WHY ARE YOU PLAYING A BARD IF YOU'RE NOT GOING TO SING?!

[RiceisNice]

- If you don't pop a Foe when there are mages in your group, you're not maximising the damage output your party can do, therefore, you are failing at your role as a DPS.

There needs to be context to this. Should I be singing foe rekt at every moment of the fight? It depends on the circumstances; where there are downtimes and you're better off singing ballad to give healers a bit of mana, and to save up mana for foe rekt for phases where having a higher dps could be more helpful (to minimize the time spent in that phase)

- If you are not supporting a healer in need of MP and thus, lead to the death of a party member (or even the tank/entire group), then you're again reducing the overall damage your party can do, if someone actually dies because of that.

If a healer is running out of mana doing something, then more often not then something has gone already wrong (requiring raises, overhealing, or just poor mana management). Not to say where there are moments when none of that happens and they do need the mana, but it's so far and few inbetween.

- Same thing goes for the TP/MP songs when someone just got revived. If you let, say, a MNK/DRG with no TP to use (and Invigorate being on cooldown) after a raise, then he won't do much and the overall DPS of the party will decrease.

I think someone mentioned this before, that is on the fault of the MNK/DRG dying if they needed a raise on the first place (and thus TP). Now you have to weigh this. What's going to be more dps, a bard having no damage penalty using their AoE, or a bard sarificing 20% of their damage to increase TP regeneration for someone who just got raised with a 15% stat penalty? The healer is probably low on mana after raising that MNK/DRG; should I use ballad over paeon? If it was an Aoe intense fight like T4 and such, then yes I would use Paeon, but that is not the example you provided.

If you only care about yourself and don't want to support your party when needed in order to maximime the damage of you and your group, then you are a bad bard.
Should I have to remind you what the role of DPS is all about? Yes, killing things. If you don't use the tools you have at your disposal to allow your party to do that in a more efficient way, then you are doing it wrong.

A lot of the bullets you made seem to fault more to the other party members which funnel it to the bard, such as the healers needing mana (with very few exceptions), or the MNK/DRG needing TP after a raise. I mean all of the songs are pretty circumstantial with the exception of foe rekt, but even that needs some context to when you should play it during a lengthy boss fight to manage your mana and increase dps when its really needed.

It doesn't matter... i could say the same thing as a healer and not heal outside of tank and unavoidable damage because you should avoid everything else, but I don't, because it's a disservice to the party and isono help to anybody. Someone being bad doesn't make you good: if a whm needs a song and you don't sing it because he sucks at managing MP, you're just as bad.
You're playing in a party, act like it. Your high dps is useless if the rest of the party is incapacitated by your lack of singing. It's not that hard of a concept to understand.

I have yet to have an instance where people in my party dies because I wasn't singing. It could have been a contributor (such as the healer running out of mana), but that also stems from other problems (like them having to spend mana on raise in the first place).

A bard not singing is like a healer not healing and dpsing.

What is this argument about skilled bards vs non skilled other dps got to do with it? That's kinda obvious that a bad player is worse than a good one oO.

This is about it really. If you're not going above and beyond your role, you're nothing special (good or bad). If you try to do that but fail at it (letting the tank die in the healer's case, or playing the wrong song at the run time), the party suffers from it and you're probably better off just sticking to the ground.