just a percentage base (bards have 10% less weapon damage than everyone else), the gap on numerical dps difference is just going to widen in future content if they continue with the downscaling on WD, which really seems to be the point of interest for some people here. Hope it doesn't come to it, but it's eventually going to hit numerical values that are so high, that the bards would be doing roughly 200 less dps (which is still 5-10% less dps than everyone else at that point) where it's probably better just to bring another dps or the eventual machinist to fill in that missing dps to hasten phases or fights.
