Bard is a great ARCHER job, BUT...

Like the title suggests, Bard is a great archer/ranger job which I find quite engaging. The dot-proc gameplay is fun. The only thing I wish it had was a way for me to spread my dots in an AoE situation and it would be perfect. Maybe Shadowbite could do that?

However

The musician fantasy fulfillment in combat is not enough for me, personally. While the things we do have are visually pleasing, they are buffs that don't happen often enough. And since simply complaining about things without offering ideas to improve them is a waste of everyone's time - here's my suggestion:

We splice Mage's Ballad and Army's Peon into one song and add a musician mode. Let's call it "School of Rock" (SoR) for ease. SoR will have us switch out our bow for an instrument we've previously chosen - let's use the guitar for this example. In order to get into SoR we will use the ability "Stage Dive" which will be a gap closer but its main functionality is to fulfill the fantasy of a musician at a concert. While in SoR, we will have access to new abilities in musical name and visuals such as - "Power Chord", "Face Melt", "Shred", and "Encore". The first three could play out in a typical combo fashion with the last one being a proc. While in SoR we will be stacking up "For Those About To Rock" (Our renamed Repertoire functionality). When we have at least 1 stack of it, "Stage Dive" will turn into "We Salute You!". When the time comes to end the SoR phase and get back to the bow phase we will use "We Salute You" slamming our guitar into the ground for damage, applying the current Repertoire functionalities, and bringing our bow back out again.
With enough time and effort, this phase could even become an explosive opener phase with "We Salute You!" also applying our dots.
While we're throwing out ideas, why also not allow players to cut a portion of an Orchestron they own and let it play while we're in SoR mode? I understand this can be a massive technological difficulty, but we're just throwing out ideas here.

My last suggestion is to give us a harmonica as a playable instrument.

Thank you for reading and here's to all jobs being as fun as they could be.

Or we could just bring back what was unrightfully siezed, Foe Requiem.

I think that BRD suffers a bit from trying to do two things at the same time: be an archer and a musician. This is not bad on its own, but it might hinder the job's ability to expand upon one identity or the other.

My personal wish that will never come to pass is for Archer to upgrade to a new Sniper-like job that uses bows and for BRD to truly focus into the musical aspect.

However, I still like BRD a lot as it is now so I wouldn't be too bothered if the job was kept the way it's always been.

I sort of agree. I want play a ranger/markman like job then a musician. One reason I didn't level Bard to max at first. Truthfully, I think Bard doesn't know what it want to be. Its a Archer, musician and dot base job. I think it need a Smn like rework or, they give us a Ranger bow like job and Bard can focus on the musician side more.

This pops up every few months like it's a thing.

It is okay that BRD is a combination of a ranger and a bard. Because both of those would be quite limited and boring in isolation compared to the other job fantasies. Bow and arrows is perhaps the most singularly least engaging weapon design if not combined with something else (magic abilities, pets, songs). And a pure bard would struggle to have even basic attack abilities in a game that is heavily designed around basic attack rotations. Combining the two made sense to shore up both of their limitations.

It's also the reason why:

* DRK is DRK + RUN
* AST is TIM + GAM
* MCH is GUN + PUP
* SAM is SAM + MYS
* RDM is RDM + RUN
* SGE is SGE + PSY

FFXIV has a fairly elaborate job design system that seems to want to find synergies between old job concepts to create distinct new job aesthetics. Bard is perhaps one of the most creative because tell me what other games feature a freaking harp-bow?

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Originally Posted by SeverianLyonesse

It is okay that BRD is a combination of a ranger and a bard. Because both of those would be quite limited and boring in isolation compared to the other job fantasies.

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Hard, hard disagree. Right now BRD job fantasy sucks because it commits fully to neither, and there's so much underutilized on both the Ranger/Bard side of things. The bow action feels weak, the singing like an afterthought. None of the offensive capability of Singer/Bard is present, Ranger's nature/hunter aesthetic is barely there, etc.

Tactics Advanced for example had archers basically become assassins with bows too, you could lean into the damage dealing much more than the game does.

EDIT:

I don't really agree with your list of combinations either, there are some huge stretches in there. Even AST only borrows bits of Time Mage and Gambler, it doesn't need to fully incorporate both to have solid enough identity.